Despite the fame of her name, I can believe that. Although Hardwick and I have both clocked-up 30 years in fashion, this is, astonishingly, the first time we have clapped eyes on each other. ''I've always been a bit of an outsider, never been able to participate in any artifice,'' she says. ''I don't go to cocktail parties, don't do small talk. I don't 'play the game'. I know there are assumptions made about you when you're not conventional: that you're not friendly, for instance. But I've just always wanted honesty. I just don't like to waste energy pussy-footing around.''

Hardwick started her eponymous bridal brand in 1982 by accident. For a handful of years before that, she had dabbled in pop-up fashion shops in Lorne and Mount Buller, purely because her first in-laws were clothing manufacturers and that was a fact too convenient for a budding entrepreneur not to exploit. Later, she sold her own designs, fashioned from laboriously recycled Victorian lace, out of her South Yarra boutique, The Garb Shop. These brought her fame in the late 1970s as a fashion identity but Hardwick, an arts graduate, saw herself more as a creative entrepreneur. She had a congenital horror of routine and no particular plan other than: ''I never wanted to get a job.'' Which was lucky, because she was described once as ''unemployable'' for craving curiosity and what she admits was her addiction to newness and ''fresh arrivals''. Meanwhile, her creamy, off-beat frocks with their seaweedy layers and ruffles, strips and trims of laboriously salvaged antique lace were strumming a million girls' heartstrings and had germinated a radical new aesthetic that still resonates in vintage and deconstructed fashion today. ''Then, people started wearing them for wedding dresses and that's how I got into this whole bridal thing,'' Hardwick says.

As we talk on, she appears to wilt a little; ''I'm not used to talking this much,'' she says, before continuing earnestly. ''I embrace things when they're fresh, then go into them probably too much and run out of steam.'' She talks about travelling, especially to India and Yemen (she rejects Europe for being ''almost too civilised … too picture perfect''), where she found that authenticity she craves in unexpected places. ''Not having a shared language means you start communicating like a child at a very simple level,'' she says. ''It's very empathetic the way real communication happens.''

It was this restlessness, however, that increasingly seduced her away from her bridal business during the past decade. A year ago, she withdrew and appointed her daughter-in-law, Rebekah Malone, managing director. Malone is married to Sebastian, Hardwick's only son and the youngest of her four (now adult) children. Under Malone, the business still runs a brisk appointment book for 300 brides-to-be a month and, of those, an average of 60 buy gowns, mostly handmade bespoke designs, costing upwards of $3500.

From the cumulus nimbus clouds of silk billowing along the salon's walls, I can see strapless and bead, crystal and embroidery-embellished bodices attached to light-emitting layered silk tulle skirts. Some more strictly corsetted figure-hugging gowns with extravagant fishtail features are particularly popular. A smaller chunk of business is also done in off-the-rack gowns, lovingly locally made too, for $2500 to $4000 and sold by Sydney, Perth and Hobart stockists, in addition to the Mariana Hardwick showroom.

Hardwick's life is different but no simpler now her interest in the fashionable trappings of romance - ''this hormonally driven business … this stuff that is the basis of society's structure … this mating business'' - has run out of steam. She lives in a cyclic triangle of houses: one in the city, one by the sea, one in the country, and travels to the next when she tires of the last. Sometimes she just pulls a chair into the middle of her country paddock and watches the night sky, listening to the silence for hours.

Hardwick also manages about 20 tenants in the massive Sydney Road block property she bought to become this showroom in 2006 but her contribution to her accidental fashion career is nebulous now. ''What I did was create an identity, integrity, a signature: what you can expect a Mariana Hardwick [gown] to be,'' she says.

By lore and with Malone's good management, it should mean a sense of Hardwick's complicated self, a strand of her creative DNA, will cling to her iconic label just as Coco's does at Chanel, Hubert's at Givenchy and Christian's at Dior.

¦A Mariana Hardwick retrospective is planned for the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival in March. Rebekah Malone hopes to contact anyone with vintage designs, particularly from The Garb Shop-period, 9388 0399.