Dame Trelise Cooper
Few carry prestige in New Zealand’s fashion industry like Dame Trelise Cooper, her work featuring in Vogue and Marie Claire’s pages and the wardrobe of Julia Roberts. She talks about four decades of fashion, summer in France, and what modern dressing means in her 60s, with Metropol editor Nina Tucker.
Dame Trelise Cooper has just finished breakfast when she joins our call from Singapore. The esteemed designer of four New Zealand fashion brands is on her way home after soaking up a European summer at the home she shares in France with husband Jack and rummaging through treasures at an antique fair in Provence. Only four days on business in China separates them from Auckland’s shores. “Life as we know it,” she laughs.
Just over two years ago, Trelise handed the day-to-day administration of her company to a trusted Kate Devlin (CEO) and Judith Pratt (general manager) so she could focus solely on design (16 collections per year, that is). The duo, she says, have the “Trelise Cooper DNA… that thread runs through their blood and veins,” and have been by her side in business for 28 and 22 years respectively. “That allows me to have time away from the office. To have time in France.” (Not to mention time in Santa Barbara with her son and one-year-old grandson.) Flitting between is like “living the best of both worlds,” Trelise says.
Her connection to France is as intuitive as her design process. Together with a group of New Zealanders prior to 2023, Trelise raised funds to open a war memorial in Les Quesnoy. A small town north of Paris that in 1918 was under German occupation for four years, Les Quesnoy was saved by New Zealand troops without the loss of any French, though some Kiwi soldiers died in combat taking the town back. Trelise tells me the town has been forever grateful, naming streets like Rue Aotearoa and Place des All Blacks. “The museum is a real tribute to generous New Zealanders. All New Zealanders, if they’ve got time, would enjoy a visit.”
Four decades of fashion
“I have always marched to the beat of my own drum in terms of fashion, and it’s worked,” Trelise says. Sticking to the famous Trelise Cooper codes like colour and bold prints has proven a breath of fresh air for buyers and shoppers bored of the beige colour palette.
“I’m in my late 60s now, but I still want to wear modern clothes. But my sort of modern. We’re going through a moment in fashion where there’s a lot of what I call homogenisation of looks, where every second person looks like an Instagram version of quiet luxury. I’ve always had what I call colourful luxury. So we did go quieter for a few seasons, but there’s a danger in that because you end up looking like every other collection,” she says.
With four decades of experience, Trelise Cooper fashion has evolved into garments and silhouettes “more refined and less theatrical.” In an age of fast fashion, the timeless foundations endure. “We always, even before it was fashionable, had a timelessness in our designs that withstands years. I know that my work has done that and continues to do that. Women will come to me at an event and say, “Look, I’m wearing this 20 years later, and I still love it.” To me, that’s when I’ve nailed it,” she says.
“To survive in this market, you have to cover a lot of bases because we don’t have a large population,” Trelise says of balancing creativity with commercial reality. “That’s the hardest part of what we do. You can create amazing things, but can people actually wear them in their everyday lives? It’s harder and harder because, of course, we’ve been around a long time. But there’s something about when you get it right and everybody in the design room wants to buy it. I have a little saying taught to me by another New Zealand entrepreneur Murray Thom: ‘There’s nothing wrongwith it, but is there everything right with it?’ I put that measure on everything.”
If the thousands who wear her designs daily don’t serve enough of a reminder, Trelise’s travels reiterate her ability to compete with global powerhouses. “We went into a store yesterday, it had a collection of the very best labels the world has to offer: Simone Rocha, Sacai, Comme des Garçons, Ganni. It was like an atrium of fashion. And there wasn’t one plain garment.
Every piece had something to say. That’s what I aim for.”
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QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS
Your travel ritual? I always travel well-dressed. I believe that when you turn up to an airport or hotel desk, you get better service internationally when you look polished, so I take comfortable clothes that I can sleep in and I quickly change before we take off and then again before we land. I take my makeup off and lather myself in La Mer moisturiser, and more recently I’ve been using mouth tape on flights, which probably looks odd but I’d prefer to have my mouth taped than open catching flies.
What piece from your spring collections would make a perfect outfit at the Christchurch Spring Fashion Festival? I love the leopard print with the big pink jacquard rose on it (search Trelise Cooper the leopard floral edit online). That fabric was a complete mistake and wasn’t what I ordered, I edited it out of the range originally but it’s become a favourite.
Interesting… fabric fails? I have to buy fabric months and months out, sometimes a year. Then when the fabric comes, I’ll think, “Oh my gosh, what was I thinking!” So yes, we definitely have things that bomb and don’t work out. It’s part of the process.
What’s your guilty pleasure? Sitting at the beach house with nothing but chocolate and Netflix. In the daytime. Hoping no one knocks on the door.
Which designers are you most inspired or influenced by? I’ve always loved Comme des Garçons designed by Rei Kawakubo. I love people like Simone Rocha, Cecilie Bahnsen, Sacai. I like all of these brands because they could be any season, could be any year. It’s fashion but it doesn’t have a datestamp. That’s the problem with fast fashion, it’s datestamped.
Tell me what book you’re reading and show you’re watching? I really wanted to watch Netflix or Prime while I was away in France and I haven’t got to any of it. So I’m looking forward to coming back to New Zealand to catch up on something called The Madison. I’ve become very digital in that I love social media, but you can get caught doomscrolling. I’ve been a big reader all my life but I’ve found it harder and harder to focus so I’ve been listening all summer to Audible books. The one I’m reading at the moment, or that’s being read to me, is The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. What I’ve loved about the audiobooks is that narration, now, is acted. It’s very entertaining. I’d rather listen to a book than even watch a movie at the moment.
Aside from your own brands, which labels are you often wearing? I love Japanese brands and I often wear an unknown brand.
If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? I’m not a one thing person.
What would our readers be surprised to know about you? I love fishing and my father taught me at a very young age how to gut and fillet a fish.
What do you still have left to do? I would like to visit the village of Trelease in Cornwall that my ancesters come from.
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Hero image: Dame Trelise Cooper at Breast Cancer Cure’s Front Row at Flockhill event in May this year, presenting her winter collections.
