Fashion designer Karen Walker, photographed at home for Viva in 2024, last night laid down two challenges to participants at a reimagined New Zealand Fashion Week: Kahuria. Photo / Babiche Martens
Fashion designer Karen Walker, photographed at home for Viva in 2024, last night laid down two challenges to participants at a reimagined New Zealand Fashion Week: Kahuria. Photo / Babiche Martens
Karen Walker announced her return to New Zealand Fashion Week after nearly a decade away from the runway.
Walker praised the event’s new creative vision and flexible format, allowing diverse presentations.
The 2025 event will focus on inclusivity, relevance, and sustainability, with plans to feature collaborations with hospitality venues and major music labels.
The country’s best-known fashion designer has announced a surprise return to New Zealand Fashion Week: Kahuria – almost a decade after she quit runway shows here and overseas.
Karen Walker CNZM told an industry gathering last night she said an immediate “yes – we’re in” afterhearing plans for the reimagined event, scheduled to take place in Auckland from August 25-30.
“And the reason we’re in, is this vision has creativity at its heart. This vision is not 35 looks trotting up a runway.”
A “30-second elevator pitch standing at the kitchen bench eating chips” was all it took to convince her, Walker said.
The designer, who launched her label in 1987, showed her first runway collection in 1998 – the same year she made headlines with news she was selling into major New York department store, Barneys. She went on to sign partnerships with the likes of United States-based Anthropologie and her clothes have been worn by multiple celebrities, including Björk, Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, Sienna Miller, Claire Danes and Beth Ditto.
In 2016, Walker announced the runway show at New York Fashion Week would be her last, telling Vogue Australia “there are just way better ways to talk to people now than ten years ago. Today’s marketing tools are totally different and much more effective to what they were when we first started showing - why not use them?”.
Last night, Walker said she was yet to determine what form her 2025 New Zealand Fashion Week: Kahuria involvement would take, but she shared two challenges her husband and business partner Mikhail Gherman frequently lays down to their own team:
“Make sure your ideas are so good your competitor brands will think ‘***k, why didn’t we think of that?’
“And when you’re doing an event, it has to be so good that people will drive all the way from Hamilton to be there.”
The “elasticity” of the new format was exciting, said Walker, giving designers scope to imagine everything from a large-scale runway show to a table where children might be invited to make clothes for peg dolls.
“Do something huge or intimate ... quiet or loud.”
Scenes from runways past - Kiri Nathan's show at Kahuria: New Zealand Fashion Week 2023. Photo / Getty Images
Walker spoke at a “town hall” style meeting, attended by around 120 media, designers and fashion industry-adjacent leaders, at Josh Emett’s Auckland restaurant Onslow. Guests ate crayfish eclairs and caviar-topped fried chicken, while the “reimagined” event was outlined by Liam Taylor (announced in February as the director of the newly formed New Zealand Fashion Week governing board).
Taylor said that in 2025, New Zealand Fashion Week: Kahuria would focus on inclusivity, relevance, sustainability and format.
Shed 10 would be the main venue, but attendees could expect to go “beyond the runway” with fewer (but bigger) weekday shows, a packed weekend schedule, and more collaborations with hospitality venues (think designer breakfasts, lunches and dinners, off-site pop-ups and shows, and the opportunity for designers to tie in-store events to the week). A speaker series would be aspirational but also practical – offering everything from advice about e-commerce to the logistics of sending product overseas.
“Not every designer wants to do a runway show,” Taylor said.
He said talks were under way to involve major music labels in the week and he confirmed two major sponsors – Auckland Council’s cultural and economic agency, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, and Hotel Indigo.
New Zealand Fashion Week was founded in 2001 by Dame Pieter Stewart. In 2021, the event was acquired by businessman Feroz Ali’s Aligroup. Fashion Week was cancelled last year, with Ali citing the economic downturn and low consumer confidence.
The new governing board that will oversee Fashion Week’s 2025 return comprises Liam Taylor (founder of brand and communications agency Darkhorse), Natalie Xenita, (ex-vice-president and managing director of IMG Fashion Events & Properties Asia Pacific), Dan Ahwa (former creative director of NZME’s Viva) and Murray Bevan (director and founder of fashion public relations agency Showroom 22).
