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Audi New Zealand - News and Events |
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The time of Helen Talbot
Audi and Helen Talbot. They are brands with something in common. Both are high-priced, and known for prodigious attention to detail and quality.
More than that, they are both slightly abstracted from the mainstream, running outside the pack, searching for excellence on the edge of two different worlds of design. A relationship between the two seems like a natural synergy.
“There is no point in not acknowledging to myself that what I have is a gift, and I recognise that not everyone has it, in the same way that not everyone is musical or can run fast. I feel now that I am finally making use of it. And for a long time when I was practising Law I had this incredible fear that I might never get this time in my life to create, to do the thing I was born to do, the thing I dreamed of.”
Roses ramble up the side of a handsome redbrick building in Auckland’s Herne Bay. They’re yellow and pink, colours you won’t find in any of the fabrics inside. In the 1870s this was a bakery; now it houses the Helen Talbot fashion label.
By the yardsticks of the fashion industry Helen Talbot is an overnight sensation. Her debut collection was shown – by invitation - in October 2001, just six weeks after she opened her label. Since then her clothes have sold, as one of her Wellington stockists puts it, “like the proverbial hotcakes”. She has received repeat invitations to hold collections at Auckland’s Ascot Metropolis, in 2003 her Fashion Week collection attracted international buyers, and she was chosen by Eric Watson as the showcase designer for his “Stand Tall” charity launch at the Sheraton in November. Television personalities here and in Australia will wear the next Helen Talbot winter range, and discussions are underway for U.S. distribution.
Five years ago Talbot was one of New Zealand’s most successful criminal barristers, but that seems long ago. She brings life experiences to her designs, but they have little to do with the Law, apart from whatever training it gave her in the single-minded application of a powerful intellect.
Helen Talbot reaches much further back. She can still summon the wide-eyed wonder felt by a solitary, artistic child who was entranced by the costumes she saw in historical picture books. Growing up on a Taranaki farm provided few opportunities to play with other little girls. There was a country bus to school and back, and in the evenings she read, and drew, and dreamed. To this day Helen Talbot feels “an incredible need to have my own private space.”
When the long day’s work is done Helen Talbot has probably missed the television news, but it’s not too late to draw, and she’s a skilled artist on paper as well as with cloth.
Her living area underneath the workroom is quiet, the building set well back from Jervois Road’s jostling eateries. She picks up a pencil and opens a notebook already crowded with fashion sketches: a possible corset, a pair of braces fastening onto something indistinct, the memory of an Edwardian bodice, a line of fabric around a shoulder. Sometimes she will bring a ‘dolly’, a mannequin downstairs and start to move cloth around, experimenting with pleats and folds, concentrating...
It’s Fashion Week 2003. Helen Talbot’s collection will be part of the New Generation designers’ showing in the Grand Hall. Everyone knows it will be special. The fashion media are already believers. Privately they have begun to spread the gospel, and the fitting sessions have confirmed expectations. The word is that Helen Talbot is creating a genuine oeuvre, her models not just clotheshangers but canvas, tabulae rasae for a new kind of look. Does she do it with colour, with funk, with shock frocks? No, evidently not. Apparently she does it with structure.
Helen Talbot doesn’t like to talk about the cancer that changed her life. It was diagnosed the night before a birthday. She went ahead with the party, but sleepwalked through it in a fog of fear. It seemed like her fault, that was the worst aspect. As a hard-driving trial lawyer there had been little recent opportunity for relaxation or an interior life. The cancer seemed like an “awful reckoning”, the inevitable consequence of a career “that wasn’t right for me, even though I was good at it.” If she could beat the cancer, she would change everything.. change it completely.
.. Model Mia Pistorius from Nova steps onto the catwalk in a Helen Talbot skirt called the ‘merry-go-round.’ The eyes of the industry study it as Mia walks. Mia wears a black woollen jacket with a confederate cut, in the style of American Civil War soldiers. Maroon stripes drop vertically, front and back, from the right shoulder and end as straps traversing a bare midriff. The skirt itself has boning in it, and is gored in eight striped panels with the stripes matching at the interstices. Mia walks the frock well, but there is movement happening independently of her. Somehow the skirt has a life of its own. There is something about its structure..
Suzanne Selwyn has been a dressmaker with other big name designers. “There is way more work in Helen’s clothes, and the detail is amazing. She will just not compromise. I suppose you would say her clothes have a high degree of difficulty - if it were gymnastics it would be the beam – and partly it’s because Helen hasn’t got a background in the trade, she just breaks the rules. She’ll try anything, and so much of it works. That’s the thing; it works.”
The techniques Talbot used from the beginning - oriental layers, quilting and strapping – are now becoming very fashionable. Her strapping, especially, has attracted attention. She likes having a quilted fabric opening, say, down the back, with a metallic cloth showing through underneath; or she straps through pockets, little jet pockets, up to sixteen of them in one coat. “When you walk it’s got all this kind of amazing stuff happening with these straps.”
Always with Talbot is that same childlike delight with the way clothes can look. “The first time we made a sample of the little jet things on a coat,” laughs Suzanne, “Helen carried it around with her in her pocket.”
.. The ‘merry-go-round’ is deep lime and aubergine, and it sparkles faintly in the lights because of the metallic thread insinuated through the taffeta. The cutting is beautiful, allowing glimpses of muted internal colours in the linings as the garment moves. At the waist the fabric drops between rings, with Talbot’s trademark strapping suggesting the modi operandi of bondage. Straps, instead of confining her garments, imply a sensuous liberation. That’s the Helen Talbot design paradox. Clearly the clothes are inordinately complex, but the effect is simple and lovely. It is all in the structure...
Suzanne and her sister Kerry Nicholson are Talbot’s patternmakers and cutters. The workroom atmosphere on the top floor of the old bakery is relaxed, almost jolly. Helen Talbot may have the vision, but she depends on the sisters to make it work, and they swap opinions without deference.
“The first time I met Helen,” says Suzanne, “as soon as we had got rid of the ‘nice-to-meet-yous’, she said ‘And don’t tell me anything’s impossible!’ I thought ‘God what have we got here?’ And she said it bluntly, like a shot being fired across my bow. I realise now it was because she had employed dressmakers who couldn’t do what she wanted, and that frustrated her terribly. But now she’s got us!”
“I love the ‘merry-go-round’” murmurs Talbot. “You can just keep looking into it, like the heart of a bottomless flower.” Mia returns from the catwalk, flushed with the excitement of the reception for the dress. “I knew your time was coming” she says to Talbot. “This is your time. Come on.” It’s de rigueur for the designer, however reluctant, to close the collection by joining her model on the runway. “Don’t let go of my hand, Mia” says Helen Talbot. Together they walk out into the applause and the cheers.
The design is in the detail
Strewn across tables in the wide workroom are the tools of the trade: pincushions, rulers, pencils, scissors, swatches. On one table some Armani tweed is about to be made into a jacket with inserted fabric from an antique sari bought in Berlin, on another a woollen godet waits to be stitched into a dress. The label buys cloth in, but also makes up its own fabrics from an eclectic mix of sources: an antique damask from France, second-hand silk ties, a multiplicity of clothes with their past lives deconstructed.
It begins with cloth on a mannequin, then shape and structure are created by pinning on the cloth. The lines are chalked, and the chalk lines become a pattern on paper. They all love patterning best; it’s the real act of garment creation. Hanging on racks in the workroom are dresses and jackets, wrapped and buckled and strapped. Talbot moves around, talking to her staff but simultaneously in a kind of distraction, aware of the urgency for new designs, conjuring possibilities from bolts of cotton and linen. 
As soon as you study the clothes you begin to see their complexities. A black pinstripe jacket hangs at the front of a rack. Double-breasting the front of the garment is a panel which unbuttons to create options. Often there are options in a Helen Talbot design. The panel has white pinstripes on its reverse side, and can either be re-fastened around the back of the jacket or can simply hang down, like an elegant handkerchief that has jumped down from a breast pocket and acquired a life of its own. “One of the things that interests me most of all is being able to change what something is by adding or subtracting fabric panels and strips. I love what you can do with fabric.”
“Taffeta you want to crunch” she says, “silk you crush into new shapes and each new shape has a different life. Linen, cotton? You respect them for their immense history, but they don’t always perform, don’t have the extra stretch of the new synthetics. We prefer traditional cloths though. I love that workmanlike aura they have, and that will always attract people. If you work hard with them they will repay the effort.”
Her look is heavily tailored, but with “lots of things happening”, like shirts with shutting options around the collars. There might be two collar stands instead of a collar, with an intriguing gap opening up at the throat, and a little piece of strapping crossing it that you can wear or take off.
The Helen Talbot talent is to turn something basic like a shirt into a completely different piece of apparel.
Jude Riddell owns designer fashion outlets in Wellington: Jude in the Old Bank Shopping Arcade on Lambton Quay, Raumati’s Frock Shop and a planned boutique in Seatoun. She stocks Helen Talbot garments. “They’re beautifully tailored, very international. You could wear them anywhere in the world and people would admire them.”
“I feel she’s the designer who has come along to match the achievements of women in New Zealand now. Her clothes are right for them, so it’s the right time for her. She’s aware of what women need, that dichotomy between a traditional, tailored base look and accoutrements that have to be edgy and different. And you know what else I like? She caters to a wide range of women’s bodies, bigger 14s and so on. Not everyone’s a perfect 10 or 12.”
Talbot designs by visualising fabrics in her head, sees the way they will move on a catwalk, changes their colour, intuits it all from the look and feel of the cloth. “I usually shut my eyes to do it. I don’t have to, but I find if I shut my eyes I still any other distractions in my head. I can look down the tube of what will be the leg of some trousers and know what is going to happen to it.”
A family business
There are four Talbot children from a past marriage. Former snowboard coach Edward Talbot started the label with his mother.
“I’ve always been interested in psychology, and why people do things, buy things, choose things. As a boy I could always see the design flaws or marketing flaws in new products like PlayStations, Walkmans or other new tech. I’d want to write to them all suggesting improvements! So I guess I was destined to end up in business, and a design business. My mother’s an inspiration because her energy is just endless. She has always made good things happen, never waited for them to arrive.”
Trouble has arrived at times too, not often but in big doses. A keen horse rider, she broke her neck in 1991, separated from her partner in 1993, and within a fortnight of that trauma both her parents died. Then came the breast cancer. She shares that story with great reluctance.
“On the one hand I hate it being identified as part of my life, and on the other hand feel that I kind of owe it to women to be out there with them. You feel so absolutely alone when you get cancer. As time passes – five years now – I feel more strongly that I’m going to survive, so it isn’t the same issue as it was.”
“It’s completely changed my life, and I look back and I think that there were a number of awful things that happened to me within a relatively short space of time in the 1990s, and each one – looking back – was saying to me ‘it’s time you gave up the way you’re living.’ But it was the illness that brought me to my knees.”
The Talbot admirers
She has never lacked loyal friends, even in the hard times.
Christchurch’s Nick Davidson Q.C. has known her since they were at Law School together. “She was a highly successful trial lawyer” he says, “the only woman practising alone as a barrister in Taranaki. Most people don’t understand how hard those yards are; and she was bringing up young children on her own as well. She is the most determined person I know. You don’t attract international attention as a two-year designer unless you’ve got extraordinary talent. She always had the talent. She’s a superb artist as well as a designer.”
Former colleague Grant Kerr is best known nationally for his high-profile involvement in chess (he once played Bobby Fischer), but he’s also a well-known New Plymouth lawyer.
“Her ethics are very high; she always gave 105%, and she was highly regarded by lawyers, police and clients. You don’t get that a lot. It’s the real pointy end of the law, what she was doing.”
“To see where she’s got to in fashion so quickly is amazing. Most people start at the bottom. She came in two rungs from the top and carried on climbing.”
A grand design
Helen Talbot believes “that everything that happens in my life has a point. Even if I might not recognise it at the time I will grow to see it as something that has been valuable to me.”
So she’s being looked after? “Umm… let’s just say there’s a serendipity to things. There are events in any life that if you let them can turn you into a bitter and miserable person. The trick is to turn that around, not let it happen. Those feelings destroy the person that has them.
This is the time, rather than the tide, in the affairs of Helen Talbot; “not the tide because my life has always been in full flood. It’s rather that I’m prepared to lash myself onto a small raft and let the sea take me where it will.”
The Helen Talbot difference
As you can imagine, she’s a perfectionist. There’s huge emphasis on the construction of a Helen Talbot garment, achieving a perfect finish, a perfect line, with perfect buttonholes and painstaking layering of clothing. It’s often quite a simple fabric. Talbot hardly ever uses prints and not a lot of colour. She seeks to change the fabric she is using in some way, change its nature, rather than buying in a solution.
What fabrics does she like best? “Dark fabrics: wool, linen, tweeds, pinstripes, cotton, tulle.. pure fabrics.”
After the cancer, Helen Talbot shifted to Auckland and opened a cushion shop. She was mortally afraid of going back to the Law, and wondered what she could do. It was others who gave her the idea. She had always designed her own clothes, and customers in her shop would compliment her on them. During a holiday in Colorado, where Edward was working, she took some clothes and cushions along. It was the clothes the fashionable Aspen retailers liked. Quaintly her first little “showing” was on a Herne Bay footpath. It was the birth of a fashion label.
Big on quilting, with that costumed look from her old picture books, Talbot’s first clothes were crowd-pleasers but impractical. “My favourite era as a girl? Mediaeval England. That’s where I would have been in a past life; not just for the clothes but also the language. The construction of their costumes was phenomenal. It’s like comparing Winchester Cathedral with a modern church. The actual elements of construction and the work that went into their garments is extraordinary.”
“Within my head are the costumes of many, many ages – right back to the beautiful Byzantine clothes – and I think what happens is that it distills somehow and then the garments spring from that enormous reservoir of memories. I still love old oriental clothes, the layering of them, the symmetry and the sometimes surprising asymmetries.”
Since then the Helen Talbot designs have retained their denseness of construction but acquired a contemporary look within a very short time frame. You have to move fast in fashion. Although the industry seems big enough now to support a number of “name” designers, that’s not so. Appearances glamourise a tough reality. “It is a very precarious way to make a living” says Talbot. “There are stories all the time of people who’ve given up or had to give up, and I don’t feel complacent about my position in it at all. I feel that I am going to succeed, on the basis of the success we’ve had within a very short time, and because I never allow myself to fail. Failure is a word I do not acknowledge.”
The Helen Talbot boutique is just a few hundred metres away, from her workroom, at 176 Jervois Road. Most of the clothing sells through the shop, and through seven outlets around the country. That looks set to change, however, with the increasing success of the label. All this in a couple of years, from a neophyte designer with a head full of delight at what she was finding in this big new world. “I would look at someone wearing something beautiful. I would want to follow them down the road…”
Now people follow her. Mia Pistorius has worn her clothes from the beginning. “I always loved what she did, but I’m amazed at the changes. At first she had me in very feminine, pleated and layered things but she’s so versatile now. There’s still the femininity, but such strength along with it; that’s so good for women. I’m dying to see what she comes up with next. She’s amazing.”
It’s an exhausting industry, especially in the months before summer and winter collections appear. And Talbot’s staff work harder than most because of the detail she demands. “We’re still waiting for her minimalist period so we can have a rest,” jokes Suzanne.
You can’t imagine Talbot ‘having a rest’. There is too much to do; so much cloth waiting for inspiration, so much potential in this woman who has discovered a gift, and is making up for lost time.
But there is time ahead. Her time has only just begun.
She turns off the lights in the workroom, goes down the stairs. She should put her feet up, but a mannequin is waiting beside the dining table. She sits down, pulls it closer, starts to rearrange the fabric...
The reviews
“Helen Talbot’s mainly black collection was the biggest surprise of the week.. brilliant, Helmut Lang-esque tabbed and buckled skirts in nothing but the sootiest shades.” Annabel Davidson, Sunday Star-Times.
“I was really excited by that show - she obviously understands design.” Alistair McKimm, stylist for i-D magazine (London), Russian Vogue, French Official and Showstudio website.
“Hot Discovery of Fashion Week? Helen Talbot.” Style Magazine.
“New talent Helen Talbot dominated the New Generation shows.” Clare Barker, The Australian.
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