BE HERE NOW
One label that will be missed on this week’s official New Zealand Fashion Week schedule is Wellington-based Twenty-Seven Names. After a rapturous show last year featuring the Auckland Girls’ Grammar Choir singing Rihanna’s 2013 hit Diamonds, designers Anjali Stewart and Rachel Easting chose to document their winter 2020 collection on home turf, at the striking Michael Fowler Centre in the heart of Wellington. “Aside from school prize-giving or symphony outings, we don’t really interact with the Michael Fowler Centre on a day-to-day basis,” says Anjali. “But it seemed to represent this idea of how we can idolise what is elsewhere, and yet ignore what’s in our own backyard. It’s this incredible piece of modernist architecture with amazing textile hangings and the auditorium has this intense scale to it.” Entitled ‘The Grass isn’t Always Greener’, the collection is a sophisticated outing from the label, with silk blouses, wool coats and a selection of dresses that tick all the boxes for elegant after-five dressing. Special pieces that could be worn all day, every day. “These days it feels like we’re always looking over other people’s fences. Dreaming of what’s still to come, what’s far away, wherever it is we aren’t right now. We’re taking a moment to appreciate our current surroundings and recalibrating our efforts into our own pastures. Here’s to finding things hiding in plain sight.”
• See the full collection in motion with a special video filmed at the Michael Fowler centre at Twentysevennames.co.nz and Viva.co.nz.