Lana Coc-Kroft's return last year.
Feature
The money shot
by Joanne Black
Glamorous models, designers, celebrities and overseas journalists have become a familiar part of Air New Zealand Fashion Week. So where do the clothes come into it?
When Lana Coc-Kroft appeared on the front page of the New Zealand Herald last year, wearing the Catalyst label on the catwalk at Air New Zealand Fashion Week, many of her anxious fans would have been pleased to note her recovery from a mystery illness. But no one was more excited than High Society design director Laurinda Sutcliffe, who produces Catalyst.
“That was her coming out after her illness,” says Sutcliffe, “and she looked fantastic and we were celebrating her triumph over adversity and that got us on the front page of the New Zealand Herald and in every weekly women’s magazine the following week.
“It was the biggest publicity hit you could possibly have in terms of getting out into the mass market. It was fantastic.”
It is opportunities like those that designers crave and do their best to create at a fashion week.
“We call it the money shot,” says fashion communications consultant Josie Vidal. “At fashion week there’ll be, say, 10 shows a day and there’ll only be one front-page picture. It’s the job of people like me to ensure that my designer gets that front-page picture.”
The focus on money shots is a phenomenon of fashion weeks around the world, and not just on the catwalk – the celebrity media earlier this month lapped up photos of Victoria Beckham in the front row at Roberto Cavelli’s show at Milan fashion week.
So the overseas trends are being followed here, but does home-grown fashion look different? Is there such a thing as a New Zealand look? And, if there is, is it anything more than Kiwi women’s inclination to reach for something, anything, black?
The fashion editor of the London Times, Lisa Armstrong, came to fashion week last year and later wrote that the fashionistas had all been “striding around in layers of black. “Black, black, black. They love it,” she wrote.
She added that it might have been New Zealand’s attempt to differentiate itself from Sydney Fashion Week, which New Zealand saw as “a sort of Sodom-and-Gomorrah fleshpot of sin, showiness and sequins. In European terms, Sydney is Milan and Auckland is Antwerp. Or put another way, Sydney is Paris Hilton and Auckland is Jean-Paul Sartre, without the lifelong existential crisis.”
The characterisation of New Zealand fashion as intelligent and dark seems fixed in the consciousness of Europeans – if they spare a thought for New Zealand fashion at all.
Sydney Morning Herald fashion columnist and former British Elle editor Maggie Alderson saw many New Zealand shows while living in Sydney for eight years, though she says she has lost touch a little in her last four years back in her native UK. A fan of Walker, an even bigger fan of Kate Sylvester, and devastated by the demise of Nicholas Blanchett, Alderson says the New Zealanders used to stand out at Australian Fashion Week because their work had a darker, more intellectual mood.
“I don’t like to speak in sweeping generalisations,” says Alderson, “but most Sydney-based designers were about the body, about being sexy and out there and a bit bling. The Melbourne designers were a little bit more thoughtful but the New Zealand designers seemed to be quite romantic, a little bit gothic, a little bit dark.
“There was a distinctive style, quite strikingly so, I thought, and at one stage I did pitch a story to British Vogue, ‘New Zealand is the new Belgium’, because there seemed to be this group of very interesting designers who had a very specific mood that they shared, although they were distinctive, separate designers. There was definitely a national mood.”
British Daily Telegraph fashion director Hilary Alexander says the fashion cognoscenti in Europe are “very aware of Karen Walker and Zambesi. These are the two New Zealand labels that are best known.”
Apart from those two, however, “There is huge knowledge and respect for The Lord of the Rings – the whole location/inspiration/costumes which, while not exactly fashion, is a kind of style vibe which has put New Zealand on the map, probably more than its fashion.”
Sutcliffe thinks the “New Zealand look” has diversified in recent years from the “dark, edgy, intelligent clothing for serious women” – which, when she says it, does not necessarily sound like a compliment.
“I do think there’s a look, but it takes a few different forms. Before Trelise Cooper made a big impact on the New Zealand market, the look was all about how people perceived Karen Walker and Zambesi and Nom*D, so they were probably a lot darker and supposedly intelligent and that edgy look.
“Then Trelise has come on board as a very big exporter, with a very high profile and doing something completely different. Five years ago I think we had a look and it was quite defined; now, fortunately, the look is a lot more diverse, and a lot more interesting, which is good, because I think we ran the risk of being categorised as ‘the New Zealand look’ as though that’s all New Zealand does.”
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) might weep to hear it, but Alderson thinks it no longer matters where designers come from.
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