World provoked outrage when it was caught selling foreign-produced T-shirts as New Zealand made. But has it become too hard to manufacture in this country? By Katie Ruscoe of The Wireless.
The Auckland warehouse of fashion fabric supplier Hawes and Freer is buzzing with activity: The company's small team chat as they cut yardage, press buttons and log orders for a roll-call of some of New Zealand's top designers. Ask owner and industry veteran Trevor Hookway about the state of our wider rag trade, though, and he paints an altogether less active and cheerful scene: "In terms of investment and government support, it really is our forgotten industry."
If the country's garment sector had indeed been forgotten, recent T-shirt-shaped events brought it back to public attention. Earlier this month, leading fashion brand World was caught selling foreign-manufactured T-shirts as New Zealand made. Designer Dame Denise L'Estrange-Corbet, known as a staunch advocate for manufacturing locally, defended her company's move, saying it had no choice but to use foreign-produced materials as Kiwi factory after Kiwi factory closed down. Was her gloomy take on the local scene accurate, and if so, is New Zealand-made fashion soon to be nothing but a memory?
It's a subject Hookway is eager to talk about, and the way he eagerly offloads suggests it's one that weighs heavily, too. He's spent most of his life in the fashion trade – working his way up from warehouse floor ("I needed to make a bit of extra money during uni") to buying Hawes and Freer with his wife, Merran, in 1985.
During his career, he's witnessed large-scale closures and the death of arts forms and is now increasingly worried about the industry's future. On the day that we meet he's processing the news that two of his fellow fabric suppliers - Cooper Watkinson Textiles, and the fashion division of Charles Parsons Fabrics - are closing.