Trina Turk Loves Palm Springs
Trina Turk has weathered the ups and downs of retail and economic trends since launching by her namesake brand 25 years ago, including the rise and slow decline of fast fashion and the shift from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce. Through it all, she has stuck by brand and design sensibilities. She relies on quality fabrics, clean silhouettes, vivid color, and bold signature prints that reflect the late 1960s and 1970s — eras, she says, when the general public embraced color and pattern in fashion and home design. The Trina Turk home, swimwear, and apparel lines all exude classic California style and Palm Springs buoyancy. Sunny days and a poolside lifestyle form the literal backdrop of the brand: She often shoots new collections at her Mesa neighborhood home in Palm Springs. Turk credits the visuals in vintage Palm Springs Life magazines for inspiration, as well as her interest in and involvement with the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center.
“Engaging with the worlds of art, architecture, and design is part of any designer’s job, and necessary to create relevant fashion.”
– Trina Turk
PHOTOGRAPH BY DEWEY NICKS
The Hand-Drawn Work of Candice Held
Candice Held has an obsession for print design and surrounds herself with as many prints as possible. She finds them in vintage scarves, her own wallpaper designs, and, of course, her distinctive scarf dresses that are the star of her fashion collections. She traces the roots of her work to a few vintage scarves she purchased from a secondhand shop on the Haight in San Francisco in 2001. After tossing them on a chair at home, she was struck by how they worked together in a beautifully mismatched yet harmonious way. She began draping them on her dress form and — voila! — her scarf dress silhouette was born. Held’s affinity for vintage travel scarves inspired her Palm Springs square silk scarf — a landmark-laden homage to our desert that offers the perfect headwrap for that cruise in a convertible down Palm Canyon Drive.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH O. BAKER
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY CANDICE HELD
“The Palm Springs lifestyle celebrates optimism and a vintage aesthetic. My textile and wallpaper designs are inspired by my environment, so the themes and motifs are natural here.”
— Candice Held
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD HOVEL
debra hovel’s shoes, bags, masks, and missions
Creative, diversified, uber-talented, and happily overscheduled describe Debra Hovel. Before the pandemic shutdown, she was more focused on teaching sandal- and mule-making classes than on crafting the bespoke shoes and bags behind her brand. Her passion for upcycling and sustainability drove a workshop roster that has ranged from “feral dressmaking,” indigo dyeing, and shibori to fermentation classes and others related to home and health. When COVID-19 hit, Hovel turned Makerville — the artist collective she co-founded in Mountain Center — into her studio for sewing 750 masks and hundreds of gowns for healthcare workers. Another result of the times has been a new line of non-matching shoes that deliberately contrast color, pattern, and texture. Any right shoe in the line can be worn with any left, a disruptive thought in shoe fashion that she considers an artist statement. She’s also working with the Palm Springs Architectural Alliance, College of the Desert, and Cal Poly Pomona to develop an architecture degree program at COD and coordinating the virtual ND2KNW conference focused on transformative ideas for living.
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD HOVEL
PHOTOGRAPH BY LANCE GERBER
“These projects make me feel energized, creative, and happy. I will run out of time before I run out of ideas.”
— Debra Hovel
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