Kate Sylvester mines the past to design for the future

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28th Aug 2019

To mark the launch of New Zealand Fashion Week 2019, Kate Sylvester presented her autumn/winter ‘19/’20 collection ‘Love Letters’ on Monday night. Harking back to the 1950s, to the tune of New Zealander sisters and singers Purple Pilgrims, the lights lifted on a sea of love letters exchanged between her parents and strewn across the stage, blowing in the direction of the first look, and gesturing to the audience to enter into the past.

“It was the 1950s and it’s just a beautiful window into the world, that contemporary time,” Sylvester explains exclusively to . “Their relationship is a great love story – what is it? – 60 years of absolute love and commitment to each other, so it was really lovely to celebrate that,” she says. The result was an abundant display of love in all of its seasons: dusty pink tailored skirt suits prefaced military green quilted parka jackets, while ankle-skimming dresses in shocking pinks flowed before cropped flight jackets in ecru-coloured leather took to the stage. The mutabilis rose – “my mother’s favourite” – served as a binding motif, metaphorising Sylvester’s portrayal of her parents’ relationship in bloom.  

By mobilising her parents as key references, Sylvester was also able to nurture her own inclinations to blend the feminine and masculine, hard and soft, as is typical of her previous collections, seamlessly. “Dad was in the territorial army… so that’s where all the military elements came into the collection and then all the femininity [came from] my mum’s side,” she says. Skirts were teamed with belts that featured pockets to maximise utility, while fitted suits that contoured the waist were paired with gumboots. “The two real extremes and that’s a theme I’ve always played with… masculine and feminine working together.” 

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The collection also rang in a pervasive theme of sustainability that has reverberated across all of the designers exhibited this week. To highlight the brand’s Reloved program – an initiative where consumers can buy and sell their preowned Kate Sylvester wares – vintage pieces were woven into the collection to meld old with new, although you wouldn’t know it. As Sylvester explains: “I loved the fact that they’re seamless in the collection. The fans who followed us for years were struggling to pick which were the vintage and which were the current [pieces] and that’s what we wanted because we wanted to show that they’re timeless and they can just keep going and going.” 

In this vein, two models dressed as bride and groom (in an off-the-shoulder white lace number and a black pant suit respectively) walked down the aisle out of the bygone era and into the contemporary present to signal the finale, as the love letters, gaining wind, flew away.