Precious few riches in the rag trade
It’s tough, and not many people would encourage it as a career path, but those in the middle of it wouldn’t do anything else. This is fashion, darling. Audrey Malone reports.
When Sophie Brader moved home to Timaru from Melbourne to take on the family business, she had to talk her parents into it being a good idea. She had a high-flying career in industrial design, but she wanted to be the thirdgeneration owner of a few fashion stores. ‘‘Fashion’s a hard game. Retail is tough. Let’s put it like this – my dad did not encourage me to come home at all,’’ she says. Brader has short, blonde hair, a bubbly personality, and a steely determination. You need that in the retail game – it’s hard going. She is now the partowner, alongside her parents, of several stores in Timaru, O¯ amaru, and Ashburton: Miss Timaru, Preen, and Todd’s of Ashburton. The number and breadth of the stores have expanded in the five years she has been on board. With it comes a lot of risk. If a supplier she uses has a bad season, then she has a range of stock that doesn’t sell. She can get a new supplier, but that means a loss to her company for the range that was dead in the water. There’s no two ways about it: fashion is tough going. Although fashion is a $5.3 billion industry in New Zealand, it’s ultra-competitive, and based on crystal ball-gazing: you have to predict what people are going to like or want in a year’s time. That means if you get it wrong, you are yesterday’s news. Domestic producers and retail stores are also competing with a global market. With the internet, and the rise of multinational fashion stores, the Kiwi market can struggle to get the oxygen required to survive. The past year has seen the loss of Kimberleys, Topshop, Topman, David Lawrence, Marcs, and Andrea Moore. New Zealand is a small island nation, isolated from a lot of the world. Any fashion producers or retailers have expensive operating costs, relatively smallscale operations, and have to pay 15 per cent GST and a further 10 per cent duty to the government. That makes it hard to compete with the likes of multinational company Zara, which falls under the Inditex retail stores umbrella. Inditex has extended its tentacles across six continents. It produces 248 million garments each year, which then get shipped to 6500 stores in 88 markets. Global brands are producing 52 micro collections a year, on averages one a week, creating high turnover and constant fresh product for consumers. Globally, people are spending about $200b on fashion each year, going towards buying any one of the 80b garments made. Making garments has become cheaper, and Sustain Your Style, a group advocating for ethical dressing, says people have five times more clothes in their wardrobes than their grandparents did, and on average wear each one about seven times before getting rid of it. All of these things are reducing the number of jobs in New Zealand fashion, and the earning potential for those in the business. Most of the jobs in the local industry are not glamorous, and you don’t earn much. If you push above that, there’s always the looming axe if you don’t predict correctly what people are going to want, or the overseas competition with the lower dollar is too great. While the country kicked up a stink about World using cut-price T-shirts made in Bangladesh and embellishments bought off Chinese mega-retailer Ali Express and labelling the items as being made in New Zealand, local consumers don’t want to pay the high prices for locally made goods all the time, Brader says – so she offers a variety of stock in store.
Brader pursued fashion because she loves it, but also because she sees potential for growth. That excites the business side of her. ‘‘It’s all about how you approach it,’’ she says. She has put an emphasis on social media as a way for customers to engage, and for them to see clothes. To highlight the stores’ products she uses her staff and people from the wider community. She has launched a Facebook page called Preen Sisters Styling, where women can post photos about outfits they are putting together, ask each other for tips, and talk about all things fashion. ‘‘Our suppliers give us these lovely photos with these beautiful 6ft models. No-one looks like that, and they can’t relate,’’ Brader says. ‘‘I want my customers to see the clothes on real women, so they can imagine themselves in the clothes.’’
The designer
‘‘Growing up, I was into mud, dinosaurs and bugs,’’ Tess Norquay says. ‘‘So, it was a natural progression into fashion,’’ she deadpans. Norquay shows up with strong eyebrows, bright pink lips, a heap of dark brown hair piled on her head, and ready to laugh. Her layers of clothes for the blustery Wellington weather look so cool it hurts. She could
easily be snapped in a street style photograph before any of the major fashion weeks. Instead, she has just finished a day’s work at Nancy’s, a craft and fabric shop. When Norquay starts talking, you know she is a bright cookie: she has a sharp wit, is fascinated by politics, inspired by Jacinda Ardern, and had it not been for her adoration of Tim Gunn on Project Runway she probably would have been a lawyer, or a dog walker. Instead, she is a fashion graduate, hunting for a job as a designer or pattern maker.
Norquay knows fashion is a tough game. She was chosen as one of the top student designers in the country, winning plaudits and prizes at Dunedin’s Fashion ID, and was one of three to showcase designs at New Zealand Fashion Week (where she met Ardern). ‘‘If you want to have friends it isn’t for you – you can’t do anything else. Maybe one day I will have balance,’’ Norquay says of pouring all her time and money into her hopeful future career. Furthermore, she learnt that doing a collection for fashion week pushes designers to the absolute limits. ‘‘If I didn’t care, everyone would have been naked on the runway, because I would have faked my own death. And, even though I love it, and don’t want to do anything else, I considered it as an option to get out of [fashion],’’ she says tongue in cheek. All that hard work doesn’t translate into an automatic job – she is still doing the hard yards at Nancy’s until she can either afford to intern with a label, or gets a job somewhere. But competition is stiff, and it’s not made any easier by the fast fashion being produced in thirdworld countries. Norquay does not want to participate in that – she is a conscious consumer all the way. ‘‘It’s sad for the planet, there’s so much waste. It’s sad for women – well, predominantly women – that work in these factories that treat them poorly. It sucks that it’s the norm and it makes it harder for others to break into the industry.’’ As a result, Norquay makes most of her own clothes. People don’t see fashion as an academic subject, but it requires business nous, creativity and grit, Norquay says. It doesn’t seem to get the same recognition in academic institutions as careers in medicine, law, or accounting, but it should, she says. ‘‘It’s seen as women’s work and frivolity, but I don’t see what’s wrong with making women feel good about themselves.’’
The PR guru
Will Hyndman is one of the most connected people in New Zealand’s young fashion set. He’s a brand manager for fashion public relations firm Public Library, and looks after accounts such as skate brand Vans. His mop of curly, dark blond hair falls down his head, and his smile reaches right across his face, which he presents with an easy charm. He is often featured on social media, mixing it up with all the cool kids from seasons of The Bachelor past. His fashion mantra is peach for life. He didn’t set out for a job in fashion. He has always been passionate about it, but he had to convince himself it was an OK career to pursue. Growing up, there was no encouragement to go down the fashion path, especially as a male. He never considered it a career path, so off he went to the University of Otago and the ‘‘normal’’ route of studying towards a bachelor of arts in philosophy. ‘‘I just didn’t like it,’’ he says. Now, Hyndman lives and breathes fashion. But it was while he was in Dunedin that he realised he had to pursue a career in the fashion industry. He was working at Slick Willy’s, a store known by anyone with a passing interest in clothes in the southern end of the South Island. The clothes are cool, the staff even cooler. After a bit of trial and error, Hyndman realised that fashion was where he wanted to go in life. He picked up some papers in fashion at Otago Polytechnic, helped with buying for Slick’s, and was eventually headhunted by the team at Public Library, upping sticks and moving to Auckland. ‘‘I love my job. I’m really lucky, I work with a great team of people and brands.’’ Even though Hyndman thinks he is the cat with the fashion cream, there’s more he wants to do. He has dabbled with making duffle bags, emblazoned with a custom logo, under the name Rupert Smiles. But then the women who made his bags shut up shop – a good lesson for him to learn early in the game. It’s tough, but you have to persevere if you want to make a name for yourself, he proffers as advice.
The photographer
Chances are, almost all Kiwi females under the age of 40 have seen Holly Sarah Burgess’ work. Her daytime job is as a fashion photographer for high-street chain Glassons. Burgess, or HS Burg, as she is known to the fash pack, has quickly made a name for herself with well-known Kiwi influencers, stylists and models. Jaime Ridge makes regular appearances on her Instagram feed. Burgess underplays herself. Long deep-brown hair, high cheekbones, her eyes are perfect pools of green, with just enough sass. ‘‘I’m a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl,’’ she says. It’s just her jeans and T-shirt look as if they belong in the centrefold of Vogue. Burgess is quietly revolutionising the New Zealand fashion photography scene. The young gun has a global approach to how she does her job as a fashion photographer. Burgess knows she has to present a look. She has to sell to the world what she is doing on more platforms than her predecessors. It’s no longer enough just to be good at taking photographs; she also has to know how to sell the Holly Sarah Burgess brand to the world – whether that’s through her job with Glassons, what she plugs on Instagram, or whatever else she does. That’s what the bigger players overseas are doing, so that’s what she is doing. She spent her teens in Thailand, where she became obsessed with colour and taking photos. When she was trying to figure out where to take her career, people kept telling her to get into photography.
Her voice sparkles down the phone line. Burgess brings energy into the conversation, but there is a determination that lies beneath it. You get the impression she knows what she wants, and how to get it. Burgess talks about artists and photographers she is inspired by, and books she lugs around with her, but her greatest inspiration is seeing how fashion plays out in real life, and how it influences the people wearing it. ‘‘There’s nothing like getting a look to work on a girl and then seeing how she feels about herself when it all comes together. That’s why I do it,’’ she says. ‘‘I just really like bringing out the best in other women, and making them feel good about themselves.’’ She feels pretty darn lucky – there aren’t many people out there who are paid to do something they are as passionate about. While there is a lot of respect from her friends and family, she is aware the respect for people working in fashion isn’t something that runs deep. Fashion is an undervalued art form, Burgess says. ‘‘But I wouldn’t do anything else.’’