When Olivia, a 35-year-old immigration lawyer, first began working in the City, she was introduced to the “seven second test” — which posits that, when you first meet someone, you have seven seconds to make an impression that could last decades.
“When you’re starting out in your career, it’s drilled into you that fitting in is key — look the part, blend in, fit the mould,” she says. “Before you know it, your work wardrobe becomes a rotation of the same five pieces everyone else is wearing: taupe wide-leg trousers and a black boat-neck top. Essentially, a uniform. But as you gain confidence, something shifts. You no longer want to blend in; you want to express who you are.”
That’s where Talia Byre, the five-year-old label founded by Talia Lipkin-Connor, comes in. “Her pieces let you stand out while still looking polished and professional,” Olivia says, citing a corset knit dress she layers over a white shirt for work. “Every time I wear Talia Byre to the office, I get compliments — because people notice.”
Lipkin-Connor works from a tiny yet light-drenched studio in Hackney. Packed with racks of clothes and mood boards, she describes it as a “revolving door, there is always someone popping by”. Originally that was mainly her creative friends, who dropped in to snap up a £275 metallic rugby shirt or her cult cow-print “Bolter” tubular leather bags (priced at £325). But since Byre’s sister began wearing pieces to her City firm, her colleagues and their acquaintances have quickly adopted the Byre look, too.
When we meet for coffee nearby, she tells me that her intention is to make clothes that are “aspirational, but within reach. It’s everyday pieces, that you can walk into a room [wearing] and take on anything, feeling confident, a little bit sexy but clever and not objectified. It’s such a balance of emotions and feelings that you [want to try] to bottle.”
She didn’t explicitly set out to appeal to a City demographic, but has since embraced this eclectic range of fans. A permanent core collection, called Icons, offers a series of modern and seasonless tailoring separates all in black. The collarless longline jackets with unfinished edges are particularly great (£445). “It’s really interesting to see that different spectrum,” she muses, “the Icons definitely [appeal] more to corporate girls, but all the black fits into more of a fashion girl [look] as well.”
After setting up during lockdown in her sister’s one-bedroom Camden flat, complete with industrial sewing machines and irons, she was picked up by Twentyfourseven, an incubator programme that helped her find her Italian manufacturers and land stockists including Selfridges and Nordstrom. At the end of 2023, faced with a worsening market for fashion wholesale, she decided to focus on selling more directly, taking the company into her own hands, too.
“We parted on good terms,” Lipkin-Connor says of Twentyfourseven, fresh from New York where she launched her spring/summer 25 collection with a series of trunk shows in boutiques including Café Forgot, Maimoun, and LRCHQEV, a fashion-meets-art salon in the East Village. “I find it more exciting to work with these smaller boutiques, you can chat to the owners and they care about it a lot more.”
When establishing her own ecommerce channel, one aim was to bring down her prices. She enlisted her sister, an HR manager in a City law firm, for market research. “I said, ‘can you just ask around what people are spending?’ The feedback was around £300 on one piece a month. That’s the sweet spot.”
In a market saturated with excruciating and ever-rising designer prices, the move to position the brand at a “contemporary” price point seems smart. That customer is woefully underserved. Her sister is a case in point.
This perception extends to her new bridal offer aimed at a self-assured City woman, the antithesis of what Lipkin-Connor calls “the podium experience”.
“It’s for a town hall or to [cater to] the many events and dinners [that a] wedding [can encapsulate]” she says. The collection features her signature corseted dresses in white canvas with satin piping, and well as sculpted beanie hats with elaborate tulle trains (£650).
Fashion is in Lipkin-Connor’s blood. The “Byre” bit of the label’s name is a tribute to her great uncle’s boutique, Lucinda Byre, which sold Mary Quant, early Vivienne Westwood and Mulberry as well as its own knitwear pieces to Liverpool’s fashion-conscious crowd. The store closed a decade before Lipkin-Connor was born, but tales of its renown were handed down from her grandmother.
Fashion might have skipped a generation, but no one was surprised when Lipkin-Connor picked up from where her forebears left off. She is part of London’s cohort of young designers who graduated into Covid, who have weathered a fits and starts entry into an industry which is demanding at the best of economic times and downright inhospitable currently.
She has been shrewd about her marketing costs. Instead of spending thousands on a catwalk show, she talked through her collection at an intimate presentation during February’s London Fashion Week. That approach helped her land a place on the shortlist of this year’s BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund (the winner will receive £150,000).
Back in her studio and under her desk are boxes of scraps left over from every material roll she’s used. Some have been used by an artist friend to upholster small pieces of furniture, but Lipkin-Connor is using the remainder to create a childrenswear collection that will launch later this year. Highlights include Dalmatian-print knit leggings for toddlers and shaggy sheepskin gilets for the coolest of tweens.
While her long-term ambition is to open a store similar to the original Lucinda Byre, which had a café on the top floor, for now she is looking for a bigger studio that could incorporate showroom space for clients to shop in person. Location, as ever, is key. “Where is that spot between the City and east London? she muses. “We’re trying to find that perfect trifecta.”
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