Monday, July 4, 2011
Designer Helen Lefeaux helped shape Vancouver's fashion landscape
By MATTHEW ROBINSON, Vancouver Sun July 3, 2011
| In this file photo, design instructor Helen Lefeaux (left) talks to Kristin Shoemaker about the lace wedding dress she's wearing that Lefeaux made in the 1970s. Lefeaux died June 13, 2011. Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, PNG files |
In a Vancouver fashion career that spanned decades, Helen Lefeaux helped shape, style, and tailor some of the city’s best designers.
The foundational figure in the Vancouver fashion scene died June 13, 2011, but is remembered by many who benefited from her vision and dedication. Lefeaux is best known for founding The Helen Lefeaux School of Fashion Design and from her work on the cutting room floor of her Kerrisdale salon, Helen Lefeaux Couturier.
“Fashion was her hobby. It was her life,” recalled Lefeaux’s daughter Krystal Harris. “I think the city has changed a huge deal with some of her fashion.”
Lefeaux’s life in style began far from the West Coast of Canada. She was born Helena Rosulek, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on November 15, 1925. She showed an almost instant interest in fashion.Lefeaux apprenticed in Prague during the Second World War, were she learned dressmaking in the traditional European manner, as well as the importance of frugality in design, given wartime shortages of cloth.
Lefeaux left her home country for Tel Aviv in 1948, where she learned to work with fur. From Israel, she went on to London to work in couture for Molyneaux. She emigrated to Montreal in 1950 to work as a designer/pattern maker with Algo, and settled in Vancouver in 1952 where she worked with Jantzen.
Harris said her mother was well-known around town during the 1950s, spending time at clubs like the Cave, and once making a spaghetti dinner for Louis Armstrong.
In 1968, not long after the birth of her only child, Lefeaux opened Helen Lefeaux Coutouriere. Working alone and at times with one other, Lefeaux designed and created original and personalized dresses for well-to-do clients in Vancouver into the late 1980s.
But it was a brief teaching stint at Douglas College that alerted Lefeaux to her greatest talent — teaching.
“It was the students she connected with at the college that said ‘You should open up your own school,’” said Harris.
The idea materialized in 1981.
In its nearly three decades of operation, the Helen Lefeaux School of Fashion Design graduated a wealth of designers including Yumi Eto, Dorothy Grant and Mary Van Osch.
Former student and designer Julie Berg called Lefeaux a matriarch, a mentor and a friend.
“I hadn’t always done fashion,” said Berg, who first met Lefeaux at a hockey game in 1989.
Berg, then working as an engineer, had walked into a private box wearing an outfit she had designed herself.
“All of a sudden [Lefeaux] just grabs me and says ‘Who are you wearing? who is that by? what is that?,’” said Berg. In a later meeting, Lefeaux convinced Berg to change careers.
“I walked into the engineering company that next week and said ‘I’m going back to school.’”
Lefeaux taught at the School of Fashion Design until she was well into her late seventies.
In 1997, she was slowed ever-so-slightly by a heart attack.
“A lot of family members were trying to pressure her to give up the school in ‘97,” said Harris. “I was really glad she didn’t. Being with the students in that environment kept her really young for a long time.”
Lefeaux finally stopped teaching in the early 2000s and turned her school over to a student under whom it continued to operate until recently.
On June 13, 2011, Helen Lefeaux, weakened by pneumonia, died.
Harris said that even in dying her mother displayed the same drive that brought her so much success in life.
“If she decided ‘That’s it,’ then there was no humming and hawing,” said Harris, “she was just done and that was it.”
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