Jack Yan reports from ID Dunedin Fashion Week, where New Zealand’s most innovative fashion designers are concentrated

PHOTOGRAPHED BY KARL PRISTON
BACKSTAGE PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY ID DUNEDIN AND REDKEN

HIS YEAR’S ID Dunedin Fashion Weekend was the biggest yet, for several reasons. The first is that New Zealand fashion is getting bigger. When Lucire first started, you’d be hard pressed to find the Karen Walker section in an upscale New York department store. Now you can, as well as the Rebecca Taylor section. Like it or not, there are more creative people walking to their own beat in New Zealand than in the state of Texas, per capita, of course.
   Secondly, if New Zealand fashion in general is getting bigger, then there’s some logic in saying that Dunedin fashion is getting bigger. This southern city—the first major metropolis literally to see the light of the 21st century—has been covered in Lucire before as a creative paradise where people not only have down-home goodness, but the same wide-eyed design idealism as though everyone in town were aged 18. As it is a student city in the vein of Berkeley, Calif., then that’s not too far from the average population age downtown on a Friday night. It is arguably New Zealand’s fashion design capital, its inhabitants proudly saying that they would not trade their Dunedin base for an Auckland one—a sentiment reiterated by its best known exporting designers, Donna Tulloch of Mild Red, Tanya Carlson and, fresh back from NYFW, Margi Robertson of Nom D, at a joint press conference at the beginning of ID.
   Thirdly, both Carlson and Tulloch did not show collections at L’Oréal New Zealand Fashion Week. This was big news at the time: Mild Red, after all, had been picked out by Colin McDowell as his favourite from the LNZFW before, while Carlson has a knack for showmanship that it was inconceivable in the late winter days last year to imagine a week without it. It would be like Lloyd Klein not making it to NYFW—which actually wound up happening, too.
   Finally, ID Dunedin was more than just ID Dunedin. This year, the event attracted sponsorship from Vodafone—money well spent, in our opinion. Vodafone not only sponsored an extra competition called Call Me Baby, open to New Zealand residents. The three winning fashion-design entries, as judged by Dunedinite Richard Moore, would be made into full catwalk outfits and shown at ID, while their creators would get spending money for a Dunedin shopping spree.
   Press members were handled well by an outside company, Parka Ltd., this year, highlighting that ID had indeed grown beyond the realm of Tourism Dunedin and the City Council. We were all given schedules this year, the interviews all arranged prior. Our only regret was attempting to do the same amount of work in half the time, but we managed.
   This attracted major interest. There were public events all week before the ID catwalk showing of autumn–winter 2004 outfits. NZFW boss Pieter Stewart attended the catwalk show, as did some international journalists from Ireland and Australia. Retired newsreader Dougal Stevenson, who MCed the event in 2003, retired this gig, too, in favour of current TV3 anchors Carol Hirschfeld and John Campbell, whose enjoyable and otherwise natural banter was ruined only by the fact that both stared at their scripts through the night. But 2004 is the year of TV3’s renaissance, not to mention its 15th anniversary, and one needed no better evidence than how well the audience—reportedly numbering 1,200—‘came home to the feeling’ of Hirschfeld and Campbell.

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Like it or not, there are more creative people walking to their own beat in New Zealand than in the state of Texas, per capita

ABOVE: The Redken stylists at work backstage.

Download this article as laid out in the Catwalk section of Lucire May 2004: click here for download page