eleanorj-calder:
Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: Eleanor Calder is Louis Tomlinson’s ex-girlfriend.
We have to say it now, because despite the fact that Eleanor is so much more than the relationship that first vaulted her into gossipy headlines — a graduate of political and social sciences, an entrepreneur, and an all-around very sweet girl, if our interview is any indication — it’s her famous ex that dominates the conversation about her.
But that won’t be the case for much longer, if Eleanor has her way. It isn’t her past attachment to One Direction that’s getting her into fashion shows and major events like SxSW today; it’s her personal style blog, called “The Trend Pear.” Eleanor runs it alongside partner and best friend Max Hurd — who, as far as we know, hasn’t dated a single member of One Direction.
The pair met while at university in Manchester through a chance get-together with mutual friends in London while on a school break four years ago, and have been inseparable ever since. Even before starting a blog, they would crop up in each other’s Instagrams wearing matching outfits — at the time, a total accident, but it would become the beginning of their blog.
“We used to entertain the idea [of a blog] while we were still at university together,” Eleanor tells Teen Vogue. “We’d often turn up to lectures together in very similar outfits, or our outfits would compliment each other.”
“It almost got embarrassing at some point, to turn up in matching outfits completely by mistake,” Max adds with a laugh. “It looked very, very planned.”
Of course, Eleanor already had a huge social following, and soon Max had one too. Her style had long been inspiring a crop of Tumblr accounts dedicated to finding the clothes she would wear, and so last summer the pair turned their personal passion into the blog. It was an interesting choice, but one that made them stand out instantly in a sea of personal style blogs: A male and female take on a trend. And it all came about because Eleanor felt shy being on her own in front of the camera.
“We started taking pictures together because I wasn’t that comfortable being in front of the camera on my own — I always wanted Max in it as well,” Eleanor says. “As we started doing pictures together, we just saw it looked a lot better, and then we thought the concept would be interesting if we did the male and female perspective on current trends and how we both wear similar clothes differently.”
Now The Trend Pear is taking Max and Eleanor everywhere from New York Fashion Week to the Elle Style Awards — and they’re just getting started. Read on to hear about how they put their style posts together, where they shop, and what they have in the works for the future.
Teen Vogue: You guys both already had a huge social media following, and people were super interested in your style. How much did that influence starting a blog?
Max Hurd: Our blog came about really naturally. We decided to pick up on what people responded best to on our social media accounts, and a lot of comments and likes were based around either our friendship or the clothes we were wearing and people asking where items of clothing were from, so we started tagging brands. From that, we just decided to morph that into a blog and it came about very naturally.
TV: It’s interesting that you chose to have a male and female perspective. How did you guys come up with that?
Eleanor Calder: We did realize quite early on that it was a niche concept for a blog. Obviously blogging is quite huge now and there are a million females that run fashion blogs and not so many men, but I think it’s getting bigger.
MH: Men’s fashion is growing so, so fast. There’s way more of a receptive audience to male fashion blogging than there was two or three years ago and it’s quite nice that when we get ready, we help each other. It’s quite nice to have a male and female view on the outfit. We try not to be too matchy-matchy, because I think it looks a bit contrived if we’re both wearing identical outfits. But it’s nice, our styles do compliment each other very naturally and so it’s a very organic blog.
TV: You met at university but this isn’t what you were studying. Is this something that you want to do full-time, or do you still do other jobs during the day?
EC: Our degrees at university were both not fashion related. Mine was in politics and social science and Max was doing languages. Then, Max went to Brazil.
MH: Yeah, I’d always liked doing my school holidays in fashion. I’ve done everything from marketing to PR. I’ve also studied fashion in various different courses.
EC: We both did some retail, and Max also did a 10-week course at Conde Nast School of Fashion; it covered a range of things from designing to fashion journalism. Then it was after we finished university that we both wanted to focus on that area.
MH: And the blog is a full-time job, it takes a lot of our time. It’s so nice that we can do it together.
TV: How do you guys come up with your post ideas?
MH: From all over, really. I mean, we spend a lot of time really searching and we’re both really, really interested in fashion, so the ideas come about out of discussions about recent things we’ve been inspired by. So, either people we see on the street, or people we’ve seen online. We’ll spend a lot of time kind of researching online for editorial shoots and things like that.
EC: And where we live — both of us living in areas that have a lot of vintage shops and a lot of higher end shops and stuff. So we spend a lot of time either window shopping or actually shopping. We do spend quite a bit of time out and about buying stuff, so because we’re always doing that together, we often find outfits while we’re out that we want to buy for shooting.
TV: Who does the actual writing and photography?
MH: My sister does our photographs. She’s a budding professional photographer so she kindly takes all of our pictures for us.
EC: And we sit down together on a weekly basis and do a lot of the articles.
MH: We come up with a theme together, and then Eleanor and I have different roles in creating it. We’re an absolute dream team because I ramble and ramble and ramble, and I have absolutely no stop button. So I write and write and write and Eleanor will sit there and be like, “No, too much!”
TV:How do you guys choose the brands and clothes that are on the blog?
EC: Recently we’ve been trying very much to support London-based brands. So we spent a lot of time in Soho and places where there’s a lot of stand-alone shops that often change from month to month — up-and-coming designers or recent graduates. We try to find niche brands that are based in London, because a lot of our following is from other countries, so we do like to do that. But we do also incorporate popular brands.
MH: We try to mix up, because we know that it gets quite boring if bloggers end up wearing kind of the same kind of brands over and over again. We have stuff from kind of all over, from lower-end brands to higher-end brands.
EC: We want it to be accessible in a way that it’s not unaffordable all the time. If we constantly just did vintage one off pieces, what would that mean for our readers and our following who can’t actually buy it if they wanted to? Which is also what inspired our Looks For Less section, so when we do find brands that either only had a one-off piece, or if they’re not available in America or somewhere else in Europe, then we try and make it so that they can get the same look, and not for much money.
TV: What kind of feedback are you getting on social media?
MH: Very, very positive. We were absolutely terrified when we started to launch. We spent about two weeks holed up in my house, absolutely perfecting it and making sure we were one hundred percent happy with how it looked before we launched.
EC: We were quite nervous about the response it was gonna get — I think that’s quite natural when you put something out there to an audience.
MH: We literally switched buttons to activate the site, and then shut our laptops, left our phones at home, and went out and had dinner and drinks, and didn’t come home for a couple hours. We didn’t want to be checking, and we were absolutely terrified. When we came home we were like, “What if no one has looked at it?” “What if everyone hates it?” Luckily, that wasn’t the case.
EC: We were surprised with the positive feedback we got. Not that we were expecting everyone to be like “We hate it, shut it down,” because we did have requests for it and people were saying “You should start blogging.” So, it wasn’t that out of the bloom.
MH: We have been overwhelmed by how nice and how sweet everyone’s been It’s so lovely to get such positive feedback from people all across the world. That’s what’s been so amazing, we were so surprised at how many different nationalities and countries are interested, and it’s just been really, really overwhelming and rather kind.
What’s your goal for the blog?
EC: We don’t necessarily have an end goal, something that we’re striving towards one hundred percent. As long as people are still enjoying it and like following it, we love doing it. We get to spend all of our time together and we really enjoy doing the blog, so as long as people are still interested than we’ll keep it going.
MH: We have some really exciting projects coming up — we can’t really talk too much about them, but one of them that I can mention is a design collaboration that we’re so excited about.
EC: That’s really exciting, to be able to get involved in designing and stuff.
MH: So watch the space — there’ll be some more information about that but we can’t really say too much now.
(Tyler McCall for TeenVogue.com)