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Aliza Reger: Lingerie Queen

Aliza Reger is the daughter of Janet, the lingerie entrepreneur who changed the way women look and wear underwear. She told Tamara Corin her mother's story, and her dreams for the Reger brand.

February 9, 2017 17:07
Aliza Reger: heir to the lingerie empire
6 min read

My mother’s design career started very early in her life while she was still a child, designing and making clothes out of scraps for her younger sister’s dolls. She soon progressed to logo design, coming up with the emblem for the Sunday School Truants Club that had the limited attendance of her sisters and cousins.

She grew up in a large family in the East End of London but once Hitler’s bombs started raining down on them, the family moved to Reading. She was the oldest of four sisters. Her father, who had a textile business, bought up old parachute silk which was made into bras for Littlewoods and thereby inadvertently started her passion for beautiful and luxurious lingerie. My mother left school and went on to study Contour Fashion at Leicester Polytechnic, now De Montfort University, where her final collection was selected as the best of the year.

Various lingerie design positions in London followed with Marks and Spencer, Slix and Rosy of Paris but my mother was not happy in the gloomy and austere times of Post War London. It was time for a break. Her grandfather gave her a ticket to Israel where she soon learned Hebrew and met her future husband, my father Peter at the neighbouring Kibbutz.

It was love at first sight and after a whirlwind romance in the heat of the Middle East; it was soon time for both of them to return to Europe, her to England and him back to Munich. It soon turned into a difficult long distance love and they decided quickly to marry on New Year’s Day 1961. More life changing decisions and the young couple made their home in Zurich where my father worked as a bio chemist and my mother continued with the lingerie design work, this time as a freelance designer working with companies over Europe. I was born at the end of the year and followed into the business as soon as I was old enough (see exclusive interview in this week’s paper).