When National College of Art and Design fashion student Molly Walters went on an Erasmus placement in Milan before graduation, she became friends with a group of Portuguese students, one of whom was to have a formative effect on her career and future relationship with the Portuguese textile industry.
Matilde Guimaraes, knowing Walters’ interest in textiles, organised an internship for her with Polopique, a family textile business developed by her father Luis Guimaraes in Vizela in the Braga area of northern Portugal.
Polopique is one of the largest textile groups in Portugal with a thousand employees and one of the few remaining vertical textile and clothing groups in Europe. With an annual turnover of €110 million, it has a daily production capacity of more than 100,000 pieces and exports 100 per cent of what it produces, with its main customer being Inditex, the owner of Zara and associated brands.
Walters gained valuable experience there and after graduation went on to win the €3,500 River Island bursary and a three-month paid internship in London for her capsule collection called Waste Not, Want Not inspired by her late grandmother’s philosophy of taking care of her possessions and garments.
In the meantime, Guimaraes, who is passionate about sustainability and, like all her family, interested in fabrics, wanted to start her own brand and was adamant that the collection be made from durable natural or cellulose, fossil-free biodegradable fibres.
She called it Taippe (pronounced type) and asked Walters to become its fashion designer. “I agreed and it was an active choice having had experience of fast fashion”, Walters says.
As a subsidiary of Polopique, Taippe is a capsule unisex wardrobe transcending seasons and trends, embracing a fully vertical production process. “All the Guimaraes stay in the business inspired by their predecessors, but the new generation want to do their own thing” Walters explains.
She has now settled in Lisbon in a ground floor flat in the centre of the city and commutes to the factory in Vizela every second week for two days where the collection is developed and manufactured.
“We focus on crafting timeless, versatile garments, high-quality pieces that can be worn and reworn for years. The first collection was trial and error, but you make your mistakes in the first one. We sell directly to consumers from the website,” she says.
She loves Lisbon having lived abroad for over a year. “I work mainly from home because I am a victim of the Covid generation who had to learn to work from home and it works for me.
“I lived in Porto [during the internship] which is only an hour from Vizela and got to know the city well, but wanted to explore the capital,” she says of her move to Lisbon. “I like change. I like new environments, and I am learning Portuguese.”
Although still relatively new to the city, she finds the locals “incredibly friendly, everybody is willing to chat so it’s similar to the Irish. People want to help you and look after you”, she says. “I find it a youthful city; people want to be out and about all the time and there is always something happening.
“In Stockholm where I lived for eight months and worked remotely, people really hibernate and everyone wants to have a nice place at home that they don’t want to leave. So, it’s different here where people value being out and it is so easy to meet and make connections”, she says.
“There are so many exhibitions and every single restaurant, pub and bar is flooded with people. The shops have pop-ups where people can have a beer, so it’s a very social place”.
From Dublin, though her parents have now moved to Wexford, Walters was surrounded by an artistic family and has inherited the attitude of her grandmother Hilda and her mother Jenny to clothing, and of looking after rather than discarding garments. She has found the perfect expression of these ideals working for Taippe.
“Our aim is to combat fast fashion and unconscious consumerism and grow organically with a commitment to inclusivity across all genders and ages” is the mission statement. They organised a pop-up event in Lisbon and next January will show at Paris Fashion Week at an incubation project called Impossible Objects.
Taippe is also in the forefront when it comes to complying with robust new EU rules regarding garment traceability rolling out in coming years.
“Every item we produce will have a digital passport and the QR code on the garment will give details of fibre composition, country of origin of materials, where the item was made and ownership,” she says.
The factory environment in Vizela impresses too. “It is ethical, very social and workers are paid well. In the booming Portuguese textile industry everyone knows everyone else, so there are always connections.
“The only downside is that it can be difficult to communicate because of my lack of fluency in the language, but Matilde has been my translator. We work with an engineer called Armando and we bring him fabrics that we like so he can reproduce them in a more sustainable way. Matilde is really into pattern and graphics while my focus is on detail and design so we complement each other.”
