Wednesday 25 August 2010

"VIDEO: Meet Grazia's Vintage Obsession, Lalka!"

Check out this link to see our interview at Vintage at Goodwood Festival, now on the Grazia website!

http://www.graziadaily.co.uk/fashion/archive/2010/08/25/video--meet-grazias-vintage-find--lalka.htm


Friday 20 August 2010

LALKA greets Goodwood Vintage




After weeks of preparation, bunting making, sign painting, pricing, washing and ironing we finally set up shop on Penny Lane at the fabulous first year of Goodwood Vintage festival.






Some of our happy customers...








And one lady who was wearing her Mothers dress found something similar in Babcia's collection..



Babcia's dream of a shop came to feel very real while we were at Goodwood Vintage festival. We were warmly received by everyone we met, and enjoyed sharing the story of Babcia with our customers.
The experience has pushed us to consider continuing Lalka and developing what we have learnt from Babcia's house, creating our own designs and gradually our own collection to be distributed and shared with the world.


LALKA



LALKA was born when Regina died. She always dreamed of having her own shop, to sell the clothes she collected and ones she had made herself. She even took a selection of some of her best pieces to her house in Poland with the vision of opening her first shop there.
Months after her death as we tried to sort through the treasures she left behind, we decided that we could open a shop for her and carry on her ideas of collecting and selling beautiful artefacts and recycling style from the past. This was the begining of LALKA and we decided to launch it at Goodwood Vintage, the place where her collection would be appreciated most.

What followed was a careful clear-out, as we attempted to gather the items that were still sellable and undamaged, choosing things to take with us back to London to clean and repair.
The discoveries we made, led us to learn the habits of Babcia, and her eccentricities made us miss her even more. Who else would stuff a pillow with hair she had collected from her brush, why was there a perfectly preserved cheese cake hidden under her bed?

With around 5% of the house's contents split between two cars and thousands of photographs taken, we made our way home and began to prepare for the shop.










Wednesday 18 August 2010

Welcome to Babcia's House

To begin with i would like to explain that Babcia means Grandmother in Polish, and this what we called Regina when she was alive.

Babcia's house is perhaps one of the most beautiful and haunting places you could ever set eyes on. After Babcia lost everything during the war, she proceeded as many who experienced the same did, in hoarding excessively. She kept everything from plastic bags to motorbikes, hidden within the walls of her derelict palace. The house which survived fire and ruin is almost kept standing by the piles of clothes that she collected throughout her life time. For us, only great explorers and archeologists could understand the excitement we found as we made each knew discovery as we grew up, foraging through the towers of curiosities she had collected.






They will be worn again.




On Sunday the 31st of January 2010 a woman called Regina Chmurska died. On the Saturday she had been shopping at her favorite church bazar, looking for bargains. She slipped on the ice, and that day would be her last shopping trip, the last in her whole life. Regina was our Grandmother, a Polish dress maker and a woman with enviable style that carried her through the second world war and a life time of hardships. The story of her life which we will reveal throughout this blog, was a fascinating story of adventure, fueled by a burning energy to exist and indeed to dress beautifully, whatever happened.

Her house, for my sister and I, a shrine of inspiration, remains to this day and through Lalka we will share her legacy with the world.