January 9, 2023 |
Talia Byre is a brand devoted to celebrating the female form. Hailing from the North-West, founder and creative director Talia Lipkin-Connor is known for her knitwear. Ribbed, slashed, covered-up and exposed: her deeply feminine skirts, cardis and twinsets delightfully cling to the body and come in punchy, unexpected hues.
Last October, during Frieze week, the brand made its catwalk debut. The show was staged in London restaurant Sweetings, a popular lunch time spot flooded with bankers through the week. “I had done a lot of research on how classic houses hosted their shows, and it was quite common in the 1950s and ‘60s for brands to present their shows in restaurants with friends. Sometimes it was over breakfast, with people tucking in as models walked the catwalk,” says Talia.
The brand’s tactile, woolen separates came in pleasantly, off-kilter finishings. From shrunken boleros through to dresses pulled in skew-whiff proportions. Since her days at university – Talia graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA Fashion course in 2020 – the designer has shown a deft hand in draping. Here, lightweight knits, fashioned in blush pink, neon green and cream, traced the body’s frame, hugging in all the right places.
“This season’s palette was inspired by [the late American painter] Helen Francensola. She had this amazing retrospective in South London a few months ago. She made these beautiful watercolour canvases that are really abstract, just so many beautiful colours,” says Talia.
The designer pictures the collection being worn out of a suitcase, dressing her customer as she holidays during the late summer months. She began working on the collection as we emerged from the final Covid lockdown last winter. “It was a pretty awful time in the UK, it was miserable,” she says. Desperate for a get-away, the designer would go home and repeatedly watch classic travel movies like Betty Blue and Wild At Heart, letting the colours of each seep into the collection.
Talia comes from a lineage of designers and seamstresses. Her great-uncle Ralph owned the womenswear boutique Lucinda Byre, based in Liverpool, which was open from the 1960s through to the late 1980s. Talia’s family played a big part in running the store, in particular the designer’s grandmother. “Even though the store closed before I was born, she injected me with all this knowledge about it – sending me old clippings in the post from when I was around 12,” says Talia. The designer sadly lost her grandmother and other family members during the pandemic. Living back home in Warrington at the time after completing her MA, the designer decided to launch her own label “to keep the narrative going”, borrowing Byre to name her own brand in homage to her grandmother’s legacy.
“I’ve been meeting the people who used to work [at Lucinda Byre] outside of my family,” says Talia. “It’s so inspiring. They’ve written down their notes and everything they know, giving me old photographs. One woman I met in Liverpool had so much knowledge and all these amazing stories, as well as old garments from the store. It’s what keeps me going.”
Today, Talia fuses Lucinda Byre codes into her own label, keen not to be overtly nostalgic in her approach. She strives to create clothes that will be adored and passed down through generations, working with Northern mills to construct her earliest pieces.
“When I was at home, I was clearing out my grandma’s flat, and no one else wanted to tackle the wardrobes – she had about five. I found loads of fabric at the back of the wardrobe and it was like an epiphany,” says Talia. She contacted a mill Huddersfield used by her father’s side of the family, who were tailors. “They were really keen to support me and hear the story. In the beginning we used a lot of their fabrics, like off-cuts and stuff they didn’t need. They gave us really luxurious stuff.”
Nowadays, Talia produces her collections in Italy, working largely with upcycled materials. She strives to open her own store like Lucinda Byre, where her customers can hang out and connect. “That’s the ultimate goal,” she says, “I think it would be really special to recreate something similar, even if it’s a temporary space. I want to achieve something that Lucinda Byre once was, a place where community can exist.”
Photography by James Robjant.
