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There's an old family story about Sera Vaea which still makes her mother laugh. Some 20 years ago, when the still terribly young fashion designer who works under her maiden name Sera Lilly was 5 or 6, her family moved to Hong Kong. Not long after, little Sera was sent off to be educated at a very proper school for the very proper offspring of British toffs.
"Within the first week we got a phone call and I had to go up to the school," recalls Vaea's mother Cheryl. "They said 'Mrs Lilly, can I put it to you like this ... when I ask the class to run as fast as tigers, Sera goes as slow as a snail. When I ask them to go as slow as a snail, Sera goes as fast as a tiger'.
"She was," Cheryl Lilly hoots, "a very challenging child."
That, of course, was then. The young woman now 24 perched on her Meadowbank home's couch doesn't appear the least bit challenging, though of course I'm neither demanding she tear around like a tiger nor slide slowly like a snail. Yet Sera Vaea, fashion designer and soon-to-be mother of three, might be said to have changed very little from the impish child who tested authority. As she tells me her story, it becomes clear rather quickly that she's styled a rather singular path into the vocation she's wanted nearly all her life.
From becoming a mother as a teenager to starting her label during the first year of a two-year diploma in fashion, to opening her own Ponsonby Rd store during the course's second year, she has gone her own way.
And she will do the same again this week with her first solo show at Air New Zealand Fashion Week, the rag trade's annual shopfront-cum-knees-up. But it will come as no shock at least to those who know her work that frocks will be her show's focus.
"We're going to start just being a frock shop. We want to be Auckland's frock shop, where you can get anything from ball dresses to wrap-dresses." It will be dresses for success then. It might have been otherwise.
Sera Vaea fell pregnant at the beginning of sixth form. She'd been educated at Cornwall Park Primary before moving on to private girls' school Baradene the family is Catholic but she'd left there for the more arty Selwyn College at the end of fifth form.
Discovering she was pregnant with her daughter Stella-Kate at just 17 was, as you'd expect, something of a shock.
"But my parents were really good. You hope, as a parent, you'd be as good as my parents. They were like 'you're not on drugs, you're not anorexic, it's not a bad thing'. Of course you wouldn't wish your daughter to go out and get pregnant but it's not the end of the world."
Maybe, though it's hardly an expectation for the daughters of middle-class families either. But then Vaea's parents evidently aren't typical middle-class parents.
David and Cheryl Lilly he's in finance, she's worked as a nurse and a journalist are Australians who moved to New Zealand when Vaea's elder sister Kate was just 7 days old. Sera was born 18 months later, followed by brother Josh and another sister, Rachel, now a model.
David Lilly's work took the family to the Cook Islands for a few years in the early 1990s, where Cheryl Lilly wrote for the local paper, before that move to Hong Kong.
It was after the family returned to Auckland and Vaea had started at Baradene that her vision for her future began to form. There aren't many of us who figure out what we want to do with the rest of our lives when just 11, but Vaea did. For a school project, each student in her class at Baradene put something together for a time capsule. Eleven-year-old Vaea's contribution was a few drawings "which were horrible but cute" and a note saying she wanted to be a fashion designer. And as her teenage years began, she started dressing like one too, at least in her mind.
"I was always very opinionated about what I liked and didn't like [about fashion] even though some of the fashions I wore weren't that fashionable. But I thought I was cool at the time."
The time capsule was dug up in what would have been Vaea's seventh form year. But by that stage Stella-Kate had already been born, and it was motherhood rather than fashion that seemed set to be her life. It says much that Vaea doesn't seem to have viewed it that way. And nor did her parents.
"I remember David saying that when she found her passion and direction in life that she would be amazing and would be really successful," Cheryl Lilly says. "As parents, that's all you want for your kids for them to find their own passion and then support them in that."
Vaea believes becoming a mother so early was one of the best things that could have happened to her. "Because I don't think I'd be here sitting talking to you right now if I hadn't had Stella-Kate when I was 17. As soon as she was born, it was like 'right, I have to sort my life'."
The birth of Stella-Kate put Vaea on the fast track to adulthood. But it was she who put herself on a rapid road to a fashion career. After finding herself pregnant she quit school, but not her education. For the rest of the year she was enrolled in a makeup artistry course.
"Mum and Dad said 'if you go there and win a few awards' there were three 'we'll pay off the student loan'. I thought 'I'm going to do this'. And I won all three."
She went on to do freelance makeup work for brides and for a Trelise Cooper show. "But to be a makeup artist you can't really have children because there are early morning calls, you need to be quite flexible. It just something creative I guess, that I could tuck under my belt and it was something I could tie in with fashion."
Meanwhile motherhood wasn't entirely what she expected. "It's going to sound really silly, you think you're getting a baby. I said this to one of my friends who had a baby as well, she totally agreed. You don't realise that you're going to get a child. You think 'I'm going to get a baby' and then it hit me I'm going to have a teenager. But that doesn't hit you when you're pregnant."
Vaea decided to have two years at home with Stella-Kate. She thought it was important to bond with her and get the hang of parenting. Even so, around the same time she applied for the three-year degree in fashion at AUT. She was turned down, but won a place in the two-year diploma course, which she started in 2005.
She had barely begun her studies when she entered a competition called the ASB Glam Slam young designer of the year timed with that year's ASB tennis tournament. She entered two outfits and held her breath. It worked. She not only finished first but second as well. The prize was $3000, but the real reward came from her parents.
"With your kids, you encourage them whichever direction they're going in," says Cheryl Lilly. "We thought [after she won the Glam Slam] that she was obviously doing okay, and then she was highly commended in the Zambesi young designer awards in 2005. She wanted to do something with the money she'd won from the Glam Slam ... we talked about a business and said 'we'll see how it goes'."
Not long after winning the Glam Slam, Vaea began selling her designs, initially in a couple of outlets. The next step was obvious and a year later, in April 2006 on the day of her 21st she opened her store in designer Adrian Hailwood's old shop on Ponsonby Rd. Indeed, Hailwood suggested she take the shop when he decided to move to bigger premises. He has since become something of a mentor for Vaea.
"She's very focused and she goes out and gets what she wants," Hailwood says. "She's really good, she's a hard worker." Which is probably just as well. Fashion, Hailwood says, is very fickle and a hard, hard slog. However, it seems it's been worth it.
Viva fashion writer Zoe Walker says Vaea's clothes are always feminine and simple. "They're not particularly directional but she tends to always nail the key trends of the season in a way that's wearable and accessible. They've become even more retail-focused over time, which is inevitable for a young designer with their own store."
Sera Lilly the label doesn't belong to Sera Vaea the designer. It's her parents' company and she works for them. "I couldn't do it without them and they couldn't do it without me because I've got the creative thing and they've got the knowledge of business. I can't even get my head around PAYE."
It's a family business, then. Sera designs and works in the shop three days a week. Her mother works the rest. Her father does the books and the business plan. And Vaea's husband, Maka Vaea, offers advice and support. The couple married in January but had their first child, Kingston, 18 months ago (Vaea has no contact with Stella-Kate's father) and the couple are expecting their second on Christmas Day.
The young couple's life sounds improbably busy. He is studying sport and recreation at AUT and works three nights a week as head of security at SkyCity. Vaea fits her designing around taking care of the kids, dropping Stella-Kate at ballet, working in the shop and cooking most of the meals. Unsurprisingly, the designing happens at night.
If she looks a little tired, that's allowed. And she knows that life won't be this hectic for long. After that she can focus on her big goal.
"I want to be a really well-known brand, to be New Zealand-made, and a label that every New Zealand woman has in her wardrobe."
And if or when that happens, she'll have done it in her own fashion.
