Brendan Taylor and Kym Arnold recently sat down with long time client of Lincolns, Ricarda Loecker. If you are local to Albany, that name may sound familiar to you due to her flagship fashion and homewares store on York Street. While we normally focus on the business in these articles, as we started to talk to Ricarda and her life story unfolded, we realised there was so much more to her story than her current business. For this reason we decided to do this as a two part series and we can’t wait to hear what you think of her story.

Part 1

Ricarda was born and raised in Düsseldorf, Germany. Being born not long after the end of World War II, Ricarda’s childhood was affected by the aftermath in a number of ways. Her father was a prisoner of war in Russia and only made it back to Germany in 1948 despite the war ending in 1945. Out of the over 3 million prisoners Russia took, only 9,000 made it home. Once Ricarda’s father was home, he and Ricarda’s mother found an apartment in Düsseldorf, and he got to work in a pharmaceutical company. Germany was in a strong rebuilding economy phase to try and get back on its feet. This meant that her father worked long, hard hours.

Her mother was someone Ricarda described as both spontaneous and practical but also very outspoken. Ricarda was the second of four children. The first died during the war, the third died aged three after the war. Due to her father working long hours Ricarda spent a lot of her time growing up with her youngest sister, Dorothee, and her mother who taught her how to sew, knit and built within her a love of textiles, colour and textures. She also got from her mother the understanding of quality. Her mother was very frugal with their money but if she found a piece of clothing or shoes she wanted of high quality she saved and spent the money on those quality pieces. She taught Ricarda about colour, texture, creativeness, perfection and that eye for quality and detail.

All of this flowed through into Ricarda’s schooling and work life after school. In school Ricarda excelled in art, sewing and music but was not a fan of math and describes herself as someone who is not that type of logical thinker. By the age of 13 Ricarda knew that fashion design was what she wanted to do as a career. At the age of 15 she left school and started an apprenticeship with a high-end tailor where she learned a lot about precision sewing, textiles and different materials. The tailor she worked for serviced the rich and famous and she and the other apprentices would squabble over who got to assist with bringing in their clients’ bags, as you received great tips for doing this.

Once she had finished her apprenticeship she applied and got into fashion school This is where Ricarda really found herself. She was quite the rebel who questioned her parents’ way of thinking, smoked and joined demonstrations against the underlying right wing groups still within Germany. This is also where she found her love of Paris, romantic music such as Charles Aznavour and the American pop art movement These things all really set her fashion design style. She was not your typical designer and rather than following trends she was a creator of new trends. Her style was high fashion, androgynous and influenced by Italian and Parisian fashion.

After fashion school had finished she applied for art school in Munich but her father refused to pay for the move. He said, “I’m not supporting artists, here is a sewing machine, go and make some money”. Not only was this exactly what Ricarda did but this also set her on a path of an incredible 15 year career in fashion design and manufacturing.

Initially Ricarda was working alone from a farmhouse outside of Munich and would create pieces from calico, the only material she could afford at the time, and then sell them direct to boutiques. As demand grew, she expanded. Ricarda ended up getting a warehouse and within a few years had over 70 employees (mostly farmers wives) working with her. It was during this time in Munich that Ricarda met her partner and they started their family.

So after 15 years in business and still going strong with her designing and manufacturing – why did Ricarda suddenly decide that she wanted to leave it all behind and start somewhere new and fresh?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Ricarda’s incredible story next month.