What Katie did...
Britain's coolest fashion queen has no trouble getting the A-list to pose for her glossy mag. Just ask Madonna
By Tamsin Blanchard The Observer

She's as likely to be seen buzzing about backstage, chatting to her friends Gisèle or Luella, as sitting, restlessly, waiting for a fashion show to begin, frantically speed-texting on her mobile. Her dark brown hair is usually a fuzzy mess, her skin pale and sleep-deprived. At 32, she is British fashion's brightest, brashest queen bee. And as the show season begins once more, with the cavalcade stopping for a breather after this week's round of haute couture in Paris, before setting off on a month of travels - New York, London, Milan and back to Paris again - pressure is mounting. Katie Grand has a magazine to get on to the newsstands.

Issue six of her glossy, fashion-obsessed biannual, Pop, will be published to coincide with the new collections. The magazine has a circulation of 80,000 but is so trendy it has a an effect on fashion that defies those numbers. The last issue, in case you missed it, featured cover-girl Liz Hurley in black, high-heeled, kinky sex shoes and more mascara than Divine Brown would wear in a week. The first featured Grand's 'gang' - including ex-flatmate and fashion designer Luella Bartley, model of the moment Liberty Ross, and Stella McCartney (the magazine's contributing fashion editor) - all dancing round poles in their skimpies.

Grand has an uncanny knack for getting in with all the right people. She was at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design with McCartney, then became the lover and right-hand woman of celebrity snapper Rankin when he had just founded Dazed and Confused magazine with Kate Moss's boyfriend Jefferson Hack. The fashion photographer Corinne Day worked upstairs from them at the time, and her boyfriend had just directed Oasis's first video. Grand found herself at the epicentre of Cool Britannia, and not only knew its hippest protagonists but - as an up-and-coming stylist - helped to give the era its look as well. Now Grand has such a reputation for being cutting-edge that the fashion establishment is clamouring for her Midas touch.

How, I ask, does a niche magazine such as Pop manage to get Madonna to pose for the cover? 'Stella got Madonna,' she says simply. 'We were sat having a cup of tea and she looked at me and said, "You want to do this, don't you?" and she called her on her mobile. We sent some magazines over and Madonna called Stella back and said it was fine. It was the most smooth-running thing we've ever done.' Easy when you know how. Or should I say, when you know who.

In addition to editing Pop, it was announced last week that Grand has been appointed creative director of the Face. She also styles ad campaigns for fashion houses from Louis Vuitton to Miss Sixty, and works with designer Miuccia Prada, helping to shape a collection that will have the fashion pack salivating, and, in turn, shape the clothes the rest of us buy on the high street.

Although she has friends in high places, Katie Grand is not everybody's cup of Earl Grey. There's a lot of insecurity around - and too many egos.

'I suppose we've always been a loud gang in a way,' Grand says of her fashion clan. 'Luella and I were really aware from the minute we started being friends that we annoyed people. Like there was one London Fashion Week when we wore fluoro for the whole week and just got photographed everywhere. It was just those little things, like not wearing black and heels, and how easy it is to be anti-establishment without doing anything very wrong. Or like being at proper parties drunk and loud and obnoxious and falling over. It's not like we were very influential or anything. It was much more people saying, "Oh, I wish those girls would go and wash!" We were quite scummy really.'

Katie Grand is one of those people you love or hate. But you can't ignore her. Even while we're chatting, over tea in the bar at Claridges, an actor, who is with his agent on the table next to ours, suddenly leans over. 'Who are you?' he demands. 'I work on a magazine,' shrugs Grand. Then he tells us we are talking bullshit, which I'm sure we are, but still, what he really wanted was to pull up his chair and join in. She has this way of attracting friends as well as enemies. Whether people have an axe to grind with her depends, she says, on whether they were at college with her. 'I think all of our year at St Martin's have got certain issues with one another. Without going into detail, all the grudges they had at 21 are still there. On both sides.'

Grand didn't get much out of her stint at Central St Martin's. Having identified her aim in life - to edit Vogue - she enrolled for the Fashion Journalism and Promotion degree, but after a term changed to do Fashion Design with Print. 'I arrived expecting something really different from what it was,' she says, 'and I found it very difficult. I thought it was going to be instructive and positive, like you expect university or college to be, and I found the atmosphere very, very negative.'

As a child, Grand made her own clothes. Her mother, who taught her to knit, moved out when she was about seven, and she grew up with her dad, seeing her mum in the evenings after school. She is an only child. 'I was the centre of attention,' she admits, 'and quite spoilt in that me and my friends were just allowed to do whatever we wanted. When you're a teenager there's always someone's house where the parents don't mind what you get up to. That was our house.'

Her dad's girlfriend was influential in cultivating her fashion cravings. 'She lived in London and was completely obsessed with fashion.' As was her dad. Instead of going abroad on holidays, they would go to London and look at shops. Katharine Hamnett was a favourite. She didn't really know how to turn her penchant for chopping sleeves off T-shirts into the top job at Vogue. All she knew was she had to get into St Martin's. 'There was this complete determination I was going to go to art school, and I had to do that no matter how much work it took. I didn't see the point going anywhere but somewhere in central London.'

Poor Katie. She had worked her Fiorucci socks off to get into the college only to find it wasn't worth the effort, in her opinion. And then she met Rankin. 'We were spending a lot of time together, so I suppose it made sense to start sleeping with each other. I don't think it ever really worked. I was 23. It was quite funny. He's terribly charismatic.'

So she quit college before her final year, and, with financial assistance from her dad, as well as her earnings from a wool shop, where, as an avid knitter, she enjoyed discussing the merits of Kaffe Fassett patterns with fellow enthusiasts, she went to work on Dazed . 'We were quite blinded by our belief about what this thing could be. There was one year when we only actually put two issues out, but we were still saying we were a monthly magazine. We were quite led away by our own hype and we would have fly posters everywhere.'

By the mid-nineties, the magazine had established its own niche, with a slightly bigger office in Brewer Street, Soho. 'Bands such as Oasis had come along. It felt like there was something quite exciting going on in London - like Damien Hirst. It all sounds like such clichés in retrospect, but there was such a scene to report on and be a part of.'

As Rankin's career took off, Grand's fashion styling grew with it. She began to work for other publications, like Dazed's arch rival, the Face, and in 1999, she left. Things had already soured between her and Rankin. She threw him out of her flat the night before they were due to go on a trip to LA to photograph Kylie Minogue. 'We weren't professional at all. We were really rude and obnoxious and he carried on that behaviour with me until I left,' she recalls. 'It was really unpleasant.' These days, however, the two are the best of friends and Rankin is referred to as Pop 's favourite photographer.

Although she hasn't achieved her teenage ambition to edit Vogue, Grand has in a way, gone one better. She is the editor-in-chief of her own magazine. The idea was to make Pop a sister magazine to the Face. 'I didn't see any point talking about things I didn't know about, which is why Stella and Luella ended up being on the cover. They were my friends and that made sense. I don't see the point of working with people you don't get on with or you wouldn't choose to see socially.'

Grand is as fanatical about fashion as she ever was, and nothing if not determined. 'I'm probably worse now than I was five years ago. I stopped drinking. Up to the age of 30 I was out all the time. I've become much more motivated the older I've got. I'm probably more ambitious now.' She lives with her boyfriend, Steve Mackey, from Pulp, in a house in north London. She has two cars - a sensible Fiesta and a flashy vintage Ford Mustang.

Despite the fact that Pop is selling well and the advertisers love it (not least because they can be sure that they will be given some glowing editorial in return), the magazine is not going to make her or its publisher, Emap, rich. Her consultancies and ad campaigns will; but Grand insists it is not about money. 'I don't think I've ever been motivated by money. Obviously it's something that has come along later. I've ended up doing what I do because I like doing it.'

So does she really still want to be doing this when she is 80? Surely at some stage, the shine wears off the Prada shoes and the glossy paper. But Grand fixes me with wide eyes and a look of absolute incomprehension. 'I'm not bored with it. I really like what I do. I don't get pissed off with it.' And just in case I hadn't got the message, she says it again: 'I really, really like it. I can't imagine doing anything else.'