KATE SYLVESTER – the NZFW ‘Good In Your Hood’ special 4/4

Here is the final instalment of my four part NZFW ‘Good In Your Hood’ series with designer Kate Sylvester. 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. Enjoy :

“I grew up in a wild hippie rose garden playing dress-ups in Greenhithe” – Kate Sylvester.

What were some of the pivotal moments or memories for you growing up, that you really identify with that area?

The key thing for me is I literally grew up wearing dress-ups. My whole life has been clothes, basically. All I’ve ever done my whole life is make dolls clothes, make paper cut-out dolls, playing dress ups and sewing my own clothes. So it’s just been full immersion my whole life.

Was that passed down to you from your parents, or was that something you did on your own?

My Mum sewed all our clothes, and I had all these great Aunts who gave us lots of dress ups. But Greenhithe back then was gravel roads and fruit orchards and farms, and all the other girls were obsessed with horses and pony club. And then there was crazy Kate Sylvester playing dress-ups. The ponies just didn’t come into it for me.

When you got a little older, were there any other impactful neighbourhoods that inspired you in certain ways, creatively?

Wayne and I spent a year in Paris, we lived for a year in Paris when I was in my early twenties. That was hugely influential for both of us. Wayne is the creative partner in Kate Sylvester. It was during that year in Paris that we really shaped, and started to make plans for, coming back to start our own label and that’s where we really created the aesthetic that’s driven the brand all the way through. So that was a hugely influential year for me.

In terms of those earlier years, do you see a lot of that come through in your designs?

Yes, absolutely. It’s the two things. There’s pieces from the dress-ups that recur constantly still and they definitely shaped my aesthetic. There was my Mothers wedding dress that we chopped off into a bodice, and that’s a recurring kind of thing that I do every few years, is make these little chopped off bodice pieces like they’re cropped gowns, really. From my time in Paris, every single season we do some stripes. Either in Sylvester or Kate Sylvester there is always stripes. And that came from my time in Paris. The colour red actually is something that came out of my time in Paris. Nearly every season we do red.

Was there a particular neighbourhood in Paris that you loved the most?

We lived in the Marais. So that was our neighbourhood and it was just absolutely ridiculously beautiful.

Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for this year, or what you were thinking about when you were putting it together?

Last night Wayne and I were working on the music for the show. I was listening to a song that was really perfect and I said ‘Oh my God, just imagine right now, you can see the girl with the hair and the makeup we’re doing, and you can just see her walking down the runway,’ and Wayne said, ‘Yeah, this is hard-core Kate.’ So, I think that it’s quintessential Kate that we’re showing this season.

It’s been a little while since you’ve shown at NZFW. Is there any particular reason why this year has been the year to come back?

Certainly it felt that we’d been away for awhile. One of the triggers was because getting ready for our 21st, we’d spent a lot of time looking through our archives, and just looking at all our beautiful show images, and looking at past shows, it really brought it home to us how important it is to do shows. Creatively, they’re so incredibly valuable for the creative process. Every time we do one, it’s so incredibly positive, even for our local market. It’s a celebration of the brand, and a celebration of the industry. With fashion week, it’s different to doing a show of your own because it pulls the whole industry together, it unites the whole industry. So we just felt, Lordy, we need to get back there.

And do you find that you create differently when you’re thinking about a show, knowing that it’s gonna come out in a certain order, and all that sort of thing.

Definitely. That’s what I was referring to when I said it’s so positive for the creative process. If you know you’re gonna do a show you just push yourself further. You just extend that extra bit, you just take the concept that much further, you push your ideas that much further. I guess you’re bolder, for a show to work it’s gotta have a bold message. It does make you step up.