Heels.
Paula Taylor always wears them. High ones. And with them, she's a respectable 5 feet 6 inches tall. She's so known for her towering footwear, in fact, that the first thing her students do when she walks into class is look down.
"We always look at her shoes!" exclaims Zony Hernandez, 22, an aspiring fashion designer and a student of Taylor's at The Art Institute of Tucson. "She has the sexiest shoes."
She's got quite the pair on today - spike-heeled, pointy-toed Dolce & Gabbana boots with a denim shaft that date to the days of her high-end boutique, Pour Moi. A glimmer of gold on the inside heel flashes with each step around La Encantada.
It's hot and sticky the day before Fashion's Night Out, an event expected to draw thousands of people to the shopping center. Taylor, who's wearing a summery, beige and blue chiffon dress with an asymmetrical hem, is visiting stores that are loaning outfits for models to wear. A tan Dior clutch is tucked under her arm. She's carrying a standard, office-supply clipboard - "Paula the Queen" is written in black Sharpie across the metal.
People are also reading…
As she blazes through her to-do list, she realizes there's no Plan B in case of rain.
"It's all about the contingency plan," she says, and smiles at the irony because this is something she hammers on in her recently released textbook about producing fashion shows.
Sure enough, the day of FNO, it pours. Throughout the morning, into the afternoon. But when the event starts at 6 p.m., the exhibits and booths are all safely tucked under covered walkways. Rainproofed.
Contingency plan. Ya gotta have one.
• • •
Paula Taylor is not a woman who dashes into the grocery store wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She's typically in skyscraper shoes, of course, and something flowy with a mod '60s sensibility - on the longer side.
"I'm a good Lebanese girl," Taylor, 43, says with a laugh. She doesn't like to go miniskirt short because she hates constantly tugging at a creeping hemline.
The five closets of the Foothills home she shares with her husband of nearly 12 years, musician Clif Taylor, and their Australian shepherd Sadie are "all full of Paula stuff" - an Yves Saint Laurent crushed velvet, wide-legged pants suit in a practically edible chocolate shade; a gorgeous green Pierre Cardin maxi; a vintage Mister Freedom red silk, sailor-collar shirt and matching shorts, custom-made for someone way smaller than sample size. It kills Taylor that the shorts are a smidge too little for her.
"I know every piece of clothing I have," says Taylor, who runs Paula Taylor Productions, an international events management and fashion production agency.
Working out of her house - which currently has a rolling clothes rack parked in the living room and a wall clock stopped dead at 1:25 (it's 9 a.m.) - Taylor has carved out a niche, producing runway shows and fashion exhibits. She also puts together pop-up vintage clothing shops, works as a stylist and teaches at the Art Institute of Tucson in its fashion design and marketing programs.
She's a newly minted author: Her textbook, "How to Produce a Fashion Show from A to Z" (Prentice Hall, $66.67) was published this summer, the first of what she hopes will become a series. In her spare time, Taylor's even been working on a novel, which she describes as a story about grown-up love.
Taylor's a big name on the Tucson fashion scene. The city boasts a growing community of independent designers, and Taylor is often credited for making the flip-flop-wearing Old Pueblo more fashion-conscious.
"She has a huge heart for growth in this city and for local designers," says Elizabeth Albert, 33, a local designer who launched Tucson Fashion Week two years ago.
And that's another project Taylor's taken on - producing the 2013 local fashion week, which she envisions as bigger and interactive, pulling in chefs and artists to go along with the clothing.
"She brings knowledge and business sense and professionalism," says Albert, who made one of her first sales of a gold-printed, redesigned T-shirt to Taylor. "I feel like we're all kind of playing at fashion. Paula is fashion. She knows what it's like out there."
• • •
Both of Taylor's grandmothers owned boutiques. It's no surprise she developed a thing for fashion.
"I always loved clothes," says Taylor, who makes a point of buying at least one piece from every Target designer collaboration. "The beautiful thing about clothing, it can help us be our best self, make us feel stronger, more confident. That doesn't need to cost you $4,000."
After moving here from Michigan at age 12, she honed her style at St. Cyril of Alexandria School and then Sabino High School. Preppy and proud of it, she rocked plaid shorts. She popped the collars on her shirts and wore penny loafers, naturally, with the copper coins tucked inside.
After studying history and humanities at the University of Arizona, Taylor struck out for Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., for an experimental program that packed grad students onto a school bus and had them camping and essentially living on the road, learning about the environment.
Cue the sound of a record needle scratching to a halt on a turntable.
"People who know me now cannot believe it," Taylor says of her granola past. No heels were allowed, but she managed to exercise her fashion sense by wearing a lot of purple. "It was wonderful. I met (folk singer) Pete Seeger, lived with Mennonites. And on the road, I would be sketching and thinking about fashion."
On her way to a master's degree in environmental sciences, Taylor was diagnosed with lupus. The autoimmune disease flared in the damp weather, so after graduation, she came back to Tucson to heal.
While working at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, she still couldn't escape fashion. On a daily basis, she grappled with her outfits.
"What do I wear doing these tours? It's hot," Taylor recalls thinking.
With the help of local seamstress Pegii Golden, who'd had a lengthy career as a designer, Taylor began making her own clothes, mostly dresses. She'd wear them, and women would ask to buy them. So, in 1996, she launched her own clothing line, Ultravivid, in a boutique of the same name downtown. She even put on a fashion show, featuring 20 designs, emceed by Angela Bowie, David's ex. (As you might expect from their respective professions, Taylor and her husband have a fair amount of famous friends.) The show even featured a woman walking around with sushi stuck to her body. Ultravivid was edgy and light years ahead of its time.
So, of course, it flopped.
"Nobody came downtown," Taylor says. "I'm not great at failure. I'm an overachiever, so I was somewhat crippled."
She found solace - and had some fun - in a side project, singing and playing bass for not one but two bands. First came BLT, which Taylor describes as a sugary pop band. Next was 520, a hip-hop parody band that riffed on BLT songs.
"We were all about our outfits and how we looked," she laughs. "It was a funny, schticky thing."
In the meantime, Taylor realized what Tucson was lacking: the big guns. High-end, high-fashion labels. So she set out to bring the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Just Cavalli to town. People predicted her boutique Pour Moi - which regularly featured runway shows for its clients - would bomb. Quite the contrary, women responded to the store at East River Road and North Campbell Avenue, which featured highly personalized service. But in 2008, after an eight-year run, Taylor realized she'd done everything she set out to do and was ready for a new challenge.
Now, Taylor - who admits she ties on a pair of New Balance running shoes for her daily three-mile walk with Sadie - is concentrating on growing her business, with an eye toward turning it into a major production house while generating more fashion work here.
It won't be easy, but Taylor loves her latest venture. "God, I'm lucky that I have been given the opportunity to live a creative life."
And to have such fabulous shoes.
"The beautiful thing about clothing, it can help us be our best self, make us feel stronger, more confident."
Paula Taylor
Contact Kristen Cook at kcook@azstarnet.com or 573-4194.
