In 2018–19, Australians threw out 780,000 tonnes of textile waste, just over a third of it clothing. This put textile waste on Tanya Plibersek’s Priority List 2023–2024. In my other job at the post office, I see a lot of clothing company parcels and wonder what could be done. How can we convince people to buy less? How can we get fast fashion to stop the excess? In this two-part series, I talk to “clothes people” I know and to former designer-manufacturer Loo Taylor.
I’ve known Taylor for some years, as a friend of friends and also as my teacher at the Clothes Clinic sewing classes she ran here and in Berry, prior to COVID, so I knew she’d had a background in couture in the UK, and she’d mentioned running her own lingerie business. What I hadn’t quite understood until researching this article was the scale of that business. Loo Taylor Lingerie was a big brand, so big it got proper press and was featured with Ken Done and others in Australian Made promotional books.
Taylor came up in fashion in 1970s London, first as a 16-year-old at couture house Lachasse. She’d been remodelling garments from jumble sales for a few years by then and, after learning from her professional clothes-maker mother, knew her way around technical hand stitching and “had the run of Mum’s very nice German sewing machine”. Lachasse catered to the wealthy – “Ladies, duchesses, the aristocracy,” Taylor says – showing a new collection a couple of times a year and garments made to order to the client’s customisation – the other colour; a velvet collar – with fittings along the way and much care for quality and detail in the production of the garment.
“Being the lowliest of the low that I was, my job was to hand-whip the seam allowances of the linings, make the occasional waistband for a tweed skirt, clean the irons, so as a 16-year-old growing up in London in the seventies, this was like ‘Oh my God! Kill me!’ you know. And the only way you could move up to more interesting work was to be there for about 50 years.”
As she talks about the hierarchy, with men in Tailoring on one floor and women in Day Wear on another, I have flashes of Mrs Harris Goes to Paris and am not surprised to hear the word “stifling” and that she’d left after about six months.
“But it was enough to give me a real grounding and appreciation for the art of couture and I still use techniques that I learnt there.”
In turn, we all in her Clothes Clinic classes learnt a lot from her, even experienced sewers, and one was inspired to seek out a couture class.
Taylor’s passion for fashion wasn’t dampened but she wanted more action than she’d get at another Lachasse. London was at that time exploding into different clothes-expressed sub-cultures, including punk (this is the era Vivienne Westwood was upcycling old tyres onto t-shirts). She enrolled in London Fashion College and thrived. “The course I did was called Women’s Light Clothing so it was mostly to do with technical aspects so pattern-making, manufacturing, assembly techniques, textiles stuff, and we did a little bit of design but […] it was more the nuts and bolts of the industry.”
Out of college and involved in much more creative work, Taylor was patching a week’s income together from roles for small designers – “design-sampling and production, so small-end, small business stuff”. Through a connection, she landed a full-time role at couture lingerie company Keturah Brown, founded in 1974, “hot on the heels of a woman I really admired called Janet Reger.” Reger (whose website calls her 1967-launched company a “disrupter brand”) introduced to a tired, plain underwear market the concept of couture lingerie made from high-quality silks and satins and kicked off an appetite for lace-trimmed French knickers, camisoles and teddies that sky-rocketed into the 1980s.
It’s a gorgeous autumn day when I arrive at the hillside Beaumont property where Taylor and partner Dave Macquart have built their house and – importantly – a sewing studio. After coffee overlooking the lawn (and stunning Stewart Briggs sculpture) and the veggie garden, I follow Taylor up the hill to the separate studio building. It is full of light and clothes-construction paraphernalia – a few mannequins; a huge cutting table; several sewing machines; and old printer’s trays of beautiful buttons. “My dad was a printer,” Taylor says. Her mum is here too, in a framed photo that sits propped on one of the huge windows, and in front of them against the wall are tables with the sewing machines on them: workhorse machines built to last. On the purpose-built cutting table is some t-shirt fabric. “I couldn’t find any that fit how I wanted so I’m making my own.” Fit will come into all of the conversations I have about clothing waste over following days.
Along with teaching her the craft of sewing, Taylor’s mother was a strong supporter of her taking the skill into business too, acknowledging her double blessing of technical skill and organisational acumen. And she had a feel for fabrics from her earliest days. “Mum would tell the story [of how] I used to crawl across the floor and grab a woman’s skirt and feel the fabric.”
Arriving in Australia at 23, her Keturah Brown experience in her pocket along with $300, Taylor was poised to take advantage of it. When one of her artist friends heard of her background and urged her to give it a go, she bought a roll of silk and a roll of lawn, sewed up a sample collection, and went knocking on lingerie doors in Melbourne and Sydney. This led to orders from David Jones, Myer and Grace Bros and then agents and soon her own company and rented factory in Adelaide.
“I only ran my business for about ten years but it was right through the DINKS, the Yuppie era basically, so it was high income, high-end luxury. It was all pure silk-satin and European laces and embroidery that I imported myself and we were just overwhelmed with orders. You know, it was crazy.” Everything that came in got reinvested in materials and expanding the workforce. “It was good. It was exhausting, but good.”
Loo Taylor Lingerie became a highly regarded, and highly successful, Australian brand through the 1980s and 1990s, selling through the major department stores as well as select boutiques. This was lingerie one bought for special gifts or occasions, the kind of thing fans would buy for their wedding and hang onto even years after it no longer fit.
“All the cutting and everything was done [at the factory]. And we used outworkers.” Women who lived in Adelaide and were paid by piecework, doing flexible hours around their kids’ needs, they would come into the factory to get their rolled-up bundle of garment sections. They’d make the entire garment – can you make six gowns and six nighties, or ten teddies – the one-piece thing.” Were they popular? “Huge!”
The sewers were trained inhouse with an experienced sewer, then trialled and given feedback “and then off they’d go. It worked really well and we had a really nice, happy band of women. It was great,” says Taylor, describing a kind of training lost to most Australian industries, certainly manufacturing.
Like many manufacturers at the time, Taylor had a direct relationship with her machinists and suppliers, was hands-on from design and pattern-making to promotions and sales. Even as the business grew, the people who cut and assembled her collections were not just in Australia, they lived and worked in the same city.
There was also minimal wastage: the fabric was expensive so the lay plan – an essential tool in garment production, made to show the most economical arrangement of pattern pieces on a width of fabric – was key and only as many garments were made as were ordered. “So we didn’t end up with stuff left over [that had to be] sold off cheap, or worse.” Taylor explains.
“I was in the top end of industry so we were working with luxury, very expensive material and part of my training at fashion college was about minimising waste. Minimising waste obviously translates to improving profits so it’s a business thing too.”
What wastage there was, Taylor says, was silk and occasionally other natural fibres and so minimal she’d probably compost it now, if she couldn’t find the little scraps a home. They gave them away to friends back then.
Not long after Taylor had moved to Kangaroo Valley to be with her first partner, he fell ill and she needed to sell the business to care for him. No buyer could be found, because if they wanted the company it was because they wanted Taylor and her design and organisational gifts – where the whole point was to free up her time and energy to care for her partner and finish the house they’d started building at Little Pig Creek.
She wound up Loo Taylor Lingerie, paying everyone their full redundancies. She got out “shortly before the government scrapped the import tariffs” and forced manufacturing offshore. Swift on the heels of that was the arrival to our shores of fast fashion, consumers love of it seemingly exponential since then – and the waste problem to go with it.
In the Federal Budget, announced in May, Treasurer Jim Chalmers outlined further slashing of import tariffs, including on clothes. Meanwhile, Tanya Plibersek saw to her Priority List, and launched the Seamless scheme in June 2023, a National Clothing Product Stewardship Scheme developed in consultation with the textiles industry. Seamless launched with six founding members and few have signed since then, despite there being a deadline “to have established a financially viable product stewardship organisation and have secured a clear pipeline of brands committed to the scheme. By 30 June 2024.” The Australian Fashion Council has set a further deadline of a fully circular fashion economy by 2030.
Pick up the July issue of the Voice to read how this might impact our passion for fashion and the waste produced because of it, as well as some positive news, in Part Two.
Selena Hanet-Hutchins
