After a racing start in South Auckland, Christopher Smith is changing lanes and taking his independent label Au Concours to Paris Fashion Week. He talks to Jessica-Belle Greer.
At Dover Street Market in London – a highly conceptual fashion store that attracts luxury shoppers – Christopher Smith is sitting at
“I have always been very highly opinionated and I think that has led to some good things and some bad things in life,” he says.
Growing up in South Auckland, Smith critiqued his mother’s outfits “from the age of 3”. Together they would watch Trinny and Susannah, and he also enjoyed Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Gok Wan’s styling shows. “Sure, they weren’t very good style looking back, but they were definitely influential.”
Attending Rosehill College in the early 2000s, he was “a self-proclaimed metrosexual”. He also listened to metal music, and wore ripped old black tees and skinny jeans, and started growing his hair “down to my ass”.
But it wasn’t until he went to university, studying creative technologies at AUT from 2012, that he started to think about fashion more seriously.
“I realised there was a whole group of these guys that were talking about clothing, and it wasn’t frowned upon,” he says. “You were able to talk about this openly, and that was amazing.”
With his course-related costs, he started op-shopping with friends, and bought only band tees brand new. On his way to university, he would pass the Crane Brothers contemporary tailoring store on High St, and his final project was shooting a documentary with designer Murray Crane at New Zealand Fashion Week.
Another early influence was his father’s love of cars. Smith started photographing their visits to car shows for his Freshly Whipped blog. With its success, he was sent to Tokyo and all over Australia to shoot events, including work with the Red Bull drifter “Mad” Mike Whiddett.
“My dad is a big driving force in what I do,” says Smith.
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Advertise with NZME.Straight out of university, he landed an editorial role at a car magazine, and hated it.
“You get your dream job, or so you think, and then it’s totally not at all what you think it is.”
Instead, he freelanced as a photographer for many in the fashion industry, including Murray Crane (again), Juliette Hogan and Harman Grubisa.
In 2018, he went in-house at Alt Group and stayed for five years. There, he learnt the business side of fashion while looking after the Stolen Girlfriends Club account.
“Chris is attitude with a capital A,” says Alt Group co-founder and managing director Ben Corban. “He operates in the zeitgeist at the intersection of design and culture.
“He was one of the few people we knew who would spend every weekend really digging, in an archaeological way, into second-hand stores across New Zealand.
“He always had the ability to put together a look that was unexpected but somehow worked – high, low, luxury, street combinations with an edge, often a sense of irreverent humour and a focus on detailing. Founding a fashion brand was inevitable.”
While wearing the unofficial Alt uniform of head-to-toe black, Smith helped with redesigning Stolen Girlfriends Club’s shops, contributing to the collections, photographing them, working on the fashion shows – including one in the manufactured rain at Avondale Racecourse – and winning over new stockists, such as Ssense.
“It was a lot of late nights and a lot of crazy s*** and a lot of learning,” says Smith. “I just loved the hell out of it, every minute of it.”
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After the pandemic lockdowns, Smith and his partner Nicola Irving, a marketing manager for a fine jewellery brand, bought one-way tickets to Berlin, where he started to wear more colour.
“It was the first time I felt really anonymous,” he says. “I could wear what I felt like I wanted to wear all along.”
He landed a role at an advertising agency, where he missed doing more creative work. “So, I quit that job and I quickly realised that I wanted to be my own brand.”
Au Concours is French for being “in the competition”, but it is also an ode to the Concours d’Elegance car show Smith would attend with his father back in Auckland. The show celebrated vintage cars with meticulous restoration and detailing. As a French label, from a Kiwi living overseas, Smith also likes the interpretive nature of the name.
Soon after starting work on the label, he and Irving moved to London, where they are still based, and he found a network of manufacturers, all not far from his home near Stoke Newington.
Everything is made in England, except for hats that have been outsourced to specialist makers in Portugal. “It’s not cheap to make here, and it’s not fast, but to see a direct impact on the people that I’m working with, it feels quite cool.”
Au Concours launched with one shirt, the Jacky Western, inspired by a denim one worn in a photograph of Jacky Ickx at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance car race in 1973. It’s also inspired by the denim culture Smith experienced while travelling in Japan, with the fabric coming from Kaihara, a leader in denim production for over a century. With German pearl snap domes - from the world’s oldest family-owned button manufacturer - no corners have been cut in production.
Smith’s friend Calum Buchanan, then a Savile Row pattern maker, cleaned up the design and created the first official patterns.
“Chris doesn’t shy away from a challenge,” says Buchanan. “He has chosen to pursue distinctive designs which require unique problem solving and creative skills. This, combined with the decision to partner with suppliers and manufacturers in London and Japan, means that Au Concours produces premium products with integrity and longevity.”
The Cervert Fabricators Coat, for example, is made from a single piece of heavyweight cowhide. Named after the French driver François Cevert, it’s inspired by early 20th-century welders’ and fabricators’ coats. With a large rounded collar, it looks tough but playful.
“When shooting cars, I was surrounded by these blokes that were really trying to continually push hyper-masculinity,” says Smith. “But I was always, like … Couldn’t things be a little bit more fun?
“A lot of my inspiration comes from the 70s, when guys were dressing a little bit flirty and freaky, and you had these collars that were crazy, and colours that were different, and bootcut pants – all these things that, somewhere along the line, got lost.”
While a lot more contemporary, Smith’s designs have what he calls a similar “stoic flirtiness”. They can also change style gears. “You could wear my garments under a car or to a ball.”
The most important thing is that the designs go the distance. “I want things that will fade and will get beaten up and changed over their life,” he says. “I want people to own it for 40 years and be able to pass it on to their kids and know that it’s a great jacket and it still holds up.”
Smith has a keen interest in how garments age, and he’s continued his love of collecting at markets and fairs. London apartments are known for their limited storage options, but he’s managed to keep a “full archive of vintage clothing” from around the 1700s to the 1990s.
Currently, Smith is sampling his Summer ’26 collection, which comprises about 20 pieces. At the end of June, he will take Au Concours to the menswear edition of Paris Fashion Week, with the Tora Tora Showroom. Away from the flashy runways, the showroom is a chance to connect with wholesalers, especially from Japan and America. “Everyone comes to Paris,” Smith says. “It’s the place that everyone buys.”
He has visited the Paris showrooms before, when friend Jordan Gibson of Checks Downtown was showing, and he quietly hoped he would be here with his own label next.
“Chris has an infectious personality and sense of humour, plus you can quickly tell he has an inquisitive mind, a knack for connecting with people, and a Swiss-army-knife-like set of abilities and capability to learn,” says Gibson.
“We’ve had many chats over the years about a concept brewing in the back of Chris’ mind. While doing other things, fashion always seemed to be his central interest. To see what it’s materialised as is a joy to observe.”
“Pukekohe to Paris,” laughs Smith, back at Dover Street Market – before name-checking other successful “Pukekohians”, from Formula One driver Liam Lawson to Anita Chhiba, the founder of Diet Paratha, a creative agency and community for global South Asian culture.
Smith’s finish line is to have a full and sustainable collection on his own terms, not following seasonal fashion cycles for subsequent laps. To bring it full circle, being stocked at DSM, where he sits today, is another major play.
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