L.A. Times: Trina Turk pairs up with Banana Republic for summer collection

June 10, 2012 

The 60-piccc Banana Republic Trina Turk collection, which launches in 450 stores worldwide Thursday, brings her name to its biggest audience yet, with patio dresses, tunic tops and bikinis in her signature ” Pisces” and crazy botanical prints. Pieces arc priced from $34.50 to $150 – roughly half as much as her namesake line that sells at department stores and boutiques.

Turk is in brand-building mode. She recently rolled out jewelry, stationery and bedding, and she’s ramping up the Mr. Turk menswear collection designed  by her husband, Jonathan Skow. She also remodeled  her 10-ycar-old Palm Springs boutique  - the flfSt one she opened  - to better reflect the ever-widening Trina Turk world.

“My goal is to complete the lifestyle. Shoes, sunglasses … anything that would look good printed is something we should be doing,” the designer says, sitting under a sunshade by the pool at her 1936

Palm Springs bouse “Ship of the Desert,”  which looks like an ocean liner moored in the side of the mountain.

“The landscape, the architecture and the air – that’s what I love about Palm Springs,”  says Turk,

50, who has been a fan since she came here as a kid to visit her great-aunt Rose at the Villa Roma condominiums. “It’s automatically  relaxing when I get here.”

Although Turk’s primary residence is in Los Angeles, this bouse and Palm Springs have become the

$100-million brand’s spiritual home.

The swimming pool with its cliffs-edge view of the open sky has been the location for many Trina Turk  photo shoots. In the late afternoon, the sun reflects just right off the sparkling water and dusty hills, creating a canvas for Turk’s kaleidoscopic prints and cocktail culture dreams.

“It just kind of happened  that it became part of the identity of the brand,” says Turk, whose company is headquartered  in Alhambra. “We do winter clothes and fall and holiday too. But [Palm Springs] overrode all the other information about the company.”

Turk and her husband started their search for the pcrlect Palm Springs hideaway in the early 1990s, when a lot of fashion folks were discovering the midcentury  architecture here. They thought they wanted a 1950s house with a pic-crust roof until their real estate agent showed  them this place, which they have furnished with midcentury antiques and outdoor  loungcrs upholstered  in Turk’s signature fabrics.

Turk has been a student of the Southern California  lifestyle for as long as she can remember. Born in San Francisco, she spent only a short time in LA.before her father, a cosmetics industry executive, moved the family to the Seattle area. But her time here made quite an impression, and all through high school and college (she met Skow in 1981 at the University of Washington), she was aching to get back.

Her mother, who is Japanese, taught her to sew, and her first project was making a halter top. From then on, Turk knew she wanted to study apparel design.

In 1985, she moved to L.A . to work for Ocean Pacific. “It was a great job because it got me back around to surf culture, which is so important to Southern California. I was doing color-block board shorts and desjgning prints. It was a good tntin.ing ground.”

Her next job was designing a short-lived sportswear collection for swimwear label Anne Cole. When that folded, Turk moved to Bum Equipment “of the awful puff-printed sweat shirts,” she says. It wasn’t her ideal job, but it rud allow her to travel the world, visiting factories in Asia and Europe.

” I wanted to work for myself,” she says. “A lot of times I bristled when I knew instinctively something  was not going to sell. When you arc a cog in the wheel, you don’t always get to set the tone. Plus, I was working in the juruor market, and I rudn’t ever wear anything I designed.”

When she started her own  line in 1995, she was working out of her bouse. Her parents took out a home equity loan to help fund the first collection, which consisted of bright-colored silk dupioru separates screen-printed with giant photographic prints of flowers. Bebe, at the time a multi-brand retailer, placed a $250,000 order, which ended up financing the company’s first year.

Turk was still boning her desjgn vocabulary. She bought some yardage of vintage silk jersey in fun prints and made simple drawstring  sDrts and button-down shlrts. Fred Segal  bought them and ” they sold like crazy,” she says. “It made me realize we had to do prints.”

Prints have become the brand DNA . Turk introduces several new ones each season, some entirely origmal and others reworked  from vintage fabrics.

She launched  swimwear in 2005 and home accessories soon after that. “We started makffig pillows out of our fabrics for models to loll around on at photo shoots. Afterward, we would stick them in our stores and they sold really fast,” she says, by way of explaffiing the decisjon to go resjdential. She also produces indoor-outdoor fabrics with Schumacher. And her first bedding collection shlppcd in April to Neiman Marcus,Macy’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond  stores.

Menswear was once an afterthought, but since Skow  took over the design two years ago, Mr. Turk is becoming a more robust part of the business. “He was a stylist for 12 years,”  Turk says of her husband. “He sturued apparel desjgn before be switched  to marketing. He knows a lot about clothes. When we first met, we spent most of our time vintage-clotbffig shopping  - more time doing that than going to classes.” Skow  is building a fan base that includes Decades owner Cameron  Silver for his vintage-y, slim-fit, horizon stripe “Thurston”  blazers and trousers and citrus plaid “Slim Jim” shlrts.

There arc seven Trina Turk boutiques, including one in L.A., a summer-only store in East Hampton, N .Y ., and the recently renovated  Palm Springs boutique, which bas rustinct spaces for all of Turk’s product categories.