Talia Byre’s contemporary heirlooms celebrate the ‘quiet power of dressing on one’s own terms’

Rising talent, names to know: ‘Uprising’ is a monthly feature highlighting an energetic new vanguard of fashion talent, selected by the Wallpaper* style team.

Crib notes

Name: Talia Lipkin-Connor

Brand: Talia Byre

Alumnus of: Central Saint Martins MA

City: London, UK

Signature style: Northern family heirlooms revived for the wine bars of east London.

Design Philosophy

Talia Byre’s name isn’t actually Talia Byre. It’s Talia Lipkin-Connor. The Warrington-born designer plucked the surname from her great uncle’s shop, Lucinda Byre, a fabled multi-storey womenswear boutique situated on Liverpool’s Bold Street between 1964 and 1982. Lipkin-Connor never stepped foot in the shop, but she learnt much of its lore through the women she grew up around, namely her grandmother and her eccentric ‘Ab Fab’ circle of friends. They told her how the store brought Vivienne Westwood and Mulberry to the north, gave her ruffled skirts and smart knits by long-forgotten small brands, and shared photographs of the many convivial gatherings at the bistro on the top floor. Now closed but never forgotten, Lucinda Byre was a vibrant site of gathering – a place to share in a love of dressing up.

Four decades later and a few hundred miles south, in Hackney, Lipkin-Connor’s own world carries much of the same spirit. Without straying into nostalgia, her clothes honour history and humour of these women, bringing inflections of bygone glamour into the wardrobe of the discerning 30-year-old Londoner. Grounding down into a signature wardrobe of flattering knits, deliciously tactile textures, bias-cut stripes, and intelligently constructed feminine shapes, Lipkin-Connor’s design language pulsates with a quiet confidence. Her clothes are womanly but not too serious, beautiful with a cut of something tough, and sexy without needing to show any skin. Most of all they are clothes she loves wearing – and that the women around her love wearing too.

‘The process is informed by everyone in the studio and what's going on in our lives,’ Lipkin-Connor says. We’re meeting in said studio, a tiny but bright room on the third floor of a former bus depot in London Fields. The heating is broken and Lipkin-Connor is wrapped up in a soft camel V-neck jumper and scarf, paired with one of her wonky striped skirts. Ellie, her assistant, is carefully painting a pair of vintage high heels white, wearing a black down gilet. ‘It’s real clothes that we would wear. Everyone in the studio knows how they’d want to feel in something and what would make them buy something. That's the most important thing.’

Talia has invited me here ahead of her London Fashion Week show. Held yesterday morning (22 February 2025) at emerging gallery Incubator in Marylebone, the event was presented in two intimate viewings to a handful of journalists. In the studio, she pulls out a hefty, dog-eared book to show me pictures of the Sonya Rykiel salons that have inspired her since graduating from the MA course at Central Saint Martins in 2020 – images of models animatedly wafting through dark, cosy rooms. ‘It’s just more intimate,’ she says of her decision to keep things small. ‘Not everyone and their dog needs to come.’ Charmingly personal, Lipkin-Connor's past events have ranged from hosting drinks at Lant Street Wines to feeding guests fish fingers, sticky toffee pudding, and Black Velvets (a mix of Champagne and Guinness) at lunch institution Sweetings. ‘The point is for it to be a celebration,’ she says. ‘This time we're doing sparkling water and really nice biscuits.’

Lipkin-Connor always draws from a mishmash of eclectic references, but each collection takes on a particular feeling derived from its palette. Often starting with one colour pinned up on the studio wall, this season a chill watery blue relayed a sense of ease, offset by lemon yellows, earthy lilacs and mottled burgundy in silhouettes that merged a headmistress kind of formality with a dash of the British ‘fuck boy’. ‘It's been a lot of a less chaotic season, and the blue definitely comes into that,’ she says. ‘A/W 2024 was much more extravagant. I'd just gone through a really bad breakup and had disappeared to Japan for a month. That season was quite brash, womanly and sexy. This is just way more relaxed and easy, and that's probably more the vibe at the studio.’

This sense of calm, however, doesn't mean the clothes lack command or depth. After being talked about as a ‘British brand’, the designer delved into what that means through a story of checks, tweeds, nylon and ponyskin leather that needled at markers of taste. References ranged from the brash suiting in Casino, Marisa Tomei’s irreverent character in My Cousin Vinny, and the amazing blue knitwear worn by bombshell protagonist Christine in Variety. The result is a wardrobe that possesses a louche kind of ease; in the show, structured oversized shirts were slung over boxy check pleats, laddish striped rugby shirts were tucked into tweed office party skirts, and beanie hats made by James Pink snugly fit over body-hugging hoodies, paired with billowing black and white striped trousers. It is, she says, a tribute to the ‘quiet power of dressing on one’s own terms’.

While Lipkin-Connor did much of her research in New York this season, and her cinematic references are largely from American films, a few touch points were closer to home. The collection’s title, For Lilly Byre, comes from a painting of a relative that hangs in her family home up north, while a Lucinda Byre dress from the 1970s informed the checked story. Elsewhere, memories of her old school uniform came through in ties, kilts, and netball-esque knit bibs. ‘There’s definitely a bit of St. Trinian's in there,’ she jokes. ‘I think a bit of humour comes in every collection.’ The women in her world were, as ever, at the forefront of her mind. Each of them – from Ellie, her assistant, to Eliza Conlon, the stylist, and Lilli Sumner, the model and muse for this season’s imagery – had one look dedicated to their personal wardrobes.

Yesterday morning, the usually shy designer made the brave decision to talk through the collection as her models moved through the tiny gallery space. It was a display of confidence, both in herself and the woman she has been refining since 2020, received with warmth by the community she has built around the brand. Ultimately, it's this sharing with others that propels everything Lipkin-Connor does, something that she understands the power of through carrying the name of her great uncle’s store.

‘That’s what I really like,’ she says. ‘It's not the show for me, I love seeing what people wear. Really, the dream would be to have a whole building a bit like the Lucinda Byre store, where there’d be a showroom, a store, an atelier. Maybe even a wine bar. Somewhere people can just come and hang out.’

In Their Words

‘At Central Saint Martins I was the one doing more wearable clothes, rather than the usual student-y, haos. During my MA, I had this part-time job next to this really good charity shop. It had the best knitwear and I’d just cut everything up and redrape it. That’s how my design language started. The raw edges, working out how to finish things clean on the inside when you don't have certain skills means the clothes took on a sort of toughness. I'd say it's still the same now. All the silhouettes are quite feminine, womanly and classical, and then you kind of need to flip it and be a bit tougher. We're a few more seasons in, and we know the woman more now. In the studio, it's never one person's decision. It's always quite collaborative. We’re always asking each other, “How do we want the clothes to make us feel?”’

Where to buy

Shop Talia Byre at taliabyre.com and ssense.com