Across 2016, and two hemisphere’s summers, Alexandra Spencer and Teale Talbot’s brand Réalisation dominated social feeds. The Australian’s simple designs, perfected through countless try-ons with friends and promoted by their impressive social circle of influencers, drew immediate attention. With a focus on pieces not collections they delivered a tight offering of dresses and shirts that could be worn, washed, thrown into bags, pulled out and worn again. It didn’t hurt that Bella Hadid, Jeanne Damas, Phoebe Tonkin, Bambi Northwood Blyth and Alexa Chung were soon slipping on their silky creations.
At the close of a very big year, we called up Alexandra — who also happens to be the editor of 4th and Bleeker — to see how it’s all feeling. She also shared some snaps her brother, photographer Byron Spencer, took of her and the collection during a recent trip to Japan.
When you start something like this, is it because you feel something’s missing in the fashion landscape?
There were definitely things we thought were missing, that we wanted to wear when we went away, that you didn’t really have to think about and could just throw in your bag. Everything is 100 percent silk so you can throw it in and pull it back out and it’ll be fine. We also wanted to make pieces not collections. Everybody is so global these days, the world is so much smaller with the internet that having seasonal collections didn’t make sense to me or Teale.
Finally we didn’t want to make anything over $250 US dollars. My theory behind 4th and Bleeker is that it’s not really about what you wear it’s how you wear it. So I wanted to be like, you can wear this with a Chanel bag if you have one but you can also wear it with a basket and sneakers.
Does that financial cap ever complicate things from a design perspective?
You just design within your goal. Everything we make is really special anyway because all our prints are done by one of my best friends. It’s just three girls in my house, we drink wine and paint the prints. And if something is more expensive then we just don’t take a margin, we make it because we want to make it, because we think it’s good. Everything is a love project.
The brand does feel very rooted in your personal relationships, how do your friends inform Réalisation?
It’s a collaboration because we made it for them. Someone will say, “Oh, I want to wear something like this.” Every dress goes through our girlfriends, they all try it on and we ask what they think. It’s not rocket science, if someone puts a dress on and they feel good then they look great because they’re happy and comfortable.
Is it weird seeing strangers wearing your designs?
Every time I see someone wearing it I get so happy that I yell at them like, “great dress!” Then I hide. So many people come up to me and are like, “Hey, I love this dress!” Then I end up having really long conversations with them. We’re all just so happy they love it because it’s so much fun to do. We just kind of love it. I know that sounds lame, maybe I’m making that up, but I think they like it because they can tell that we love making it for them.
Things have moved pretty quickly, what do you have your eyes on next?
We’ve been open for one year so we are pretty much just trying to stay on top of all of the growth that we’ve had so far. I think it’s the same as any business. Our focus right now is making everything perfect and fixing all the little things all businesses have that need to be fixed. We get emails saying, “I own all of the things, what’s next?” so we kind of have to make things for the people that have everything already. There’s a lot of things I want to work on but it’s about hours in the day. There are really so many places you can go from silk dresses.
It’s funny how people forget that yes fashion is creative, but it comes with all the grunt work of any small business.
Exactly. Teale and I had worked together for years before we started this and we have this way of understanding what the other one means. She’s good at articulating things I can’t, even though they’re in my head. Anything I can’t do she can do and anything she can’t do I can do. That makes the world of difference because one person always knows what the fuck’s going on. If we didn’t have that I think it would be really scary.
Credits
Text Wendy Syfret
Photography Byron Spencer