Her great grandpa dressed The Beatles. Now, she’s making her own name in fashion

Talia Byre’s lineage is peppered with successful clothes-makers, designers and boutique owners. But over the last 80 years, the British fashion landscape has changed.

The story of Talia Byre starts with a family tree. “Can you pass me a pen?” asks Talia Lipkin-Connor, the fashion label’s founder and sole designer. Hers is a lineage peppered with successful clothes-makers, designers and boutique owners. But in the last 80 years the British fashion landscape, wrought with new challenges and opportunities, has changed. Unable to rest on her family’s laurels, she’s starting from scratch. So far, Lipkin-Connor has done well for herself. Her 5-year-old label, stocked by stores including Browns Fashion, Farfetch and SSENSE, has this week been shortlisted for the prestigious BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund. She has also just presented her Fall-Winter 2025 collection as part of London Fashion Week. Sat in her East London studio, she starts sketching out her heritage on paper. “So there were three brothers,” she told CNN, drawing a horizontal line across the page. Her great grandfather Saul, and two great great uncles Sam and Campbell, owned three tailoring shops across Liverpool between the 1930s and 1980s. Named The Abrams Brothers, it was a cornerstone of the Liverpudlian menswear scene, even having been visited by The Beatles between their early shows at the city’s hallowed Cavern Club. Not much remains of the business, however, and Lipkin-Connor finds that keeping track of events is difficult. “All my great aunts just chime in randomly like, ‘Don’t you remember that?’ It’s like, ‘No. That was 70 years before I was born,’’” she said. Family success continued during the Swinging Sixties with her great uncle Ralph who made a name for himself in womenswear. In the mid-1960s Ralph opened Lucinda Byre, a boutique selling clothes from multiple brands, including miniskirt pioneer Mary Quant, in the center of Liverpool that later expanded across the North of England. (The name was a combination of his gentry in-law, Lord Byre, and a fictional character called Lucinda). “They were one of the first to stock (Vivienne) Westwood or Mulberry,” said Lipkin-Connor, pointing to a film photograph of one of the shop assistants dressed in a piece from Westwood’s 1981 debut collection. The boutique also carried its own range of cashmere knitwear and shoes — the remnants of which are largely scattered across the wardrobes of extended family. Some garments have found their way downstream to London, with friends discovering pieces in vintage shops on the historical Portobello Road. So beloved was Lucinda Byre that Lipkin-Connor has even inherited a few of its customers, who send through photos of their treasured garments and describe happy memories. With the British fashion industry facing disruption in the wake of Brexit, as well as other challenges including rising studio costs, low industry wages and a lack of government funding, Lipkin-Connor is navigating a very different environment from her predecessors. “It’s something we discuss a lot in my family at the dinner table,” she said. “(In terms of) funding and access to a lot of things, it’s just harder.”