No, I don't have Indian people shopping here," she confesses "No, I don't know where Indian people shop. They probably have their own designers." And one is reminded rather too pointedly of Marie Antoinette and the goings-on at the dairy when Ms Doherty explains how she designed a smock inspired by a "wonderful butcher's apron" witnessed in action at Smithfield Market. To be worn perhaps by Lady Helen Windsor, that well-known "ordinary working person"and frequent customer at Egg.Indeed, one imagines Doherty, who sniffily despises Western fashion as "the type of things people wear to Ascot these days", recoiling in horror when anyone wearing spaghetti straps wanders into her tastefully designed "non-fashion" shop. I'm looking for clothes which will be worn by ordinary, working people," she says.Which all sounds marvellous, although the prices at Egg are not for the faint-hearted - T-shirts from pounds 40, dresses from pounds 150 through to pounds 4,000 for an entire outfit. Doherty's insistence that she is merely catering for the ordinary proletariat masses rings somewhat hollow.

"Well, most of the working people who come here are actually sort of architects, that sort of thing And film people. I don't have expensive shows and I don't make clothes to show off in." Perfect for the down-shifted Nineties; indeed, the Egg style seems ideal for the growing body of professionals who don't check in at the office wearing a pin-stripe each morning In fact, some of them don't check in to the office at all. "A lot of men who buy things here wouldn't have dreamt of doing so 10 years ago. But instead of going into work now they just sit at home in a pair of drawstring trousers They have an office at home and they wear what they want. "The East has always interested me," says Ms Doherty, formerly general retail manager of the Jigsaw empire. "They make clothes that are comfortable, and they're not designed by people who hate women Like Chanel I hate Chanel. It trusses women up like chickens." Egg's clothes; loose trousers, baggy smocks, linen dresses, are all made in India by Doherty's partner Asha Sarabhai.

Sarabhai is based in Ahmedabad, North India and the clothes are delivered to Knightsbridge every month. "I don't have a season, I just have a delivery every four weeks," says Doherty "I avoid the fashion world, and all that Imran Khan hype. Egg - her shop in West London - mixes an eclectic cull of clothes from Japan, Iraq and Korea. Maureen Doherty has known about the sublime appeal of Eastern clothing for quite a while now. In the meantime, letters pages in fashion supplements are full of queries from women asking how to wear Indian clothes and if one needed any more convincing there's Princess Di, the nation's clothes- horse, appearing on the front cover of Hello! in a shalwar kameez (loose trousers and a long top, do wake up) And looking pretty comfy in it Move over, the A-line Your time is up. Compared to the Bothams and the Lambs, all wide ties and tight skirts, the two Khans, in their loose trousers and long tops looked like something which had just dropped in from Planet Vogue. In the week when she announced that her home was designed in "sheikh chic", and that her baby was to be blessed with the Polynesian moniker Hiraani, it would seem that Eastern style is simply indispensable Witness Jemima and Imran floating out of the High Court.

Other eccentric requests have come from occultists and a woman who thought she was Nefertiti and claimed one of the shabtis was her own servant from a previous life.Some of the most potent symbolism is to be found in the ancient Palestinian pots, their rotund forms modelled on that of a woman and representative of the female fertility deities. "They were made in the fertile valley, before the time of the wheel around 3000 BC, which is one and a half times further away from the Romans than we are." Five thousand years from a perfectly formed pot to the suburban semi. Isn't civilisation wonderful?Chris Martin's Ancient Art, 85 The Vale, London N14 6AT (0181-882 1509).. Paula Yates must be laughing all the way to the ante-natal classes. Ancient jewellery seems to have taken the imaginations of fashion designers, too, with Joseph including ancient beads bought from Lord McAlpine's collection in a recent show and fashion editors requesting samples for shoots.