Celebrating 25 Years of NZFW with Petra Bagust, Sonja de Mari and Tatum Savage

How is Fashion Week then compared to now? Like, what have you seen sort of, I guess, changed, evolved, like, for the great?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I love this new format because it's kind of, I guess, that magic of kind of, you know, not shrouded in secrecy, but kind of like the mystery of Fashion Week

kind

of had its place back then.

But now we're in a situation where the... sitting front row at a show should be available to the people that are shopping those brands you know and it wasn't really accessible back then or somebody that aspires to be in the fashion industry and doesn't really understand how to get their foot in the door you know it's kind of unlocked all of that for a fashion enthusiast or an aspiring designer or something so that's the evolution that has happened and I'm all for it because I just love the idea of like a 10 year old girl wanting to one day be a fashion designer and not really understanding how it kind of comes together because it is kind of this kind of mysterious world.

And then to be able to buy a ticket to their favorite designer and sit front row and be treated like a VIP, I don't know, I love this kind of evolution of it.

And I think it's relevant to the modern day way that the fashion industry

works.

And what do we say to the people that, you know, who are sort of opposite that and like, who feel that Fashion Week should be more of an exclusive thing.

You know, it's lost its essence of the hierarchy of where it sits in our fashion industry.

What do you say to that?

I would say yes to sustainability and financial imperative is a fact of life.

This has to be financially sustainable.

And we had that season.

It felt to me like New Zealand Fashion Week launched and we were asking questions of ourselves as a culture.

Are we fashionable? Do we have a fashion voice? What is our...

contribution to the

industry.

What is New Zealand fashion? And that in standing up and holding our own in that sense, and we were really asking questions and also like reaching, you know, reaching for New York Fashion Week, reaching for Australian Fashion Week and proving that we could put on a show, like we could just deliver.

That question's been answered.

And so now it's like, okay, we did that.

Like, that was fantastic.

That was a season.

The exclusivity was a thing, and we did it.

And just like a trend, we move on.