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New Zealanders are well used to wearing merino sportswear and outdoor clothing but it is one young designer’s mission to dress many more of us in high-fashion New Zealand merino. Words: Kate Coughlan; Photos: Tessa Chrisp.
THERE IS NOTHING equivocal about Christina Perriam. She’s a 30 year old who knows exactly where she is going and how she will get there. If she has her way with New Zealand women, they’ll be donning their superfine New Zealand merino glad rags along with their high heels, slipping into something casual and elegant made from merino for the weekends and even hopping into bed to sleep in superfine merino pyjamas. The only thing this young fashion powerhouse doesn’t want to do with merino is create more outdoor or sports clothing.
The route to this is via her recently relaunched eponymous fashion label of which she is the designer, the manufacturer and the retailer through her website and catalogue. Also on her business plan is a nationwide chain of flagship stores and if it’s in the business plan chances are, with this determined woman, it will happen.
“It’s in my genes,” she says of the ambition to which she’s held fast since childhood. And that’s the truth of it: her DNA includes growing up on Bendigo, one of the country’s leading merino-producing stations (see last issue of NZ Life & Leisure) with a father who was pivotal in reshaping the marketing of New Zealand’s superfine fleece and a mother who pioneered retailing merino garments at The Merino Shop in the small rural village of Tarras near Cromwell.
“I always knew what I wanted to be right from my early years – a fashion designer using New Zealand merino. It’s not just that merino is part of my heritage, it is also my lifestyle. It is who we are. And I wanted to contribute, in terms of my family, in a different way.”
Her mother Heather says she knew when Christina was very young that she’d become a fashion designer. “My friend and neighbour Helen Pledger, whose daughter Kate is Christina’s good friend, had the girls designing dolls’ clothes. Little Kate would be measuring and pinning fabric before carefully starting the cutting. Christina would pick up the fabric, look at it for a while, then begin confidently cutting to a pattern she had in her head.”
That certainty has already taken Christina a long way in the fashion world. As a sixth-form boarder at St Hilda’s in Dunedin, she persuaded renowned New Zealand fashion designer Tanya Carlson to let her observe and learn in her design studio. In her final year at school she entered the national Young Designer Awards and became a finalist, helped along by Tanya. On graduating from Massey University with a Bachelor of Design degree, she won the Best End-of-Year Collection prize with a range made entirely from Italian-spun Bendigo merino.
Surprisingly for such a young designer, she was asked by Unity Collection (a retailer of high-end women’s fashion) to supply garments for their Wellington and Auckland stores. When she was chosen by Massey to show at Australian Fashion Week the following year, the experience of that – the professional models and the professionally produced show – made her realize how exciting the industry could be, how much she had to learn and the heights to which she could aspire.
A couple of years with the Dunedin Fashion Incubator taught her a lot about the business of fashion and then she was off wholesaling her ranges throughout New Zealand as well as designing, manufacturing and retailing for her own shop in Wanaka.
“The fashion world has always called me and I have always tailored my work to New Zealand merino. But becoming a finalist in the Young Designer Awards really got me going and inspired me to do well.” Christina says she was lucky that while she was studying at Wellington Polytechnic as part of the diploma course the degree programme was introduced by Massey, enabling her to cross-credit. “I was fortunate to get both disciplines; the diploma was practical and the degree gave me the business expertise. Anyone can be a good designer but to be good at business as well, that’s hard. There is a high rate of business failure among fashion designers. It’s a hard industry.”
But Christina was on a fast track to success by then. Within a couple of years of graduation she was continuing with her design and New Zealand manufacturing operation and had opened a self-named retail store in Wanaka where she served the customers herself. “Fashion is my passion and I loved serving the customers and helping them to find the right look and garment.
“But I sort of started going down the wrong path. My vision when I set out was to be a fashion designer selling my own label and creating a brand, but because my shop was such a big space I was having to buy in other labels to fill it and I was becoming a retailer. I was getting distracted by running a big shop as well as everything else and I was surviving by just sheer hard work.”
It took four years and yet another award for Christina to realize that she was on the wrong track. This time she was awarded the Young Merino Biella Scholarship, run by Merino Inc (for a young leader in the merino industry in New Zealand) to the woollen mills in Biella, Northern Italy, to see how wool is processed into worsted superfine merino fabric.
Through the Perriam family involvement with Otamatapaio Station (a partnership with Reda Mills of Italy) Christina knew something of the processes involved. However, the international exposure and a chance to visit and observe in the fashion designer Kristina Ti’s workroom in Turin opened her eyes to a whole new world. “It really was a wonderful experience to see such beautiful clothes with the attention to detail and classic elegance of fashion at this level.”
“There really is a big world out there, I thought, where I can learn and get that international exposure. If I’m going to take the chance and go and see it, I’d better go now. At 29 the likelihood of leaving will get less and less in the future.”
She spent the next 18 months based in London, working in the head offices of suppliers to high-street retailers doing design and garment-technician work, learning how these businesses operate. “I got to see, on a big scale, how the business model worked, how to run a fashion business. It gave me a greater understanding of what is involved and clarified my ideas of what I wanted to produce.”
Looking back she says she did begin to lose her way when trying to manage the retail and design/manufacture sides of her business. But she is back now and fully focused on relaunching her fashion label, creating key, affordable but beautiful pieces that New Zealand women will treasure and keep in their wardrobes for many years. And then there’s the New Zealand merino sleepwear range which caters for the growing need for organic, healthy, sustainable fibres to be worn next to the skin.
So single-minded is Christina in pursuit of this goal that she told her father she planned to set up camp in an old fisherman’s bach belonging to her family at Crippletown on the eastern shores of Lake Dunstan. Both her brothers had spent some of their bachelor years in the tatty crib, as had variously disreputable renters including some marijuana growers who infamously failed to heist gold from the historic Gold Mining Village several kilometres below the Cromwell Bridge. (This was, Christina points out, before her family owned it.) “You can’t move into that,” her father said, “it’s full of rats.”
“I wanted to put all my resources into my label so a house had to come second,” she says with purposefulness that brooks no distraction. The rats have long gone, no doubt exhausted by all the activity involved in bringing the fisherman’s crib up to a suitable standard for a designing woman.
