Southern Comforts

Some of the world’s most innovative fashion is put on show at iD Dunedin Fashion Week.

Dunedin might just be New Zealand’s fashion capital. Its cold winters and brooding gothic architecture provide the perfect backdrop to the typically Antipodean dark and edgy style, while the city itself has been a hotbed of talent, fostering established fashion designers like Nom*D to talents like Charmaine Reveley. But perhaps more than anything else it is iD Dunedin Fashion Week that cements Dunedin’s spot on the country’s sartorial map. This isn’t just some provincial strut down a cobbled-together runway, no, this is an international fashion event.

Showcasing their winter 2010 collections, six high profile labels graced the catwalk including Nom*D, Carlson, Mild Red, Cherry Cotton Candy, Charmaine Reveley and twenty-seven names. New labels to iD this year were menswear label Rembrandt and Company of Strangers, by Sara Aspinall.

The highlight of the iD calendar was the lineup for the iD Dunedin Emerging Designer Award. Emerging designers came from around the world to send their collections down the runway. What makes iD stand out is the event’s fostering of ideas and creativity, as seen in the exciting range of fantastical and conceptual pieces that showcased craftsmanship, narrative and materiality. Kiwi designer Roxanna Zamani from Otago Polytechnic was one of the crowd favourites with her delicately folded and layered pieces, while Croatian designer Igor Galas won the Emerging Designer award as well as the Mittelmoda prize, which will allow him to show his work again to an international audience at Gorizia in northeast Italy in one of the world’s most coveted prizes for emerging designers.

In a welcome twist, Zamani and fellow Otago Polytechic student Sophie Brooke Hardy have also been chosen as two of just 29 finalists to take part in the Mittelmoda Fashion Award. urbis