Lesina Letufuga, Teresa Heather and Hope Crockett, all 18, outside McAuley High School in Auckland’s Otahuhu. Their school dance group beat 10,000 other performers to win Polyfest 2018 – an annual Polynesian dance competition that Emilia Wickstead took part in as a teenager.
Derek Henderson
I’m a big believer in knowing where you come from and where that’s taken you,” says Emilia Wickstead. We’re in the freshly painted white studio in which her company installed itself only a week ago. It seems appropriate that the new office overlooks fleets of red buses coming and going at a busy west London terminal, as the notions of home, work and journeys have been on the 35-year-old New Zealander’s mind of late. Eleven years since she started her made-to-measure label in a South Kensington flat, and seven years since she started showing ready-to-wear collections at London Fashion Week, she’s come a long way.
Silvia Cartwright, 75, is a judge. In 1989, she became the first female Chief District Court Judge, and in 1993, the first woman to be appointed to New Zealand’s High Court. She was photographed at Bethells Beach.
Derek Henderson
When she opened her original Pont Street shop (now relocated to Sloane Street), the designer employed only two machinists, a PA and two shop assistants – one of whom was Wickstead herself for five years, six days a week. Now she has 40 employees, and a burgeoning international presence. Wickstead’s clothes are worn on the red carpet by stars including Olivia Colman and Alek Wek (the frock – adorned with a giant bow – that the model wore at the Fashion Awards in December had to be one of the looks of 2018), and by women of public stature, not least Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, Michelle Obama and the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex.
Shot putter Valerie Adams, 34. The four-time World champion, two-time Olympic champion and three-time Commonwealth Games champion is seen here – while 20 weeks pregnant with her second child – in Rockfield Road, Ellerslie, Auckland.
Derek Henderson
For Wickstead – now also a mother of two young children, married to the financier Daniel Gargiulo, and with a new home in Holland Park – this has felt like a good moment to take stock. A collaboration with The Woolmark Company, the Australian wool organisation, on a capsule collection launching this month, has provided the opportunity to do just that. Sometimes you need a reason to do things a little differently – and Australian wool led Wickstead to thoughts of New Zealand. “With every collection you design, you dream up a world, but with this, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to focus on something that felt really real?’” she says. “I thought of home and I thought of women and clothes they could wear every day. And I saw it as a chance to tell people a bit more about who I am and where I come from.”
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, 70, Emeritus Professor at the University of Waikato. In 1981, Te Awekotuku became the first Maori woman in New Zealand to gain a doctorate, and she is seen here wearing a cloak that her mother made to mark the event.
Derek Henderson
Using sustainably sourced merino wool, Wickstead has created a capsule collection of lightweight separates. Most of the pieces are in what she calls “shirting” wool, but she’s pulled on a heavier knit today, an ivory high-neck sweater, as right for a breezy day on a British beach in June as it is for a grey January in London. And although she’s not defining the capsule as workwear – no doubt many of her customers wear her ready-to-wear collections and bespoke pieces on the nine-to-five – let’s just say most of us would be happy to play His Girl Friday in a pair of the high-waisted berry-red trousers and one of those dusky pink shirts hanging on a nearby rail.
Selina Tusitala Marsh, 48, New Zealand’s Poet Laureate. She holds her tokotoko, a traditional Maori ceremonial stick.
Derek Henderson
With her clipped accent, aristocratic face and dry sense
of humour, Wickstead is reminiscent of a Golden Age Hollywood character actress, as ready to roll up her sleeves and sort out a plumbing disaster as to speed off in an open-top car with a leading man. It’s an era she loves – Katharine Hepburn and her way with a mannish trouser was certainly an inspiration for the collection that Wickstead has unofficially titled Extraordinary, Ordinary Women. “Women are seeking realness. You see it on the covers of magazines, you see it in the different shapes and sizes on the runway,” she says. “I’ve always been aware of that, because I’ve been dressing women one-to-one since I started out. But now, as a designer, you feel more supported to say the things you want to say, because there’s a community of others sharing that same feeling.”
Dairy farmer Katie Milne, 49, is the first female president of the New Zealand Federated Farmers in its 118-year history.
Derek Henderson
That’s not to say she doesn’t enjoy head-to-toe sequins – or indeed bows that measure 8ft. “I’m passionate about dressing up, but for this project, I wanted to dress the kind of woman I am most of the time – someone on the run, going to work, to lunch, doing the school pick-up,” she says. “I always play on those images from the past – I want everyone to look as good as that in clothes they can wear every day, but to make that idea real, you have to photograph it on real women.”
Lupesina Koro, 19, is an engineering and commerce joint-honours student at Auckland University, and tutors Maori and Pasifika school leavers as they transition from high school to university. She is seen here outside her home in Te Atatu North, a suburb in west Auckland.
Derek Henderson
And so, on 28 November 2018, 125 years to the day since the women of New Zealand took to the polls for the first time after winning the right to vote, Wickstead arrived in her home country to photograph 12 ordinary, yet extraordinary women. They range from Katie Milne, the first female president of Federated Farmers in its 118-year history, to Selina Tusitala Marsh, the country’s Poet Laureate; from Valerie Adams, the two-time Olympic gold medal-winning shot putter, to Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the first Maori woman in the country to become a university professor. “The youngest girl we photographed is a 13-year-old dancer and the oldest woman is the international judge and former Governor-General, Silvia Cartwright,” says Wickstead, beaming. “It was a total passion project and I cried at every shot!”
When Jacinda Ardern addressed the United Nations in New York in 2018, she was wearing Emilia Wickstead. “She talked about how we come from this place that really is the end of the world, but we have so many different cultures there – Polynesian, Maori, Pakeha [the Maori term for New Zealanders of European descent]. I have a broad spectrum of cultures within my own family,” explains Wickstead. “My father is half-Samoan, so I have that Polynesian side to me, my mother is half-Italian and my cousins are Maori. That’s why this is a very personal project.”
Emilia Wickstead at Bethells Beach on New Zealand’s North Island.
Derek Henderson
Wickstead talks with huge respect and pride about the women she met and photographed. Closest to her heart, perhaps, are the three teenage dancers competing in Polyfest, an annual Polynesian dance competition, which Wickstead herself competed in as a teenager. She shows me a picture from back then. “It’s not a good photograph! I think we’re standing next to the public toilets,” she laughs. “But that’s me with cropped hair, surrounded by girls from the Polynesian island community – Samoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Tonga. It was probably one of the most soul-searching experiences of my life. It does so much for everyone’s sense of community and pride and self-confidence.”
A percentage of the garments in the collection will be given to charities that help women back into the workplace. “We want to give back,” explains the designer. “This project was a reminder to me – and our daughters and peers – to be real. In the way that you dress and present yourself, and the way that clothing makes you feel.”
The Emilia Wickstead & The Woolmark Company collection is available at Emilia Wickstead, Sloane Street, London SW1, Net-a-Porter.com and Selfridges.
