Trina Turk – fashion designer

Fashion designer Trina Turk cultivates seasonal collections of such optimism as to put a yes-we-can spring into your step. Known for her joyful signature prints and ebullient sense of color, Trina and her husband are also masters of presenting each collection and line in a highly cohesive manner that conveys a lifestyle of parties at the beach or cocktails by the pool. Inspired by strong memories of her early childhood in California and by the many vintage fabrics she’s collected, Trina’s aesthetic harkens back to a Marlo Thomas-style fresh innocence — “Diamonds, daisies, snowflakes, That Girl!” — but with a modern perspective and classic American sensibility.

Spring 2009 by Trina Turk

Your philosophy is to create wearable, optimistic fashion. In these economic times, do you feel this mission of optimistic design growing in importance?

All design is inherently optimistic, but at this moment it’s great to be doing something that is colorful and makes you feel good.

Spring 2009 collection by Trina Turk

I’m always intrigued by how deep an influence a designer’s childhood environment and culture seem to have on their later work. Up until what age did you live in California before moving to the state of Washington, and what are some of those earliest memories that have found a place in your designs?

I lived in California until I was 13, then lived in Washington through junior high, high school and college. I worked in Seattle (at Brittania Jeans) for 2 years before returning to Los Angeles in 1985. The earliest memories that have found a place in my designs include what our parents and neighbors’ parents wore to the suburban neighborhood luau in 1960’s San Jose; the beach culture of both northern and southern California; things in our home from Japan (my mother is Japanese); the colors and vibe of the “California crafts” movement that was especially strong in the late 60’s and early 70’s; the “hippies” we would see on visits to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury; and the natural beauty of Monterey, Point Lobos, Yosemite, the Redwoods up north, the Sequoias, and all the places we camped or road tripped to when I was a kid.

Spring 2009 collection by Trina Turk

Summer 2009 collection by Trina Turk

It’s remarkable the degree to which you have created such a cohesive and clear presentation of your line and the lifestyle and mood it inhabits through your lookbooks and the spring line video your husband Jonathan Skow directed. Have you always taken this overarching, thematic — or should I say cinematic? — approach to presenting your designs, or did this come about over time?

I have to give credit to Jonathan. The “lifestyle” of Trina Turk the brand is a collaboration. Jonathan is involved early on in print and color choices for most collections. In addition to shooting our look books, he works with the stylist, scouts locations, does model castings, and essentially art directs each one. Since we have been doing these shoots for 7 years, at this point it’s second nature, and we just bounce the ideas off each other.

Summer 2009 collection by Trina Turk

Spring 2009 collection by Trina Turk

I understand you cranked out 30 prints per season during your days designing surf wear for Ocean Pacific. Is this where you really honed your skills designing California-lifestyle patterns, or were you already going down this path on your own?

I definitely honed my skills at Op. I enjoyed working with color combinations and patterns, but it was not until later that I realized how much I had learned there. I also starting collecting vintage prints at the flea market while I was working at Op. I saw some of the artwork that was being sold for textile print artwork and thought there was much better stuff at the flea market! So I started to amass a collection. Now there are many people selling vintage prints for inspiration, but in 1985 it was not as common.

Summer 2009 collection by Trina Turk

Spring 2009 collection by Trina Turk

Tell me about your decision to start your own line. Did this idea percolate for a while, and how did you weigh this decision?

The idea percolated for years. I had worked as a designer for several companies, but never really wore the clothing that I designed — I was mostly designing juniors. I wanted to do contemporary, but it would have been difficult to get hired to design contemporary when my experience was in juniors. I talked about it a lot, and Jonathan always encouraged me to quit my job and try starting my own company, but the job was like a security blanket. Now I wish I would have started a few years earlier…. but I had to psyche myself up to quit a job that included international travel, insurance, all that good stuff.

You describe your clothes as being ‘casually sophisticated’ and as integrating the ‘best aspects of classic American sportswear’. Is there a balancing act you play in referencing this iconic imagery while creating something modern and in step with the times?

It’s always a balancing act — it doesn’t really work to knock off vintage without updating it for now. We spend a lot of time on creating the prints and fabric selection. We emphasize the fabric in our styling — i.e. we don’t do a lot of embellishment or application of “trim” to our fabrics. So in that sense, it’s always nice to have the reference point of classic American sportswear, because it’s usually cleanly styled and functional. I like our clothing to be easy to wear, to fit well and not to be fussy. And American sportswear has those characteristics.

Spring 2009 collection by Trina Turk

Summer 2009 collection by Trina Turk

Your sense of color is exuberant and beautifully balanced. What inspires your color choices each season, and do you wrestle with doing less vibrant choices for your fall and winter collections?

We use color trend services sometimes, but just as often are inspired by a trip (Greece, for example—blues and white) or we will start with a gorgeous print and draw the color story from that print. We work the same way on putting together fall color or spring color, so there is no wrestling involved!

Fall 2009 collection by Trina Turk

You’ve talked about how you draw constant inspiration from the cocktail party and poolside lifestyle of the desert. Do you have a very specific customer, or do you see a woman in, say, Russia, Japan, or Dubai, being able to wear your clothing well?

I see a woman anywhere wearing our clothing as long as they are ok wearing western clothing! In Dubai, many women still like to remain relatively covered up, so our strapless sundresses would not do so well there. But I see any modern woman as being able to wear our clothing.

Spring 2009 collection by Trina Turk

It’s striking how beautifully you’ve translated your aesthetic to your menswear line! Tell me about your forays into menswear, accessories, swimwear and fabrics.

At this point, menswear is exclusive to our boutiques — we have not started wholesaling a men’s line. But that is on the list of future plans. We have dabbled in sunglasses and handbags, but are currently working on re-launching both of those categories. Swimwear is done through a license with Apparel Ventures and is 3 years old. It’s been pretty easy to translate our print sensibility to swimwear, and the ultimate retail customer has been responding positively. The other fun part about swimwear is creating the hardware — it has given me a chance to delve into my cache of vintage jewelry finds to interpret them for swim hardware.

Men’s collection by Trina Turk

Swimwear by Trina Turk

Our collaboration with Schumacher was also a great project to work on — we edited down from 60 prints to 9 that made the final cut. Most are prints we had done previously in the clothing collection, and we re-colored and re-scaled them to make them appropriate for indoor/outdoor home use.

Pisces Punch fabric by Trina Turk

Do you sometimes feel you have to pinch yourself to make sure your success is real? And where do you see your business going from here?

We’ve been in business since 1995. I don’t need to pinch myself, because I worked extremely hard to make my company a success and have been intimately involved with every aspect of its growth. I would like to continue to open more retail stores — partly because working with amazing interior designers and architects is an unexpected perk of my job — but also so that we can continue to expand the categories of product we make to work toward “completing” the lifestyle.

Accessories by Trina Turk

What are some of your favorite things, whether they directly influence your work or just make you happy?

My favorite things are architectural tours, modern auction catalogs and modernism shows, textiles, art, magazines, shopping, bittersweet chocolate, hanging out by the pool in Palm Springs, my vintage modernist jewelry collection, and succulents. They all directly influence my work and also make me happy.

Trina Turk