Anna Hoang got a “niggling feeling” during her third year of law school. “I felt like a pretender. I was there, listening, but I didn’t care like other people did. Other people were getting jobs as paralegals, building their CVs, and I didn’t have that drive. I felt very out of place.”

The designer, who is set to show at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week on June 2 under her label Anna Quan, is refreshingly candid about her path to fashion, beginning with a law degree she couldn’t see herself pursuing as a career, and then moving to design despite the fact she “couldn’t sew, or even draw”.