Pushing fashion forward

Accomplished Dunedin milliner, designer and educator Margo Barton has worked tirelessly to help shape the iD fashion events into international drawcards. Jude Hathaway catches up with her on the eve of 2012 iD Dunedin Fashion Week.

Margo Barton outside iD's Dunedin Railway Station venue. Photo by Linda Robertson.
Margo Barton outside iD's Dunedin Railway Station venue. Photo by Linda Robertson.
Fashion or butchery.

That was the choice a young Margo Barton faced on completing her secondary school studies at St Hilda's Collegiate, in Dunedin.

She loved clothes and fashion and intended to work in the area but could also envisage developing the family business, Barton's Butchery, into a delicatessen. It was a real landmark, after all. Remember the pink pigs scurrying around the veranda pelmet in their neon splendour on the corner of Manse and Stafford streets?

But her father, Reg Barton, put a firm stop to the notion.

"He told me I could be anything I wanted to be anywhere in the world - just not a butcher," Ms Barton recalls with her signature smile.

Sufficiently dissuaded, she followed her love of design, a decision that would prove a winner for Dunedin's and New Zealand's fashion industry.

Over the next two decades, Ms Barton has created her own star as a milliner. She has also been instrumental in the development of fashion studies at the Otago Polytechnic School of Design, where she began as a part-time tutor in design and drawing in 1990. Today she is academic leader and principal lecturer, fashion.

But this gracious,generous-spirited lady has also drawn on natural entrepreneurial abilities to help build the iD Dunedin brand as a member of the voluntary iD Dunedin organising committee, established in 2000.

Her "baby" has been the iD International Emerging Designer Awards event. An exciting, sought-after show in the now full-blown iD Dunedin Fashion Week, it was first held in a large marquee in the central carriageway of the Octagon, Dunedin in 2005.

The crowd was intrigued and loved the creativity of the ingenue designers. The designers were thrilled to have a public showcase for their work.

The concept grew legs.

The emerging designers show had, in fact, been in an embryonic state since 1999, when Ms Barton and Dunedin fashion designer Andrea Bentley headed to the finals of the prestigious Mittelmoda design awards, held annually in Gorizia, Italy. Their remarkable collection of avant-garde merino and feather outfits set off by Ms Barton's stunning headwear had shown the right stuff to be accepted.

From there, the seeds were sown.

Says Ms Barton: "I looked around the wee city of Gorizia and thought that Dunedin would be perfect to host such an event. Back in Dunedin I put the idea to the iD team and two of its members, Diann Waugh and Margi Robertson, told me I needed to join the committee.

"From there, we started to look seriously at its potential."

Formulating the concept took a few years and "quite a few" committee meetings.

"None of the ideas were mine only. The event was built around a solid team effort by the committee and the assistance of the iD event co-ordinator, Annemarie Mains, and latterly, Victoria Muir. This is always how the best ideas are formulated and actioned.

"They're a wonderful team. No-one could have ever done it on their own."

Not that it is all clothes and creativity. The iD organisers, and Ms Barton among them, have had to wrestle with the commercial reality of putting the event together. More than once, the issue of sponsorship, or the lack of it, has threatened to cramp iD's style.

"It is always an issue, but somehow we manage to secure it and get on with the show. This is mainly thanks to iD chairwoman Susie Staley. Without her, I don't know where we would be," Ms Barton says.

While the inaugural show was a New Zealand-Australia affair, from 2006 it has become a truly international competition with finalists from up to 10 countries.

And today, ties between iD Dunedin and Mittelmoda are stronger than ever, with one of the prizes a place at Mittelmoda.

Ms Barton talks enthusiastically of the support she's had from Otago Polytechnic, in involving its fashion school with iD. "More recently, we've started to use the event as a teaching opportunity, with year three students and myself planning and managing backstage at the show."

She has also maintained the relationship between the fashion school and Mittelmoda through a successful visiting scholarship attracting talented overseas designers.

Among those watching the evolution of the event particularly closely has been Mittelmoda's project supervisor, Stefano Sopelza, who has come to Dunedin every year. He vividly recalls Ms Barton and Ms Bentley's collection that showed at Mittelmoda 1999 and went on to be modelled at the Alta Moda event in Rome. He is acutely aware of Ms Barton's abilities.

"Margo is what my ideal designer should be. She's talented, eager to know and learn, passionate, hard-working and humble. She also has an amazing heart, which enables her to create [as a designer] and share [as a tutor]," he said when contacted last week.

He recalled how her eyes "smile" in appreciation when she looks at photos of designers' work in magazines or when she's just observing young designers' collections.

He admires how she sees "both sides of the coin" through her perspective as a designer, tutor and mother of three. "She knows what young designers need and it is the same with the emerging designers' show.

Through her experience of overseas shows, she knows what is necessary to make it successful from both the designers' and the audience's standpoint. What she and the others on the iD committee have done for the event is superb."

Ms Barton and Ms Bentley were, in fact, the first Kiwis to enter the Mittelmoda awards, which were established in 1993 to source and showcase emerging designer talent from around the world.

In 2010 Ms Barton took a place on the judging panel in Gorizia, the experience putting her in touch with many international fashion heavyweights.

In fact, Ms Barton could name-drop with the best of them, if it were not against her nature.

Her networks in the design world have been developed organically. She knows iD's 2012 guest international designer, Lutz Huelle, of Paris, through a friend who worked with him and his partner, David Ballu. And another of this year's international guests, Nicholas Huxley, director of the Sydney Institute of Technology, was a teacher at the Fashion Design Studio in Sydney, Australia from which Ms Barton graduated in 1984. They remain in touch and both are involved in the international fashion educators' group, the International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutions.

She also maintains a strong interest in her graduate students.

Says Caroline Terpstra, head of the Otago Polytechnic School of Design: "Margo has nurtured and inspired hundreds of Otago Polytechnic graduates as they make their way in the fashion industry. She maintains contact with them and they with her. It is her ability to build and be part of a wider fashion community that makes her so successful as an academic leader and mentor to staff and students."

On her return to Dunedin in 1989, where she and her husband, Peter Buchanan, a primary school teacher at Bathgate School, decided to settle, she quickly established a name for herself as a milliner with clout.

"I'd designed a range of clothes when I first returned to New Zealand but by 1992 had turned to millinery. A hat is a fashion object that allows a very sculptural approach. Designing in a sculptural manner can also be done with clothes through draping, but millinery is different, as it sits on the head rather than having to conform to the body's lumps and bumps," she says.

Between family, work and study commitments (she recently completed the exegesis part of a PhD, and is preparing a mid-year exhibition and examination in Melbourne), she continues to execute splendid headwear for designers and private clients.

Hers were the statement 10-gallon hats that completed the Nom*D collection shown at New Zealand Fashion Week 2010 and iD 2011. She has also worked in collaboration with others, such as Tanya Carlson (Carlson), Donna Tulloch (Mild Red) and Auckland designer Doris de Pont.

Her millinery is a perfect testament to the depth of her design and artistic skills.

Anything from a delicate headpiece for a mother of the bride to a bountiful creation that punctuates the sartorial vibe of the members' stand on race day displays her clever techniques and imaginative use of fabrications, textures and detailing.

Whether dramatic, romantic, seductive, defiant, avant-garde, whimsical or exuding cool vintage style, a Margo Barton original is always poetic.

Her works also reflect her individual approach to fashion ... eclectic, unpredictable and never dull.

In 2009, she told the Otago Daily Times' Sarah Harvey that her fashion style was "a mix of vintage, New Zealand designers and directional international designers all accessorised with good basics from Glassons and Farmers".

With regard to her style and its evolution through the years, she said: "It has become more eclectic since my confidence to rebel against trends and to dress for me grows, along with the increase in my vintage collection."

Five years on, this grounded approach has not changed.

The rhythm of her life, which is a happy balance between her career in fashion, her husband and their family of three and her favourite pastime, swimming, remains in sync. This summer, she added rowing to her interests - another story for another time.

The coming week will leave her less time for the water as the iD events kick into gear for the 13th year of her involvement.

Within these years, has there been a major highlight?

"Definitely Zandra Rhodes coming to Dunedin with artist Andrew Logan as the international guest in 2010. Here was a long-established, revered British designer with us who was enthusiastic and impressed with what we were accomplishing.

"She raised the benchmark for the iD week and gave us the confidence to continue to approach others of her calibre to come to Dunedin. It keeps the future of iD bright."

 


The shows

• The iD International Emerging Designer Awards Show is at the Lion Foundation Arena, Edgar Centre on Thursday, at 7pm.
• The iD Fashion Show on the Dunedin Railway Station platform is on Friday and next Saturday from 8pm.


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