It took a stint working in Paris at Yves Saint Laurent for Ephemera founder and designer Nicole Banning to realise that, as the saying goes, you really don’t know what you got til it’s gone. While working for such a prestigious fashion house steeped in history was undoubtedly a career highlight, it also cemented that the things she longed for - home, family, love - were the only things that really mattered in life. Here, she tells The Grace Tales in her own words how the course of her career in Paris lead her to everything she ever wanted back home in Sydney - son Lucien, partner Anders and a burgeoning fashion label that is making waves all on its own terms…
Photography: Grace Alyssa Kyo
“I’ve been told that the Chinese believe that a child is conceived when the energy, the ‘chi’, of the two parents come together for the first time. Looking back, I do think my son Lucien was energetically conceived that night my fiancé Anders and I found ourselves strangely and serendipitously brought back together one night in our late 20’s. Having first met when I was on exchange in Sweden at the ripe old age of 21, I found myself in a restaurant down at Bondi, recounting the story of my most treasured memory of Sweden; an end of summer Swedish crayfish party at a wonderful little lakeside cottage near Drottningholm, just outside of Stockholm. It quickly transpired that the party was in fact hosted by the man I was talking to, Anders, and I had been invited to his crayfish party roughly seven years prior, during an exchange year in Europe. It might be a cliché, but the funny thing is, sometimes everything we are looking for really is right under our nose. It’s sometimes it is a truth I’d prefer to ignore, particularly when the adventurer in me is busting to go off and explore uncharted territory. For me, becoming a mother was a slow journey of peeling back the layers of my onion skin to uncover what I really wanted and who I invariably was, rather than who I wanted to be. I do remember that first groggy realisation that perhaps everything I was chasing wasn’t going to quite work for me. At 28, in the staff lift of one of the most iconic fashion houses in Paris, Yves Saint Laurent, there I found myself chatting to my colleague Valentine. With bleary eyes, she recounted how she had been up all night with her teething toddler. Her voice faltered as she told me she had no idea how she was going to say alert, let alone ‘on game’, for her fitting with the Creative Director that day. I was at the epicentre of everything I had ever dreamed of: living in Paris and working as a designer amongst all the creative magic I used to watch from afar and long to be a part of. It was thrilling to walk through the atelier, to talk to the pattern-makers and watch the shapes they would create, to be constantly surrounded by so much joy and beauty. I had the great fortune of frequently travelling to the most remarkable French and Italian factories on a regular basis, working with people who generously shared their incredible knowledge and history. Being a part of the défilés (shows) at venues like the Grand Palais or Hotel Salomon de Rothschild are dazzling memories that I will forever treasure. But the hard truth was that I also had to put on an armour each day and go to battle. I had left my friends, family, a home town that I loved and missed terribly. I had in the process also pushed away a man who later turned out to be the love of my life. I started to watch the team at work as they worked long days and weekends. Slowly, I realised that this trajectory was not going to allow me to be the woman or the mother I wanted to be and this was the time that I started to dream up the idea of my own swimwear and resortwear brand, EPHEMERA, which I later started in Paris. I wanted to be the master of my own destiny, both creatively and in life. I wanted the power to set my own pace and to be present in my future children’s lives. Once that desire for a child was seeded, everything slowly reshuffled back into place so that Lucien could come into this world. The process of ‘conceiving’ Lucien, was an intense journey of self-discovery. At times it was a hot mess. I had the very hard and scary realisation that, in the process of stretching out to reach my dream of working in Paris, I had set up a life for myself that was not at all what I wanted. How could I have been so disconnected from myself? There were tears, broken hearts and a lot of therapy along the way, as I fumbled my way back to my home, back to Anders and back to where my heart longed to be. Along the way, I picked up mementoes to bring home with me, including Lucien’s name, which fittingly means ‘the man of light’. Now I sometimes laugh when I think of Lucien, who perhaps was conceived about 8 years before he was actually born, rolling his eyes as he patiently waited and watched me fumble my way back home so that I could finally meet my magical little boy.”
COMMENTS
Comments