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Carolyn Longden has taken personal shopping to a new level. She dispenses her sartorial know-how for free to her customers, who come from around the country and Australia for her formidably personalised service.
Step into her three-year-old Hamilton store, Esteem Menswear, and you instantly know this is no ordinary clothes shop.
The store is split in half: one side for cool tones, one for warm tones.
Grey carpet and chrome fittings on the cool side, brown carpet and chocolate brown-painted fittings on the warm one. Even the tinsel switches colour at the centreline.
Once customers have been assigned their tonal type, says Longden, a fervent colourist, they are only allowed on that side of the shop.
Her mission is to bring out Kiwi blokes' inner gorgeousness.
"We're not a fashion shop," she says. "We don't promote ourselves on whose labels we have, there are no promotional signs or photos of models. We're almost opposite to the fashion and beauty industry because we believe that our customer is perfect just as he is."
Longden, a 49-year-old grandmother, has training in colours and kinesiology (study of movement in the human body), which she draws on.
She takes on the triple tyranny of women who dress their men in the colours they like, rather than the ones that suit him; the narrowness of men's fashion; and blokes' bad rep in the wardrobe department.
"Men do have intuition [about what suits them]. They just don't think they do."
Regular customer Malcolm Cox first visited Esteem when he was promoted to principal of Raglan Area School. "I didn't want to go dressed as a peacock but I didn't want to fall over either."
Longden helped the 53-year-old father of seven buy a mix-and-match wardrobe that didn't kill him financially.
It also boosted his confidence more than he expected, and got the vital thumbs-up from his wife.
"I'm not a passionate dresser, but what I do know is that I can trust Carolyn.
"She's so passionate about getting it right for you, it's fun in a scary way. If you grew up as a farmer's boy, it's a whole new experience."
