From rags to designer garb High school drop-out Jerome Taylor started making T-shirts and selling them out of his car. Now the former roofer is showing his collections at international fashion shows, writes Sarah Murray.
Jerome Taylor looks and sounds like your typical Kiwi bloke. Bearded, burly, with a strong Kiwi twang and a vocabulary that’s peppered with ‘‘buggers’’, he certainly doesn’t fit the conventional ‘‘fashion designer’’ stereotype.
But the former roofer and insurance salesman is forcing the fashion world to sit up and take notice of his high-end streetwear brand Not For You, after showing at Vancouver Fashion Week earlier this year.
It was there the stars aligned, and not only was one of his jackets worn by Miss J Alexander (the judge from America’s Next Top Model) but he was also mentioned in Vogue China.
‘‘I was just blown away by it all,’’ Taylor says of his recent success. ‘‘Getting a position at an international fashion show was ticking something off my goal list.’’
When I meet Taylor he’s dressed head to toe in his label and is sitting in his studio, at the back of a sewing shop in Lower Hutt’s Petone.
‘‘It’s quite small,’’ he says of the modest room, which has patterns and clothing racks hanging from the high ceilings in a bid to maximise space.
‘‘It was too distracting at home. I used to use my dining table to mark and cut stuff on, and when it was dinner time I’d have to take all my stuff off and stop work.’’
The 27-year-old lives at home with his parents in a bid to save money. He pours everything he earns back into his clothing label, which he started in 2014 when his love of art resulted in him screenprinting and selling T-shirts around Wellington out of his Mitsubishi Mirage. He’s come a long way since then, but it’s been a hard slog.
‘‘The person who I am today is a lot different to who I used to be,’’ says the father-of-one. ‘‘I used to go to work at 7am and work ’til 5 every day as a roofer. I’d come home, have dinner, watch TV, go to bed, wake up… and it was the same thing. Every single day. One night I was at home watching TV and I thought ‘what the f... am I doing?’’’ Taylor decided to take life into his own hands. He stopped watching TV, put down the PlayStation console and picked up a book.
‘‘When I dropped out of school I had the reading age of an 8-year-old. School, to me, was somewhere to go to muck around with my mates.
‘‘I thought I was stupid. I knew I struggled to read, which is why I didn’t do it. So I started listening to audio books, and then I’d buy the actual book and read along.’’ Leaning towards motivational speakers, he read books such as Think and Grow Rich. You can still hear the influence of these books in his voice when he talks with a preacher-like positivity. He also focused on making art, which helped him out of a dark place after a bad breakup, leading him to screen-print T-shirts and take them to a seamstress in Lower Hutt to be altered. ‘‘One day the woman said, ‘look, why don’t I just teach you how to sew? It would be cheaper if you did it yourself’,’’ he says.
He took her up on the offer, and fluked his way into an insurance salesman job so he could use his salary to buy an industrial sewing machine.
Always thinking of his goal to start a fashion label, he would do two to three hours of sewing training with the woman every day before heading to work.
At 21, he enrolled at NZ Fashion Tech and came out as a qualified machinist and pattern maker, with a diploma in fashion design and technology. Not bad for a high school dropout. Born and raised in Wainuiomata, a place the designer says ‘‘never makes the news for anything positive’’, he comes from a working-class family.
His mum worked three jobs, always wanting to give her kids a step up. Still, as the youngest of four, he had to wear hand-me-downs the majority of his childhood, always getting the school jerseys with holes in the elbows.
‘‘We haven’t come from wealth,’’ he says. ‘‘We’re not a rich family or have excess money. So, for me, I can’t wait to really crack it so we can have everything we want, because I think it really will be one of those stories from rags to riches.’’
His goals are audacious. He wants to do five different fashion shows, in five countries, in the next five years. He wants to be New Zealand’s top fashion designer, and he wants to be a millionaire. ‘‘That’s the one people tend to laugh at,’’ he says.
But he’s already ticking them off fast. Since