Winter style heats up at Hokonui Fashion Design Awards

Old newspapers with stories of the Teviot Valley, nuts and bolts and a tyre tube from a local farm and business all combined into a winning garment for Ettrick’s Nicole Mason. Mason, 43, won the Hokonui Heritage Avante Garde section of the Hokonui Fashion Design Awards at the weekend. “I never expected to come away winner of my section, it just shows you don’t need to spend a lot of money on fashion — it’s just time and patience.” A hairdresser in Ettrick, she has always wanted to enter the competition but always doubted herself. Last year she entered for the first time and came away with runner up in the From the Earth section. This year’s garment, which took five months of on-and-off work, was inspired by how people always have a stash of newspapers around doing nothing. “So I decided to reuse them into fashion.” She also used old bike tubes from Highland Pharmacy in Roxburgh and off-cuts from her net curtains. The bodice is a used car tyre tube from Pinder Motors held together with nuts bolts and washers from a friend’s farm while the head piece is her daughter’s broken light shade with newspaper and tyre tubes added. That was very a last minute add to the outfit. Coffee and water helped create the antique look while it took hours with a hot glue gun, stapler, Mod Podge (a craft glue) and cutting up tubes to bring it all together. Two Otago Polytechnic fashion students also won sections. Still VisionThe winner of the New World Gore Sustainable Excellence Award and highly commended in the Country Living Open Winter Solstice Award was Kathryn Holloway, from the Otago Polytechnic School of Fashion. Photo: Still Vision Photography. A love of swimming and free diving in Dunedin’s cold water inspired Kathryn Holloway’s winning design. A member of the Frozen Sea Dogs, Holloway, 27, swims all year round with and without a wetsuit so she wanted an outfit she could put on afterwards to be warm and comfortable. Her jacket has multiple layers of wool for warmth and moisture wicking. “The coat is designed so I can take my wet togs off underneath it. The buttons and belt buckles are laser cut from an old, used truck tail light so I used plastics that already exist.” Holloway, who has been sewing since she was 7 but only came back to it seriously about a year ago, was shocked by the win. She often makes her own clothes as she is 1.88m. “It gives me hope that I can make a career in fashion and I’m on the right path and the judges like what I can design.” Still VisionVan de Water Jewellers Open Androgynous Award winner was Ben Rouse, from the Otago Polytechnic School of Fashion. Photo: Still Vision Photography Ben Rouse, 18, was inspired to study fashion after his grandma introduced him to a sewing machine. His inspiration began with the utilitarian brief and discovering the statement “form follows function”. “I looked into different military aspects of military wear and carried them over into my design process. I wanted to expand on the idea of functionality and started thinking about how many garments can only be worn one way. This idea of multi-use made me experiment with different ways I could make a garment be able to transform silhouettes.” It took him four weeks to create his garment so winning the section was “huge”. “It means a lot to me to see my work being appreciated by other people, as it is definitely hard sometimes to reassure myself on my designs and work. Specifically winning the androgynous section is a huge achievement because I definitely put myself in the category of designing for not one specific gender.”