In 1999, Stephen Morris-Moody found himself sitting half naked in the New York headquarters of Ralph Lauren. As a yarn designer for Melbourne Textile Knitting (MTK), he’d wangled an appointment with the brand’s head buyer. But as the woman examined his fabric samples in an office high above Madison Avenue, her gaze kept returning to his sweater – a woollen V-neck in olive green with a mini-waffle stitch. “Is that one of yours?” she asked. “I need to show it to Ralph.”

Morris-Moody hesitated. He didn’t have a swatch of the fabric with him and wasn’t wearing anything beneath the jumper. Eventually, at the buyer’s insistence, he stripped off. “I just sat there with no top on for what seemed like an eternity, until finally the buyer came back in and said: ‘Ralph likes it, we’re going to book it’,” he recalls. “And just like that we were off and running.”