Wallace's blog: Celebrating Fashion and Film (Sept 21)
Celebrating our culture in Fashion and Film.
New Zealand Fashion Week starts today. And while the rest of New Zealand may or may not fully appreciate it, people on the streets of Auckland really start pulling their socks up for five days, and make a concerted effort when it comes to dressing up - or at least it seems that way. It's just something you notice.
I remember when the idea was mooted of having a Fashion and Culture week in Wellington around 2000. It was to be based around the idea of the NZ International festival of the arts. Entrepreneur Jennifer Souness had the original idea, and it was so exciting that at last NZ might get it's very own fashion week. After all, Australian Fashion Week had just got off the ground and was going great guns.
Sadly the Fashion and Culture week never eventuated, but Pieter
Stewart picked up the reigns and developed it into a more
traditional 4 day Fashion week. Four Designers - WORLD, NomD, Karen
Walker and Zambesi had not long broken new ground by being invited
to London Fashion Week, so the timing seemed right.
Next year Air NZ Fashion Week will be a decade old, and as brand
manager Myken Stewart says, many young designers now would not have
been around without our own fashion week - a far cry from the early
days when people like Margi Robertson of NomD started
out.
Of course, it's not cheap to put on a show down in the tents down in Halsey Street. When all added up, it costs tens of thousands of dollars. And some designers just aren't convinced of the merits of putting up that type of money for a show, unless of course there are some pretty influential buyers bought in by the organisers. It takes a lot of dress orders to cover, say a 40 grand fee. Zambesi do it for the branding and the connectivity to NZ. WORLD do it every three years, and sometimes not even then. Workshop don't appear to see much value in it. Karen Walker I understand needed some convincing that it was worth showing here, focused as she is on Tokyo, London and New York. Some designers, like the amazing Marilyn Sainty have never showed at all. And others like Icebreaker are just huge overseas - doing their own thing and making their own contacts.
And a whole sub-industry has developed around the week as well. Bloggers, fashion writers, stylists, make-up, and hair people - when you get inside the white tent on Auckland's viaduct it's a veritable circus.
I still can't work out whether there is a lot of money to be made in fashion. From the outside it's all very fabulous but it is a hugely labour intensive industry, in which a tiny country is competing supposedly at the higher end in world FULL of labels - working massive hours on a low pay scale. And as Denise Le Strange-Corbet of WORLD says, "no-one in the fashion industry has any money to splash around".
But for all the criticism I think we're better off for having our own fashion week. It can be bitchy, it can be hugely ego-driven, the atmosphere so rarefied only a true fashionista can fully understand it. But it's also about Kiwi business, and export orders to new markets. And it's also about having a whole lot of fun.
But for me, the week doesn't belong to Fashion. It belongs to a couple of lesbian yodellers who have taken Toronto by storm. Leanne Pooley's documentary 'The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls' won audience choice for best documentary at the prestigious Toronto Film festival, putting Michael Moore's film Capitalism: A Love story in runner up! Received a standing ovation no less. When the film came out I asked them in an interview whether they think their style of lesbian-farming-kiwi-down-home humour would honestly translate overseas. Well, I needn't have bothered asking.
I must confess to being no big fan of the Topp Twins, but like
many, this documentary has won me over. I'm even thinking of going
to see them live in concert. As the Herald On Sunday rightly
said, - "we make our mark on the world by being ourselves,
rather than trying to beat the big players at their own
game." This week belongs to the Topps - you guys demonstrate
the finest in New Zealand culture.
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