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Born in Hong Kong,
Dorothy Szeto
learned the intricacies of sewing from her
grandmother. At 9, she began designing
clothes not only for her own dolls but her
friends’ as well, and by the age of 10, she
had enrolled in a special tailoring school
before her family moved to the US in 1977.
She has since lived in New York and
California, where she studied at the Los
Angeles Fashion Institute of Design. With a
prodigious and passionate love for fabrics,
textiles and textures, Szeto traveled to
such disparate countries as Korea, Pakistan,
India and England to study traditional
dyeing, weaving and printing techniques and
has spent extensive time in the Far East
learning the business of manufacturing and
the art of local craft-making. She has
designed for a number of successful
companies in California such as IVY and 62
East; as well as for EMME’s New York
Contemporary Collection and various projects
for TSE.
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Szeto,
a seasoned fashion designer some 18 years
had seen the world change of how women dress
and their needs for everyday lifestyle wear,
(with women’s choices being either sport
utility, branded sport utility or unusable
fashion compromises). She had been
undergoing her own research and working on
developing her own sketches for a woman's
lifestyle wardrobe.
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Clare Cook,
born in London, has used her
love for extraordinary fashion, global
travel and ingenious marketing to infuse her
successful new company with the kind of
sophisticated femininity that has
underscored every aspect of her ambitious
and adventurous life. Cook’s identification
with the TAO woman is all-consuming; in
fact, she is the inspiration for the
sophisticated, fit, and always feminine
woman tao designs for.
She enjoyed
competitive sports and ballet, exhibiting
the contrasting interests that would later
re-emerge in tao’s ‘Ying and Yang’
fashion philosophy.
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At the age of
21, she set out on an around the world
journey culminating in a four day stopover
in Hong Kong which catapulted her into a
12-year marketing career where she traveled
and worked in 15 countries. She
initially worked as a sports marketer for
Asian Golfer Magazine before moving on to
develop innovative marketing strategies at
IMG for a variety of major upscale
corporations throughout the Asia Pacific;
with an impressive client roster including
Rolex, Jaguar and Omega. While working in
Asia, Cook absorbed its culture, diverse and
dramatic beauty, from elegant city style to
traditional village arts and crafts –
knowledge that would serve her well in the
years ahead.
In
2002, Cook moved to New York to pursue her
interests in Eastern philosophies.
Clare Cook,
being a yoga and spa lifestyle enthusiast combined
with a career in global sports marketing and
communication, initially decided to open a yoga
center when moving to New York in 2002. Whilst
shopping Clare could not find anything in the market
that stood out from the typical branded sports
apparel that her busy lifestyle needed.
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In 2002, Dorothy and Clare met - and
tao
freedom of the body was born through their
collective belief that fashion should celebrate
– like Ying and Yang – the beauty of contrasting
aesthetic concepts.
Their synergistic
compatibility was immediately evident; both
thought truly sophisticated, feminine and
liberating fashion was unavailable to most
women, so they joined forces and began to plan
the fashion company now known as tao freedom
of the body.
Tao
is a fashion company presenting
a new lifestyle collection
that is dramatic, modern, very focused… and
predominantly knit. They've taken the activewear
function and combined it with romantic wear design
to give it a chic, stylish image.
Freedom knits /
intricate and transformative knitwear drapes and
flows effortlessly, creating strength as they work
with natural contours to wrap the body in casual
elegance. Vertical seam lines flatter the
body, enhanced by meticulously thought-out
asymmetrical details. Gone is the wall
between strength and romance, tao styling celebrates
both.