KEY POINTS:
Many fashion devotees trace their passion for things material to happy childhood moments watching their mother preen, attics brimming with moth-eaten party frocks and strings of Great-Aunty Jo's pearls.
Alexandra Owen's love of clothing comes from a darker place. Withdrawing from a childhood that was unhappy in many respects, Owen, 25, used sketching, writing and dreaming as her escape.
A dark and introspective aesthetic is born of Owen's cynicism, a hangover from her difficult beginnings, while she attributes her approach to design, which ignores fads and to a certain extent trends, to an independent point of view from a young age.
Her introverted and serious nature gave rise to a desire to imbue the beauty she longed for in her surroundings into her work.
She was encouraged by Wellington College art teacher and painter Rob McCleod to express her unique point of view visually. Owen was placed three years running in the Young Designer Awards.
Initially hesitant about fashion design as a career, because of its commercial nature and association with superficiality, Owen grew to admire that throughout history it has created some of society's most innovative, skilful and influential people.
Time spent studying for a degree in fashion design at Massey University equipped her with the technical skills required to fuse her interest in art with craft.
When Owen was fresh out of fashion school, Marilyn Sainty, ever supportive of young design talent, retailed her first collection for Winter 2006 in her boutique Scotties. Seeing her garments hanging alongside Comme des Garcons and Dries van Noten was welcome encouragement for Owen, who had battled production dramas such as having an entire run of near-finished coats ruined at the buttonholers.
Tailored and feminine, Owen's garments have endurance of style, requiring an appreciation for interesting cuts and attention to detail, rather than an adhesion to the style or colour fad of the season. Favouring neutral hues and shying away from pattern and bright colour, she focuses on silhouette, cut and detail.
"Sometimes I find excessive use of colour a lazy way of drawing the viewer to a garment. I take my hat off to people who can be bold with colour, but I am drawn to garments that whisper, where you have to look closer and discover their beauty with time and thought."
Growing more assured of her signature with each collection, Owen experiments with new techniques through pattern-making and drape every season.
"I like complexity and challenge through the process of design and construction," she says. "I try to pay respect to tailoring techniques passed on from other generations."
Summer 2007 was Owen's strongest range. A concise collection of fewer than 10 pieces, the collection features silhouettes redolent of earlier centuries and features a jacket with a cleverly pleated elbow, cut in sheer fabric so that it has the delicate lightness of breath.
This will be her first time at Fashion Week and her fifth collection. She's excited about the prospect of transporting people to another world, the way a film does, seeing a show as a way to communicate her vision for a collection in a way that photos can't.
Playing down her expectations of the event, she simply wants to do a show that is enjoyed and a collection that inspires. She recognises that reaching international markets is key for the growth of a niche label such as hers and that this could be a stepping-stone.
Owen ultimately aims to run a boutique, small in size but big on intrigue, that presents her label alongside those of designers she admires, and she prefers not to see boundaries. "Could be here, could be in Paris," she muses.
She is also toying with doing a masters in womenswear at Central St Martins, in London, in a bid to hone her skills to the highest degree.
"I really want to create the best and most challenging work I can," she says. "I want to be selling in Europe."
