Designs on the material world

STREET CRED: Sophie Stevens wearing her own Streetwear entry for the Hokonui awards.

A swathe of 30 aspiring fashionistas from St Matthew's Collegiate School have made bids to enter the 2015 Hokonui Fashion Design Awards as part of their NCEA assessments for the year.

Trinity Schools spokeswoman Natalie Finnigan said students from the Masterton school had previously entered the annual contest but the greater number this year was due to soft material teacher Ruth Bucknell and "her innovative and forward-thinking approach to NCEA assessments".

Rather than organising assessments in her classes "that are purely focused on meeting the assessment criteria", Ms Finnigan said, students were urged to challenge themselves and apply their learning "to a real-world environment" and enter the competition.

The contest began in 1988 and is now the longest-running fashion design awards of its kind in New Zealand and the premium competitive platform in the country for amateur homegrown designers.

The number and calibre of competitive garments had increased at successive contests, as had the prize packages, entrants and crowds; and this year judges will include Denise L'Estrange Corbet and Dr Margot Barton of the Otago Polytechnic School of Fashion.

The panels of judges at the event had over the years included renowned designers Karen Walker, Nic Blanchet, Francis Hooper, Trelise Cooper, and Kiwi designer Kate Sylvester.

"The awards are great because they gives our students challenging specifications to work to that go above and beyond the assessment criteria and ask them to be fashion forward in their thinking," Mrs Bucknell said. "It's about innovation and originality and they know that they can't just replicate what they'd see in a fashion store - they need to be pushing themselves to find their own perspective."

NZ used to have national secondary school design awards but the competition fell over several years ago.

Mrs Bucknell said a national secondary school contest was now defunct and the Hokonui event was an excellent alternative due to its longevity and the inclusion of a schools category.

Mrs Bucknell, a former soft materials teacher at Wairarapa College, said the contest offered design students runway experience that was "quite different from designing clothes for themselves or their friends to wear, because it stretches them artistically, gives them significant deadlines to work to, and exposes them to a level of competition they've not encountered before".

Successful entries also exposed students' work to design houses and industry scouts and helped flesh out their design experience and CVs, she said.

The schools section has three categories, Streetwear, Recycled and Nightlife. Two students have entered designs in more than one category.

Successful entrants will be named this weekend.

"They're really excited about the awards this time - particularly in the last few weeks of term when all the garments were made and they were styling, photographing and packing their things up to send down to the awards, they were just in awe of what they had all achieved."

Principal Kiri Gill said she had enjoyed the activity the awards had generated at the school and the groups of girls "parading past my office windows in their amazing designs" on their way to photo-shoot locations around the school.