The bridal designer zooming into the future

The last two years have meant most businesses have had to upskill in various ways to cope with the challenges the pandemic has thrown at them – but bridal designer Anita Turner never imagined that she’d have to add teaching grooms-to-be how to take wedding dress measurements over Zoom to that list.

“One bride I had last year had to have her husband-to-be take her measurements and make the needed adjustments while I told him what to do via Zoom,” she says.

“I felt so sorry for the poor man.”

When Turner isn’t busy coaching groomsmen on wedding dress measurements, she has her hands full carrying on the design legacy of her mother Vinka Lucas – an entrepreneurial fashion designer who shook up the landscape of New Zealand’s bridal and evening wear – will always come before anything else.

“I spent a lot of my childhood growing up in my mother’s workroom and just watching her work,” Turner says. 

“I never wanted to do anything else but follow in her footsteps.”

Fashion world

Thanks to her upbringing, Turner says it would’ve been more difficult to not want to follow her mother into the fashion world. 

Her mother, Vinka Lucas, moved to NZ when she was just 15 and was determined to put her needlework and design skills to good use and fulfil her dream of bringing bold and bright Croatian fashion to NZs shores.

“I can only blame my mother for my love of fashion, shoes and accessories – they’re such joyful expressions,” Turner says.

“I was very much brought up with gorgeous fabrics and textures and just surrounded by pretty things.”

Turner says throughout her mother’s career, Lucas opened five evening and bridal wear stores in Auckland, another two in the Middle East – one in Jeddah and another in Kuwait, and co-founded the NZ Bride magazine with her husband and Turner’s father, David Lucas.

Turner was always encouraged by her parents to pursue her creativity – and it started at a young age.

“My mother and father were very naughty and they gave me my own sewing machine when I was just four years old,” she reflects.

“I used to make little dresses out of fabric scraps on it in my mother’s workroom while she was working on her latest gown.” 

Turner started working in her mother’s workroom full-time in her late teens, and the mother-daughter duo worked together side-by-side for over thirty years.

It wasn’t until Lucas had a major stroke in 2009 and was unable to continue to work that – for the first time – Turner experienced what it was like to manage Vinka Designs by herself and carry on designing the sought after bridal wear that brides-to-be travelled far and wide for.

She said it was “incredibly difficult” at first, especially as she had to cope with her mother’s ill health alongside running the business.

“She did over fifty years of service for the fashion industry,” Lucas says. “And then one day it was just over.”

After her stroke, Lucas was never able to pick up a needle again and had to go into full-time care. 

But Turner says every time she visited her mother she would bring along something she was working on so Lucas could touch the fabric and ask questions about it.

“She would just come alive,” Turner says. “I’d pull out a dress or some fabric samples for her to look at and all of a sudden she’d be wide awake – it was amazing to watch.”

Lucas was appointed a Member of the NZ Order of Merit, for services to the fashion industry and design in the 2019 New Year Honours list.

Although she passed away a year later at the age of 88, her memory still gets to live on through Turner who channels her mother’s creativity through all of her bridal designs.

Turner says that brides-to-be are drawn to Vinka Design for a multitude of reasons, from the boutique’s long history in Queen Street in Auckland to the feminine and classic designs that Vinka Designs is known far and wide as a leading expert in.

“The one thing that is consistent is the fit, the cut, the quality,” she says. 

“Everything we do comes down to helping brides have the dress of their dreams.”

Covid times

Turner says not being able to meet clients and brides-to-be in person during covid and lockdowns was “very challenging”.

“Last year, we were so busy with having to make dress fittings for people we couldn’t see and when Auckland was still in lockdown it was difficult to manage,” she says.

“Having to make someone’s dress without actually seeing the person or seeing them in the dress and doing it all via video and taking photos was really hard and frankly horrible.”

She said securing supplies ahead of time has never been more important than since the pandemic started and she gets most of her fabric from Australia.

“I've put a lot of money in stock just so I don't have supply issues because I can't afford to miss out and have to deal with that drama,” she says. 

“I just want everything to be flawless.”

At the end of the day, Turner says she doesn’t have any desire to grow Vinka Designs into a bridal empire. She just wants to continue carrying on her mother’s creative legacy on Auckland’s Queen Street, in the very same building where Lucas first opened her first boutique in 1959.

Turner can’t imagine herself doing anything else other than being where she’s happiest – in her workroom, surrounded by beautiful fabric, beautiful gowns and the memory of her mother.