People who’ve met Adrian Hailwood in his Auckland store will vouch for his unassuming air. But gone are the days when he was just ‘the tee shirt guy’. 800 people packed into the Westpac Shed for his ‘Winter State’ AW 2013 show, which featured everything from knitwear to workwear to a show-stopping backless gold dress for the finale. All the more impressive when you remember this is a guy who only really began cutting his fashion teeth around the same time as the label’s inception, back in 2001.
Hailwood’s collections often have a sense of a ‘new retro’ about them, and this collection was no exception, with a strong seventies vibe coming through. Girls with long, unprocessed hair paraded garments in a palate of dusky browns, blues and pinks, punctuated by purples and golds. Quilted jackets were a key piece, either shiny black bombers thrown over crop tops or in longer-line designs paired with printed wrap skirts. The print in question is Hailwood’s horse head motif, which showed up not only on the expected sweaters but also embroidered onto silk tops and longer gowns fit for a ball.
What Hailwood’s background as a tee shirt designer lends to his current collections is a street-ready quality that takes garments easily from the runway to his customers’ backs. So structured dresses and pencil skirts were finished in soft jersey, tailored pants featured drawstring waists and cuts erred on ‘oversized’. The favourite outfits for me had to be the high-low pairings of the horse-motif sweaters and miniskirts. The snuggly tops were a perfect foil to the mirror-ball effect skirts which indicate an optimistic forecast for next winter’s weather.
The show was also a chance to get a first view of Hailwood’s new shoe capsule collection being launched this week with Mi Piaci. The five designs cover all bases, from skyscraper snake print sandals (aptly named the ‘Empire State’ heels) to a work-ready nubuck court. Hailwood certainly has come a long way – it’s not every designer who gets to send models down the runway dressed head to toe in pieces created especially to fit their specific vision.
If there was one criticism, it would be that on a few of the girls the dresses seemed ill-fitting. Not due to a lack of craftsmanship in the construction, but ironically (given the pressure on models to be so thin) because the tailoring would have been better suited to slightly fuller figures.
Clothing that looks even better off the runway than on – now there’s something we can applaud.
CLICK HERE to view Hailwood NZFW12 – Runway
– Delaney MacDonald
Images: Norrie Montgomery, The A-List
