Juliette Hogan and the business of fashion

Fashion designer Juliette Hogan in her studio, with models Baylee and Kelsey wearing pieces from her summer collection. Photo / Babiche Martens

Making it doesn’t come easy in the changing world of fashion. With her business about to turn 10, designer Juliette Hogan talks to Zoe Walker about her complex relationship with the industry.

Earlier this year, Juliette Hogan threw a party in her new workroom. Unlike most fashion parties it was for breakfast, with 30 friends, media and employees sitting down at two white tables adorned with white flowers and white bowls to talk and eat toasted muesli made by Hogan's father.

She had not yet officially moved in to the 200sq m space, and this was a chance for the 34-year-old fashion designer to show it off before racks of clothes, rolls of fabric and everyday office life took over.

There were clothes, too: models chatted and laughed in the sun, showcasing pieces from Hogan's spring/summer collection, which goes into stores on August 15. They all wore white Converse sneakers, with poker-straight, side-parted hair, lounging about in beautiful organza skirts and shirts, a graphic geometric print and mosaic print on silk, and casual grey marle tees and linen suiting. It was all very effortless and grown up, and indicative of how self assured Hogan has become. But the designer, determined and no-nonsense, with a wicked sense of humour, has a complex love-hate relationship with the industry she has found herself in for the past 10 years.

"I'm interested in my business," she says frankly, "I'm not interested in fashion."

Juliette Hogan's headquarters is on a nondescript street at the city end of Dominion Rd, nestled beside mechanics, textile wholesalers and an auction house. It's a charming open-plan space; light and airy with wooden floors and power points hanging from the ceiling hinting at its former life as a sewing factory.

They moved there in April. The new workroom has changed Hogan's life: she was previously based above her Ponsonby Rd store, a comparatively tiny space where she and her design assistant had to battle over who used the one pattern-cutting table. Racks of garments were crammed into the kitchen. There wasn't much spare room for desks, and no privacy. As the business continued to grow, it was time to look for something bigger.

Hogan gets to work each morning just before 8am, for half an hour of calm before the rest of her small team arrive. On her desk, a trestle table with white painted top, sits her Mac, a large jar of almonds and a white orchid in a white vase; behind her, a large Derek Henderson photo of an empty suburban street, and a collage of images pinned to the wall. Other features of the office, aside from the typical fashion-designer necessities of cutting tables, patterns and rolls of fabric, include two Scandinavian-inspired light-grey couches, a well-burned 2.5kg Jo Malone candle, deer antlers on the wall from a hunting trip and a vase of white lilies on a wooden meeting table.

Hogan is very specific about what she does and doesn't like: white flowers only, no bright colours and no capital letters (she says it's about proportion). That clear aesthetic translates into her collections, which have matured and become more defined in recent seasons. Hogan's clothes aren't obviously sexy, they're not cute and quirky. They're discreet, practical, grown up. They're pieces that can be appreciated by a wide range of women: worn by a 23-year-old to a party, by a 35-year-old to brunch in the weekend, and by a 50-year-old to work. It's clean and minimal, casually elegant yet tomboyish - a loose cardigan thrown over a silk dress, a white T-shirt worn with a maxi skirt, the simplest silk slip dress. Not the ladylike and prim label that seems to have stuck, a leftover from the days when pleats were her signature.

"I don't think it's true to the brand anymore," she says of that ladylike tag. "It's different to how I envisage what I'm doing, but I guess potentially, when people first become aware of the brand, it may have been two or three seasons ago when it was very ladylike and vintage-inspired."

Check out Juliette Hogans summer 2013 fashion film 'Kaleidoscope City'