Born: Casablanca, Morocco, 1936
Son of a French-Moroccan furniture retailer, Joseph Ettedgui emigrated to London in the late 1950s and trained to be a hairdresser. During the 1960s he began travelling to Paris to see the ready-to-wear collections. There, he met Kenzo, whose brightly-coloured sweaters he started to sell in the reception area of his King's Road salon. Before long, the clothes had eclipsed the hairdressing, and Joseph's first shop was established below the salon in the early 1970s.
Joseph has continued his winning-formula own label alongside international names - from Azzedine Alaïa to Helmut Lang, with John Galliano, Katharine Hamnett and a host of others in-between. In 1993 he moved into menswear, then furniture design and cafes - Joe's and L'Express - and one restaurant, Joe's Cafe. His shops, designed by architects Eva Jiricna and David Chipperfield, are appropriately modernistic - using steel, white and concrete colours as a background for the collections. He also has branches in Paris, Cannes and New York. As he told the Observer in 1987, `Once a place becomes a meeting point, you get the business.'
