Growing up in West Auckland, Dame Trelise Cooper has special memories of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.
“It was my mother’s treat,” recalls Dame Trelise, 64. “She would bring it home from the supermarket and I would read it. I loved it. It’s how we got to know ourselves as women in New Zealand. The Weekly told our stories.”
With the nation’s suffragette history as a backdrop, the iconic fashion designer believes Kiwi women are trailblazers and like so many women before her, she had to be courageous to get where she is today.
“Back in the early ’80s, when I started, even though I owned my own home, I had to get my partner to come with me to the bank because they said no to me at first,” she recalls. “Because I was a female going into business. When my partner, who is now my husband, turned up, it was all okay.”
A lot has changed for women since then – and a lot has changed for Dame Trelise, who is now a household name in Aotearoa and is also admired internationally. Celebrities including Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Stevie Nicks are all enthusiastic customers.
The one mantra the mum-of-one has called on through her life is: Everything happens for my highest good.
She explains, “I’ve been using it since the early ’80s and it’s a kind of de-stressor. When things don’t go to plan and it feels like doors are closing, you can let go and think, ‘Okay, there’s nothing we can do about this.’ With this attitude, you open yourself up to new doors opening.”
If Dame Trelise could travel back in time, the first piece of advice she would dispense to her teenage self would be, “That 16 is too young to get engaged,” she says with a smile. “I got engaged on my 16th birthday.”
She went on to marry at 17 and was divorced by 21.
Seven years later, the self-taught designer opened her first boutique.
She says one of the biggest challenges facing New Zealand women today is “believing in themselves and knowing they are enough already”.
She elaborates, “My hopes for New Zealand women is that they recognise that they can claim the power within and call on their feminine strength.”
And while Dame Trelise channelled her own inner strength to achieve her dreams, she says it has taken her decades to “acknowledge that, actually, it was through my imagination and through my attitudinal thinking that I have created something from nothing.
“I left school at 15. I didn’t come from the right side of the tracks. I started in the kitchen with a pattern maker. I had no idea. I do believe what you think about is what you bring about.”
