Designers pick sequins and sensible shoes for Fashion Week

By FIONA HAWTIN

About now, panic sets in among Fashion Week delegates. Just what are they going to wear to New Zealand Fashion Week? Frantic rifling through the wardrobe ensues, coupled with frenzied shopping trips. If it's this bad for the fashion set whose job is to sit comfortably and watch the shows, what about the designers who, after all, are the stars of the week? They're the same. Don't have a thing to wear apparently. Some have given it some thought though and let us in on what it is they're likely to wear to the Air New Zealand-sponsored event.

Claire Kingan-Jones

Kingan-Jones is going to be grabbing all the summer samples "assuming Auckland turns on its best summer weather as usual for Fashion Week".

Pretty prints, belted tunic shapes and easy throw-on pieces that look good will be what she makes a beeline for. Kingan-Jones will mix this with black and Diesel and Grab jeans. "Hopefully I'll have a couple of pieces from Prada's winter collection, which I am totally in love with and have asked my girlfriend to get for me while she's in Milan.

"And I won't be going anywhere without my Bisonte bag. It's cream cracked leather - fabulous and practical."

Trelise Cooper

Cooper's Fashion Week wardrobe is usually the bane of her staff's lives. "They've said to me for the last two weeks 'what are you wearing' because I always decide the night before or on the day."

She then tries to filch it from stock. This season though, they made her put an order in so she's got her own wardrobe to work with. It will all be Trelise Cooper summer and high summer. There's her bling sequinned skirts in ivory and pink, the 50s print skirt and jacket, the Kelly green 50s seersucker skirt with sequinned waistband, the gold stretch trench coat with a sequinned skirt, the green coat with red beaded flowers worn with a red skirt.

For the trip down the catwalk she's thinking about something from her new collection. It's likely to be a coat with sparkles. All up, it'll be Cooper's sequin season "because sequins are being treated like chiffon and velvet are now.

"They're no longer for evening but for day as well".

As for shoes, well, there are her little gold Junya Watanabe ballet pumps, the Viktor & Rolf ruby red stilettos - "my Dorothy shoes" and the Miu Miu 50s aqua bejewelled numbers.

Andrea Moore

The main requirement for Moore's Fashion Week wardrobe is comfort. But it's also got to be "a bit special - I've got to look like what my job is".

For this, she's calling on Lee jeans and Minnie Cooper's sensibly-heeled black knee-high boots.

She'll probably call on her own label Visitation pants with a 20cm slit up the back, designed so the heel of the shoe becomes an erogenous zone. Her sexy Louis Jordan black boots with the red heel will come in handy here. On top, she'll be wearing more of her own designs. There's the cream and orange beaded floral cowl top and her DC3 red jacket with the white pear on the back.

Liz Mitchell

Mitchell plans on wearing pieces from her Scent of a Peony summer range - her frayed Chanel jacket and sunray pleated skirt are a good start. She's also going to get some mileage out of her Harris Hendry merino twinsets and a few Miranda Brown numbers.

A Swarovski crystal-embellished T-shirt from her winter range Wallis in Wonderland will work nicely with the customised crystal cast she's wearing on her right arm, after breaking a bone in her wrist a couple of weeks back when she fell over in her flat leather-soled brogues.

As it's not the first time she's had a fall in leather-soled shoes, Mitchell will definitely be wearing flat shoes but they won't have a leather sole.

"As a designer you want to wear pieces from your collection to show how your clothes work on real bodies.

"Because I've gone into early menopause [as a result of chemotherapy] I've had changes to my body and I also get hot quite quickly, so it's important to wear things that I can layer and that are comfortable.

"I think my clothes are comfortable."

Herald Feature: Fashion Week

NZ Fashion Week