She’s the sole queen

Kathryn Wilson enjoys the mix of designing shoes and knitwear. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

As Johnny Depp and Kate Moss have shown, getting the name of the person you love tattooed on your body can be a mistake. So when Auckland shoe designer Kathryn Wilson was put on the spot she had no doubts about the word which would adorn her foot.


"I was in London and my friend kind of tricked me into getting a tattoo. She told me she wanted to get one for herself, but when we got there she had booked me in for one too," Wilson laughs.


"I couldn't back out, but I didn't know what to get - it was going to be on me for life. Then my friend asked me what was the one thing I would never stop loving, and I immediately thought shoes."


Now in her fourth season of designing her footwear, there are no signs that Wilson will be needing to laser off the word scarpa, Italian for shoes.


She has increased her collection to 14 pairs, sales have been rising by 20 per cent every season and she remains addicted to shoes.


"I left work a few nights ago at one in the morning. I was just getting my pyjamas on when I thought surely all those shoe boxes aren't full because I've got this wall in my bedroom that's stacked with boxes. So I went through and put them all in categories of summer and winter and imports and Kathryn Wilson shoes, so now all my shoes are all perfectly in order. I was sitting there laughing at myself, thinking if only someone could see me here at two in the morning on a Monday night."


So how many shoes does she have?


"We'll there are lots of piles - ones that I wear all the time, the ones I don't wear and some that I should wear more often. I don't know how many pairs I have - I'd say well over 100."


And that's not counting those she keeps at her mother's house. These are the shoes which Wilson doesn't wear any more but has to keep - she can't remember ever throwing a pair of shoes away.


"Even if they are five years old and I've only worn them once, I keep them."


She admits that her collection pales in comparison to that of Princess Anne's, who she met at a reception at New Zealand House in London.


"I said to her 'a girl can never have too many pairs of shoes', to which she replied 'I totally agree with you. I've just auctioned off a few hundred, but I've still got thousands left.' And then she seemed more interested in talking to me about my boyfriend back home," Wilson laughs.


While Her Royal Highness hasn't made it to the hallowed heights of having a style of Kathryn Wilson shoes named after her, celebrities such as Sadie Frost and Sienna Miller provided some naming inspiration for Wilson's Winter 05 Collection.


"If it reminds me of someone, it makes sense to me to name a shoe after them," she explains. "Because that's really the style that I am after."


Wilson has found it sometimes difficult being a shoe designer here. When she began, it seemed almost impossible - there were no courses and few mentors to learn the trade from, shoe factories were closing down by the dozen and the expense of making a pair of sample shoes was mindblowing. However, three years ago Wilson won an AMP scholarship, allowing her to study in Europe.


"It was a fashion degree but I re-wrote the briefs and changed things so that I could do my assignments on shoes," says Wilson.


"By the end of it everyone there knew I wanted to do shoes and not fashion - I became the shoe girl from New Zealand."


Returning home, she took a job as an assistant knitwear designer at Caroline Sills, which soon expanded to include her shoe label, under the Sills umbrella.


Wilson is still designing knitwear, and while she would love to focus on designing her shoes fulltime, she enjoys the mix.


She says the past few years have been a learning process. "You learn what styles sell in retail. It's always the ones that I love the most that don't really sell," she laughs. "I'm kind of learning that the market doesn't always have the same tastes as me."