On First Meeting with Trelise

On first meeting with Trelise, the new Eau de Toilette from Trelise Cooper, we are immediately in the fragrant world of vanilla pods, and the glossy caramel developing under the heat of a brûlée torch. These are big fragrances: welcome home fragrances suggesting relaxation after a long walk through brown, fallen leaves.

And, spend some time in the perfume’s company and quietly revealed are other scents: the invitation of sandalwood, the enveloping, heirloom-quilt of lily of the valley, a sinuous thread of Janis Joplin patchouli. There are many components in this work.

Structurally, the component juices are sourced from the world’s spiritual 
home of perfume: Grasse in Southern France. Here is the cultivation of 
thousands of plants yielding their petals, leaves, seeds and barks to a 
centuries-old alchemy of extraction and distillation. Here, also, are 
stringent testing and verification certificates issued by the industry to 
assure a global market of quality. For Trelise, upwards of 18 separate 
juices were used to develop this perfume—one of the industry’s most 
complex orchestrations.

Greetings, Miromoda

In 2008, a marketing board was set up to promote the many designers of Maori descent working in fashion. Knitting together the Maori word miro (the weaving of fibres) with the Italian word moda (fashion), the newly-minted term Miromoda became the masthead for the board. It set out to encourage and promote and has enabled many designers with commercially viable output to come to widespread notice.

This year, Miromoda will have its third show at New Zealand Fashion Week. One of the designers to show is Adrienne Whitewood. This photo, courtesy of Miromoda, shows three of her garments as a capsule collection which Whitewood calls Te Aho Tapu: the Sacred Thread. These are strong works, and a sympathetic eye may well see a modern interpretation here of the photographic portraits taken of Maori in the 1850s and 1860s. These are the decades where traditional Maori garments meet European pattern making and materials. There is the use of tartan cloth – tons of this arrived in ports in these years for the use of clothing shops and dressmakers. 

There is leather – in Whitewood’s work this is the soft, silky leather of lambskin rather than the tough bullock hide used for raincoats and ammunition belts of the period. And there are bold echoes of the swift Maori adoption of woven materials like wool, cotton and linen into their spirit of folding, wrapping and cloaking where coloured borders stand out with drama. In Whitewood’s collection, this delight in bordering is strikingly apparent in the black cloak where the cerise borders are done in rough, raw silk.

For New Zealand Fashion Week, Whitewood will show a collection of six looks. Such an occasion is, of course, the result of a journey and along this path has been the support and interest of Miromoda.

The garment is the red Fencing Jacket.

It is from Alexandra Owen’s Autumn-Winter 2011 collection.

It is construction done in a high quality wool-cashmere, and revels in the architecture of quilting, padding and buttoning. For this collection, quilting is a motif running through all the garments like a melody. It is encountered in all colours and weights from the Prussian blue of a dress, the burgundy silk of a blouse, to the clean white of cotton.

Some of the collection’s blouses carry the title Tullio, and here we are in the world of Luchino Visconti’s 1976 film L’innocente. There is obvious homage to the film here and although Visconti’s character Tullio is a self-serving, overbearing aristocrat, it is much more the film’s visuals of moody establishing shots and lovingly shot rich details of clothes and fabrics which have buoyed Owen’s collection along.

Good as Gold: The New Shop

Behind masked windows, work had been going on for months. Good as Gold was moving their shop a few doors down into new premises at 120 Victoria Street, Wellington. And on opening, it was obvious the fit-out was not a hurried piece of retail standardisation, but a singular, crafted work of story-telling done with vast amounts of wood.

The new shop has all the hallmarks of being styled like a tree fort. It is this back story – this reminiscence of vigorous childhood – which purrs away throughout the place. The shop has three levels, not architecturally precise stories, but stages joined by sets of steps as if fitting around tree trunks too huge to remove. The top level, like that of a tree fort, feels siege-like with hinged windows you swing open and hurl missiles through at enemies: old food, perhaps slippers left behind by a distant relative.

 















The wood is macrocarpa, sourced from a specialist sawmill in the Wairarapa. It is the wood of farm construction – sheds, pens, fences, storage bins – and carries the honest smells of resin and circular saws. In places the wood is kept rough-sawn, but where used for display shelves it is polished smooth.

And, like whimsy, the dressing rooms for the ground floor stand in a row showing off their architectural heritage of part boat-shed, part outhouse, and a hint of dovecote.

The new Good as Gold is a visual draw card but also an astute marketing envelope. It is so appropriate for the business which showcases designers working in the orbits of the bold, the edgy and the wry.

The Look Book says Hello

Many look books are story books. They talk of fables, or recent events,

or places visited, or things overheard. Recently, Starfish looked at the work

of artist Len Lye to create a story-based collection, while Sophie Burrowes

visited a dark, but sometimes silvery, London for her look book.

And, like a sub-genre, the world of nostalgia has increasingly become a big,

warm engine for storyline inspiration. Nostalgia isn't riding back centuries to

epochs we never knew like the court of Eighteenth Century France or the

horse-racing events of Edwardian times. More, it is a brief trip back into our

own memories. It can be a glance at things we're just on the cusp of forgetting

about: psychedelic patterns, quaint sayings, black and white TV, sitting around

a cheese fondue.

With such effort going into the look book, it is great to see print versions still

being produced along with the online presentations. The printed books are

distinctively tactile. We spot them sitting on counters, we take them away for

perusal at our leisure, and we can show them to friends. The print medium

allows for a huge variety of size from the jumbo like a Sunday newspaper

through to a pocket-edition. All types of paper stock are used from newsprint

to heavy gloss, and there is scope for typographical swish.

One such pocket-edition look book is the Voon Winter 2011 collection: "How to Make a Bath Bomb". Immediately we are in the realm of story-telling (the 'how-to' manual), and nostalgia 
('I haven't heard of that for ages'). Voon's book takes us through instructions of how to make these scented tablets which fizz when they hit water at a delicious, illustrated pace. Oh no, we won't be rushed.

This image is called 'Sprinkle with Dried Petals'. We are about half way through the recipe, and illustrated is the collection's Bow Wow jacket and skirt. This is a fine weave of polyester/wool, with the white cotton bows being felted and weaved into the bolts of fabric. The bows are arresting and fanciful; not unlike the black tips of ermine tails seen across the dazzling white of coronation robes.

 

We are now ready to deliver the bath bomb to a friend. Illustrated here is the Cupcake Dress -- its confectionery pink colouring and glorious rose blooms done in velveteen. Over the dress is the Frosting Jacket. Although entirely synthetic, the material has exactly the same texture and feel as the Astrakhan wool used for centuries as collars, hats and facings.

Finding Old Wool

Deep in the cupboards of hundreds of houses lie jerseys and cardigans mostly unwanted, or at least unused. They are considered old-fashioned and a little ‘home made’. They have patterns which today are considered ludicrous, and some of the colours might make us run a mile. But for some this is treasure waiting to be reworked – upcycled – into exciting new presentations. It is a resource to be extracted from friends and swept up from thrift shops.

Coromandel-based Emma Churchill, a 2009 graduate from Massey University, loves the wool that nobody much wants. She has a keen sense for recycling based on both an ethical sense of abhorring casual waste, and also the artistic spirit of ‘this is still useful’.

She unpicks garments, surrounds herself with yarn, then re-knits this into lengths of cable. This is the hobby-like, unhurried, technique of French knitting. The cables are all lengths and all colours, sewn together side by side. The cables stand out like paint squeezed straight from the tube. The result is bold, painterly, and visceral. Further, the garments possess the decided patina of being art pieces; it is not necessary that they are worn. The works shown here come from her collection titled ‘Consume This’ – a title whose subtext says consume this instead.

This balaclava is a tea-cosy hilarious accessory with its meandering lines of confectionary colour. It would, of course, be superbly rejected as an item of camouflage for a Special Operations unit.This work of garment/art retains its spool showing how a single thread ends up being a thick cable. It’s like an instruction manual attached to the finished item. And, stitched in white, is the ‘designer label’ – Churchill’s brand name and web address //emroce.com 

Welcome Home

The materials for this piece called Welcome Home are enamel fused onto copper, set around lengths of found chain. The work is both a necklace and also a work of pinned-up art which you go up to from time to time and simply peruse. The tags read of actual places – Ealing, Rangitata, Hinds, Tinwald – and sayings like ‘hook, line and sinker’ as well as depictions of items like an axe, a milk bottle, a fishing hut and a magpie. 

The lettering is done in big capitals; the informal typeface we might find down rural roads warning us not to trespass or dump rubbish. The locale of these place names is the countryside around Ashburton, and up into the headwaters of the rivers of the Canterbury Plains. We read the tags, but the tags are saying more than just the words. For this piece is a protest. 

The tags recall a clear, unhurried time full of childhood destinations but now, on revisiting, pollution, overcrowding and bulk farming practices have spoiled the land. The name of the necklace has now become wry and cynical.The necklace is by jeweller-artist Kay Van Dyk whose childhood years were spent in the district. Now based in Nelson, Van Dyk trained both in New Zealand as well as at the Guildhall University in London where there was great attention paid to the art of silversmithing. 

Her accomplishment in techniques, coupled with a spirit of wishing to memorialise recent events and nostalgia, gives her work a great presence as both jewellery and one-off works of art. Van Dyk is represented in Wellington at Quoil gallery at 149 Willis Street