Marc Moore of Stolen Girlfriends Club – the NZFW ‘Good In Your Hood’ series 2/4
Here is part two of my four part NZFW ‘Good In Your Hood’ series with designer Marc Moore of the label Stolen Girlfriends Club. You can read Part One here. I wanted this ‘Good In Your Hood’ series to explore how the neighbourhoods and places these designers grew up in, and now call home, have influenced their lives, creativity and careers, as well as get a bit of insight into their latest collections being shown at NZFW this year :
Marc Moore grew up in Raglan, but also calls Auckland home.
“I guess Auckland is my home. It’s funny though, this is really bad, but when I travel to smaller towns and people go, ‘where are you from?’ and they say it in a kind of negative way, I’ll go, ‘I’m from Raglan’. And I claim Raglan, cos I find people go a bit easier on me. But Auckland is I guess my home, I’ve been here since 2001, before that was 20 years in Raglan. But yeah, it’s funny, I always notice when I go down country, I’ll say, Yeah, I’m from Raglan.”
What is it about Auckland that feels like home for you now?
I’ve spent a lot of time here, I know the city well now and all my best friends are from Auckland. All my best friends that I have now, I met when I moved to Auckland. I still obviously keep in touch with a lot of my old friends from Raglan, but we just don’t see each other as much because we’re all living different lives, and a lot of them are still massively into the surf scene or surf industry, or full time surfers, and I just don’t have that luxury anymore. I had to settle down and get a real job.
It took me a long time to call Auckland home. When I first moved here I moved to Piha, because I wanted to be by the ocean. Because Raglan has amazing surf, I was very spoilt, I lived right out on Whale Bay, right by the waves. I could hear the waves breaking when I was sleeping, it was pretty cool. When I moved to Piha, I would drive to Raglan every weekend without fail, because I just was not into Auckland. After a couple years, I moved into the city.
It took about two years to get a circle of friends and to get really comfortable. Even driving with traffic lights used to freak me out. One time I took a left turn onto Nelson or Hobson, and I turned the wrong way onto a one way, into four or five lanes of traffic. I almost shit my pants! I had to pull into this car park straight away, and there were all these cars coming towards me, I was like, ‘holy shit’! Just little things like that, no one really prepares you for. But I’m so comfortable now. I used to get really nervous going to cafes and all these cool city folk looking at me. I still get a little nervous sometimes when I go to the more fancier cafes, but I’m pretty relaxed now.
What are some of the really meaningful memories you have of Raglan growing up?
It’s just all surfing ay. I think about it a lot actually. I had a pretty amazing upbringing in Raglan, when I think back on it. I’m pretty lucky. I had a solo Mum, with no money, but she was just really good at saving up money, and really gave me what I needed. I didn’t always give me what I wanted, but she taught me to really work hard for what I wanted. I was super lucky, heaps of my other friends parents were at the pub getting pissed and shit, and blowing all their money on ciggies and stuff, and Mum was really super cool. So I had to work and save up and get the surfboard, unlike some of my other friends who had rich parents and they just got their surfboards bought for them for their birthdays. But yeah, surfing just gave me so much, I really applied myself and got really good at it so that I was able to get sponsorship from all these brands, and was able to travel a lot with it. I was coming from a poor family, and was able to surf almost for a living and see and experience all these things. Raglan has a super rich, beautiful coastline that has some of the best surf in the world, you’re so spoilt growing up with that, you take it for granted. There are so many amazing memories just surfing and being in the water, two or three times a day, it’s pretty ridiculous.
When you talk about your Mum, those principles she taught you, they obviously came in handy later on in life for you?
I think so, yeah. And she was also always telling me to dream big, and to do whatever you wanna do, but make sure you’re happy doing what you’re doing. You don’t have to get stuck in doing a 9-5 that you don’t like. So I always grew up probably a little bit naïve, just going ‘yeah, one day I’m gonna be doing something pretty cool’. But I did my fair share of shitty jobs, that’s for sure.
When did you make that transition from ‘Surfer Raglan dude’ to ‘fashion guy.’
It’s a pretty weird transition. I got so much shit from my mates when I initially made it. It wasn’t planned. I was surfing when I moved up here, I was still competing but I was working for my major sponsor in a sort of sales/marketing job. I hurt my back real bad. It was the result of years of surfing and bad posture when I paddle and stuff, and also a combo of learning how to snowboard and just smashing my body. So I had to have this back operation that put me out of surfing for a year or so. I pretty much gave up surfing, lost sponsors, and lost that buzz to want to do it anymore, I was getting a bit older too, and Mum was like, ‘Pick up the paint brushes, get creative, just keep yourself busy.’ So I did that on the side at the same time as I had this sales job. The painting I guess led me to other creative avenues. I started thinking about making some t-shirts, and jewellery. It was a slow progression of just thinking, ‘what can I do creative next’? It happened over about two years I reckon, and then I totally wanted to immerse myself in fashion. I could see that it was such a cool vehicle to express yourself and I was really interested in that side, and how in Auckland people really dress so differently. How there are different tribes of people, and they all dress and express themselves in different ways. It really interested me, I wanted to get into fashion as soon as I’d done my time here, and immersed myself in that city environment.
When you say that all your best friends you have now are from Auckland, is that because you found like-minded people creatively here? And are they all in the fashion industry?
Actually, when I look at my closest group of friends, they’re all surfers, so it’s pretty funny. I just managed to discover a group of city surfers, pretty much. Steve Dunstan (Huffer) was one of my first ‘city-people’ that I met. We just happened to go to the same café and my boss knew that I was into surfing and that I didn’t know many people, so he just introduced me. Steve was a pro-snowboarder, and I was the pro-surfer, but Steve loved surfing so much, so we’d go hang out. And when he took me snowboarding I’d be the learner snowboarder. It was a really weird, quite cool way to start a friendship with someone, being really good at something and they’re not so good, and then going into their environment and they’re amazing at it, and you’re just super humbled. It was really cool. Who else did I meet? Jae Mills from COMMONERS, but he’s a Gisborne boy, first and foremost.
It’s very rare to find people who have always been from Auckland though, I guess.
It is ay. I didn’t realise that until I moved up here. Cos Steve has even spent time in Christchurch and Fielding I think, and Luke, my business partner, he’s from Whangamata, Dan Gosling has a family home in Whangamata, there’s a connection there, it’s all connections based on water, funnily enough.
From where you come from, and from what you think of as home, do you see that coming through in your work? How does that come through in your work, if at all?
I don’t think I’m super influenced by where I come from, with what we’re making, like the clothes and stuff and what we design. I guess we have quite different concepts for every season, we just pluck em out from the most random things and we’ll mix them with another. But I don’t know if the environment, where I came from, or where I live, really inspires me. We’ve done a couple of almost surf collections over the last couple of years, and I’ve been a bit more confident about exploring that surf side of my childhood a little bit more. I used to shy completely away from surfing, and go, ‘Hell no, we’re never gonna do surfwear because I grew up in that.’
Why? Because you didn’t want to be branded as such?
Didn’t wanna be branded as a surf brand I guess. That’s where we came from, and I always say to people, we outgrew our board-shorts, you know when we first started our label. But you know, you do go full circle sometimes and I remember our last resort collection, in 2013, Rogue Wave, the inspiration was Punk and Surfing mixed together. We had that mock gang called the ‘Hawaii Mohawks’. And this collection, ‘No Aloha’, when I look at it, it’s almost like some 80’s surf vibe going on with the prints, like the use of nylon and creating crazy dresses, and you know nylon is known as sort of a quick dry fabric, a surf fabric. I guess, there’s a little inspiration there from my Raglan upbringing, subtly.
Maybe you don’t even realise it’s there…
Yeah, I guess it’s that subconscious thing, but definitely as you just get a bit more confident in what you’re doing you realise you can have a little stab at putting a bit of surf in the mix just to create something totally different.
Even if it’s not aesthetically, is there an attitude that perhaps harks back to those days?
Definitely more so I think going on the city-vibe with what we design ay. I think it doesn’t have much of a place at the beach, we do a swim short every now and then and we even romanticise the idea of a girl wearing some of our stuff on the beach, I even thought about a girl wearing that crazy pink nylon dress on the beach. She can drink her red wine on the beach, and if she spills her red wine on it, it’s nylon so she can just wash it off or goes into the ocean and cleans it. But yeah, that’s a pretty silly idea really, it’s definitely more of a city thing that we go for.
What can you talk about in terms of what you’ll be showing at fashion week this year?
The collection this year, we’re calling it the ‘Guilty Ones’. It’s quite an interesting theme, we’re quite obsessed with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks show from the 90’s. I hadn’t actually watched it. I remember my Mum buzzing out about it when I was a kid. Some of the guys here were like, it’s so cool, you should totally watch it, it’s still so current. I was blown away at how risqué and quirky it was. For back then, it would have been so risqué and weird, and so off. So we immersed ourselves in that, and watched it back to back, and really explored it. We know that it’s a theme that’s been done to death, and used by so many designers previously, even in NZ and Australia. So we wanted to put our own spin on it, so we sort of mixed Twin Peaks as a sort of feeling, with camping, or ‘glamping’ as we called it. And then we’ll put our sort of punky grungey spin on that. That’s what the collection is going to be. It’s a pretty cool collection. We’ve got our signature prints that we always do, but we’ve worked with some really cool artists to create the prints. They’re really loose prints, I love them. There’s lots of great knitwear, as per usual, I think knitwear is a really integral part of our brand now, especially for the winter collections. There’s a lot of plaid. We played on this fashion lumber-jack guy, but without being a hipster lumberjack, you know the dudes with the beards and the skinny jeans, we didn’t want it to be like that. It’s more of a punky play on that sort of lumberjack plaid. There’s lots of leather.
We’ve got this crazy, structural glitter, and that’s our glamping side. We’ve even managed to get that into shoes as well. Some really beautiful silhouettes. We’ve focused more on shape I think more than we’ve ever focused on before. I’m more of a details guy, obsessing over details and trims and things. But with shape, we’ve got a pattern maker for the first time ever, which has been amazing, actually going back to the roots of it all and working more on shape and perfecting that. That’s been quite exciting to have an in-house pattern maker.
Is that a permanent thing now, to have an in-house pattern maker?
Yeah, the way it works off-shore is you can send all your garment drawings and specifications and measurements and stuff, and they’ll pattern it up there. But they tend to pattern make quite different to us, and the shape of their bodies is very different. So we encounter quite a few problems, so we’re just trying to take it back to pattern-making here, and creating these beautiful shapes that we can control. So I’m really excited, I hope people notice that the shapes are like, really beautiful. We’ve also had Duncan Brown, or Thistle, he’s been working with us, and it’s been great for me to have someone to bounce off and he’s been doing all these amazing raw ideas and stuff. I find that we work together pretty well too. We’re quite different with our aesthetics, but finding that meeting point in the middle, and he lives and breathes fashion, which is quite good for me, because you can get quite ground down with running businesses and stuff like that in the real world, so it’s been good working with Duncan.
