Shy star makes her debut on the fashion stage

By LEANNE MOORE

Helen Cherry is not a designer who has embraced the cult of the celebrity. She prefers to keep a low-key profile, though she is pragmatic enough to accept that it's worth talking about the debut of her label at Fashion Week tonight.

"This is a modern phenomena, the designer being a star. When I started out in the early 80s, it wasn't like that. I've always believed the clothes should tell the story," she says from her loft-style base in Auckland city.

The clothes will get their chance to speak when Cherry's self-named label, along with sister labels Workshop and Workshop Denim, make their first appearance on the catwalk at the Air New Zealand-sponsored event.

Cherry's star rapidly ascended in the late 1990s after her label was snapped up by prestigious New York department store Barney's at Australian Fashion Week in 1998.

For a few years Barney's were going to Australian Fashion Week to buy new designers and they picked up Helen Cherry, among other brands such as Scanlan and Theodore.

"We did a few seasons with them but we found it quite tricky. We had to make a special trip to New York for them, and we would try to predict what they wanted to buy and we always got it wrong," says Cherry, laughing.

"We would set aside fabric, which they wouldn't want, and they would go for something we couldn't supply. From what I can tell, the department we were in, which is what they call Co-op, tends to go through labels fairly quickly. They pick up new designers, run them for a few seasons and then go on to the next one. We were completely thrilled that they bought from us for the time that they did.

"It sounds good and it looks good on our resume and I think Barney's is still one of the best department stores in the world. It was a real honour to be there."

What followed was a period of rapid expansion for Helen and husband Chris Cherry, who produce two other labels between them - menswear label Workshop and Workshop Denim.

After the birth of her second child, Vincent, in June 2002 - almost 10 years after his brother Dylan - Cherry cut back her hours at work and elected not to take part in Fashion Weeks on either side of the Tasman.

"For a couple of years, due to me having a second child, I was not so involved in the company. While everything carried on as normal, we felt it would be too much to take on a fashion show."

Two years on, she feels the timing is right to debut at the New Zealand event.

"We feel that we are ready to grow the business again. We went through some fairly serious growth about four years ago and we had to consolidate a bit and get our production sorted, particularly with the Workshop Denim."

After graduating from Wellington's fashion design school in 1980, Helen spent four valuable years at Zambesi before spreading her wings as a designer. By this time she had met Chris and they had become a couple.

Chris needed a designer for the Streetlife womenswear range so he could concentrate on designing for Workshop. It seemed the ideal opportunity for Helen to join his company, RCM.

"I always admired Workshop and Streetlife," she says. "They were doing the androgynous thing in a really appealing kind of way. They also introduced, very early on, their own screen-print designs. In fact, early in our relationship Chris gave me a pair of earrings and then he asked to borrow one of them and it ended up as a screen-print design."

When Dylan was 5, the couple launched the Helen Cherry label, putting plans to have another baby on hold.

"I never planned to have a 10-year gap. I always hoped to have two children but things came up that I never anticipated, like selling to Barney's. I got a little bit sidetracked with work for a while there. We got to a stage where we realised we really did want to have another child, and time was getting away from us.

"We made the effort for me to withdraw a little bit from the business, to enable us to have another baby. It's absolutely the best thing we ever did. We feel blessed that we were lucky enough to have a second child," says Cherry, who was a month shy of her 41st birthday when Vincent was born.

"I really love my career and I love being in the fashion industry but I also love being a mother and a parent. I can't imagine not having one without the other, so I feel lucky to be able to do both."

Helen Cherry's deceptively simple garments are casually tailored, fashionable though not trendy, and sexy but not in an overt way.

"We call it subtly sexy. That's a key ingredient with [the] Helen Cherry [range]. It's something I'm always striving for with my clothes, so that they are very feminine and flattering and they do have a certain amount of sex appeal because I think that's what women want."

She still gets a thrill when she sees someone wearing her designs.

"I went to a lunch the other day with a group of women and one of the girls was wearing one on my coats from a few seasons ago, and it still looked great. I love seeing people enjoying the clothes, and that the designs have stood the test of time. I think that's flattering as a designer."

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