Fashion designer Rory William Docherty has traded the runway for the stage. His costumes for new ballet Chrysalis express emotion through movement in a deeply personal dance work.
When Royal New Zealand Ballet resident choreographer Shaun James Kelly approached Rory William Docherty about designing costumes for a new contemporary
For Rory, whose label has gained local and international recognition for its meticulously crafted and timeless clothing, Shaun’s approach to storytelling was somewhat free-spirited.
“I was expecting characters and a plot, and clear visual cues,” he recalls, “coming from a fashion design background and working for other brands, I thought it’d be a similar thing, where the character equals the customer.”
But this was something entirely different – an exploration of an emotional journey through movement and fabric.
I met Rory back in Fashion Design School at Massey in Wellington, where we were in the same year. He’d honed his gestural but descriptive drawing style at high school, and was clearly the favourite of our design tutor. Over the past few years, I’ve watched him meld his wealth of technical experience with his artistic skill, and create one of New Zealand’s most exciting fashion labels - and an all-consuming career. When I speak to him, he has been working long days, but he’s embracing some exhaustion in the name of what he loves.
Rory has a rich and varied experience. His first design role, fresh out of design school, was at Swanndri. It was a grounding experience in commercial design. Moving to London, he worked in luxury fashion retail for Yohji Yamamoto, Prada and Miu Miu, which solidified his understanding of the importance of profit-making garments alongside conceptual pieces.
He then held technical roles for a large supplier and a mid-market brand respectively, which saw him travel to Italy for tailoring, to India for silks and beading, and Hong Kong and mainland China for knitwear.
Returning to New Zealand, he landed a job as designer and production manager at Workshop. Eight years ago, he was still managing the demands of that role when he began his own label as a personal artistic project.
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Advertise with NZME.Despite his level of experience, Rory found himself working in unexpected new ways for the Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB) presentation of Chrysalis.
“It was more about conveying an emotional arc,” Rory explains. ”There aren’t characters that the viewers know and recognise. [It’s not a case of] ‘okay, so that’s Romeo and that’s Juliet’. My role is to visually help translate the emotion that Shaun’s conveying through dance, in a way that connects it to the audience, so that they understand more clearly and obviously what’s going on.”
Chrysalis is a new work by RNZB soloist and choreographer in residence Shaun James Kelly. The autobiographical work is inspired by Shaun’s metamorphosis from young dancer in Scotland to his current role in New Zealand – a role he gained after he won the Harry Haythorne Choreographic Award.
The ballet is an exploration of relationships and self-discovery. At its heart lies a tribute to Shaun’s parents, represented by the main couple, who anchor the performance with a constancy that mirrors their long-standing relationship. They serve as a counterpoint to more transient relationships explored in other moments. Set to music by Phillip Glass, the work will premiere as one of three contemporary works in the RNZB’s upcoming season, touring Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch: Home, Land and Sea.
Rory’s role in Chrysalis began a year ago, after Shaun discovered Rory’s work on Instagram.
“The way he expresses himself through his designs strikes me as an echo of how I like to express myself through dance,” Shaun told me. “I reached out to Rory because I love the way he uses textures, patterns and colours, as well as how he creates his own artwork to use as the base of his designs.”
The pair later met at an event for Rory’s fashion label in Wellington. What started as a casual conversation evolved into an artistic partnership pushing the boundaries of dance and fashion.
The costumes have a language of their own, enhancing the choreographer’s narrative.
“The clothing in the work starts off by symbolising the hidden nature of your true personality – which is unmasked as those layers are removed... you become your true self with your full colours finally exposed,” explains Shaun.
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Advertise with NZME.“Another inspiration I take for the piece is how in everyday life people wear clothes as ‘costumes’ – to either conform, or not conform with societal expectations.”
Rory and Shaun’s approach was collaborative, working as closely as they could from different cities – Rory in his studio in Auckland, and Shaun in Wellington, along with the RNZB’s busy costume team on the third floor of the St James Theatre, under the direction of head of costume Donna Jefferis.
“It felt like having a full atelier,” says Rory, his eyes lighting up, “a far cry from my usual small studio setup.”
He approached the project with the same attention to detail that defines his fashion brand, while the team helped to bring the technical and practical considerations required for performance wear to his designs.
Those practical challenges were significant. Ballet costumes must withstand intense physical movement, frequent laundering, and the scrutiny of stage lighting.
“There’s been an open dialogue,” explains Rory. “They’ll come to me and say, during rehearsal the other day, during the lifts, it was slipping and turning around the body and this is what we propose to resolve this. And then we’ll kind of go back and forth.”
Shaun’s decades of dance experience helped inform the finer details.
“It has been easy to use my expertise to adjust the clothing designs from a dancer’s perspective, such as making sleeves shorter or longer for ease of dance,” he says. The costume team made mock-ups, suggesting modifications that balance both artistic vision and practical functionality.
In the ballet, the costumes begin minimally and gradually flood the stage with colour and print, mirroring a journey of personal discovery and emotional revelation.
“I created a specific painting for the piece,” Docherty reveals, “which was then recoloured multiple times to represent different emotional states.”
This isn’t just costume design then, it’s a form of visual storytelling that bridges fashion and performance. For Rory, it’s more than a one-off gig: the experience has already begun influencing his upcoming collection, with design elements from the ballet subtly weaving their way into his fashion line.
When Chrysalis premieres this month, Rory will witness his vision come to life on stage in Wellington. It will be a full circle moment – back when we were at Massey, that design class had a project sketching from RNZB rehearsals.
For those familiar with Rory’s fashion label, his costumes for this work will feel both familiar and transformed. His signature roomy trench coats, tailoring and illustrated textiles are present, but there are new layers of ideas – the trench coats are rendered in sheer organza, while pin-stripe and Prince of Wales check are meticulously created with top-stitching on suiting. His painterly prints appear on unitards – a nod to Rory’s love of David Bowie’s early stage aesthetics.
While these clothes are made with dancing in mind, together they form a cohesive and stylish collection, in a complementary colour palette. Most of these garments could have served as understudies for the collection he presented – to critical acclaim – at Australian Fashion Week last year. Rory will also be a part of this year’s New Zealand Fashion Week, with a creative installation in Auckland’s Britomart precinct to complement the designer shows at Shed 10 on the waterfront.
As Home, Land and Sea’s opening night approaches, there’s a palpable sense of excitement. For Rory, it represents a culmination of years of creative exploration – a moment where his understanding of fabric, tailoring, balanced proportions, movement and emotional expression come together in a truly unique way.
Home, Land & Sea, July 24 - August 9, Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch. To find out more, visit RNZB.org.nz
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