Blending Māori heritage with global style, Tessa Lont’s Kapa collection fuses kapa haka traditions, Formula One inspiration, and meticulous craftsmanship.
Pink and blue tassels swish in rhythmic motion, a modern piupiu alive with movement and energy. The cocktail dress of thousands of threads in the colours of the Alpine
If you distil her vision further, this collection is a wearable embodiment of Kapa; the Māori term for gathering as a group. Honouring the power of collective strength.
Growing up in Waitara, Taranaki, Tessa (Te Atiawa, Ngāti Porou and Ngāi Tahu) was schooled through Te Kōhanga Reo and performed kapa haka at Te Matatini as a teenager. She’s also proud of her Dutch heritage and spent a few months living in Holland with her grandfather to learn more about her whakapapa.
For the past 10 years, she’s been based mainly in Singapore – a nation nutty about F1. The riot of colour and celebration provides stimulus for the designer, whose collections have a strong storytelling vibe.
Statement pieces include a “Ferrari-red” corset and pant and “McLaren” orange jumpsuit with racing stripes, as well as the pink and blue piupiu. Lont researched the exact Pantone colours to replicate the teams’ colours and saw it as an opportunity to do something bright.
The collection is split into three parts – activewear, “which is all about training”; uniform “for representing”; and gowns “that are for performing”, as well as menswear and some gender-neutral looks.
For the logo, she uses her Dutch family Lont crest, dating from the 1500s, on jackets and jumpers – a beautiful swan that’s likely to inspire more logo mania. Tāniko patterns are printed on to knits, linings or painstakingly beaded on to the bodice of gown – the latter took five months to complete and is reflected in the $6196 price tag.
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Advertise with NZME.Luxury fabrics include silk wool, while jackets have peephole cutouts with a practical purpose, because it’s generally too hot for long sleeves in Singapore.
It’s a stunning, fresh expression of cultural heritage and world-class design with global appeal. F1 drivers Aurelia Nobels and Abbi Pulling have both coveted her corsets and jumpsuits.
Last month, Lontessa showed Kapa on the runway at Āhua, Tāmaki Makaurau’s Underground Fashion Week. In past years, she has shown at New Zealand Fashion Week – the last time in 2023 with a solo show. It was being part of the Miromoda showcase in 2018, but that led to her being invited by Oxford Fashion Studio to show at New York (SS 2019), Paris (AW 2019 & 2020) and London (SS 2022) Fashion Weeks. She opened her Singapore Showroom in 2019, though it was after Paris that her audience took her seriously. Now she’s focused on taking on Hong Kong, where she moved with her husband 18 months ago. Which means she’s now splitting her time between Hong Kong, Singapore and Aotearoa.
During the design phase, she likes to be alone, and her bolthole is a tiny apartment in Taranaki.
“It’s where I feel like there’s no pressure to do anything. It’s the opportunity to hibernate for a bit, draw and come up with new concepts.”
Her seamstress grandmother, Ollie Bailey, 84, was a huge influence. She worked for Swanndri for 30 years until the brand moved production offshore.
“She’s still sewing and making clothes for her friends, and on this trip home she made me a sample to create some Māori [Women’s] Welfare League uniforms,” says Tessa.
“We’ve always had this connection of our love of designing and making clothes. When I was little, I would design dresses, and she’d make them for me to wear to church. When I was a teen, she’d make clothes for me and my friends. For my first collection show, she was the seamstress because I couldn’t sew back then.”
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Advertise with NZME.Lont studied industrial design and contemporary Māori art as a side paper in Wellington, but you could say that finding her way in fashion was destined. She planned for the industrial fabrics she designed to upholster furniture, but was persuaded to fashion them into garments instead. At the time, she was modelling for WOW (World of WearableArt) and friends offered to model for free and her grandmother to sew up ideas.
She presented her first collection in 2010 on her home Ōawe Marae because she wanted local support and approval before she took her ideas out into the world.
Afterwards, she worked in Portugal designing cosmetic containers and packaging and realised creating clothing was her passion. On her return, she enrolled in 2013 for a year at the New Zealand Academy of Fashion, where she learned how to sew and make patterns.
She has also adopted a one-season and slow fashion approach. Most garments are made to order, and fabrics are chosen with environmental impact in mind: timeless, quality items that fit well and last a lifetime.
Her next collection, which she is partway through creating, is inspired by James Clavell’s novel Tai-Pan, about European and American traders who move into Hong Kong in 1842 after the end of the First Opium War.
“Scottish pirates, dandyism, different cultures colliding together and exploring new territory, which is what I’m connecting at the moment,” says Tessa.
“I’ve decided to call it Tūhura, my grandmother’s name on my mother’s side, which means ‘to explore’.”
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