She may have had an unusual upbringing but fashion designer Cybele Wiren refuses to be labelled a hippie, writes CATHRIN SCHAER
KEY POINTS:
IT'S A strange place for a fashion designer to hang out. No champagne, no models, no glamour. Instead, there are old couples doddering about, German backpackers trying to look interested and security guards looking suspiciously at a clutch of anxious Japanese tourists.
But when asked where she likes to fish for design inspiration, Cybele Wiren thought about it for a week. Then she chose to come here, to the Auckland War Memorial Museum. To be more precise, to the museums Encounter gallery, which specialises in New Zealand design and decorative arts.
Wiren's been in the business of making pretty frocks for the past five years and shell be showing her latest collection at Air New Zealand Fashion Week on Monday morning. She's also one of the local fashion industrys biggest cliches: a brightest hope for the next generation of local clothing creativity.
But there is, of course, so much more to any designer, indeed to any person, than a fabulous cliche. All sorts of elements go into the gamine-in-Costume National pumps that is Wiren today. For instance, that she grew up in the most remote area of Coromandel in a house with no electricity in what she describes as "experimental circumstances;" that for four years she studied to become an artist and that she once almost lost her finger while attending a job interview in Melbourne. Well, sort of.
Ask her about her inspirations and youll hear about all that.
Right now Wiren is staring at something brown and fuzzy on the museum wall with undivided attention and a sort of nostalgia. Get a little closer and you realise it's a genuine 70s weaving with more than a passing resemblance to your auntys macrame potholders.
"That is so familiar to me," Wiren says, laughing because no one else will get why she's so into this ugly, yet oddly attractive, piece of weaving. So she explains. Wiren's father, who is now a psychotherapist, used to be a professional weaver. And in designing her new collection, there was one particular work of her fathers that got the 31-year-olds fashion creativity flowing.
"It involved a lot of driftwood and lots of raw silk and I always remember it had a pocket woven into it," Wiren says. "It was also very large which made it quite amazing." She is standing before the fuzzy brown wall-hanging, which must pale in comparison to the one of her childhood; that was eventually sold to someone in America and has never been seen since.
To those readers sired by plumbers, electricians, accountants and rugby players, it might seem a little unusual to have a father who wove for a living. But then Wiren and her three siblings two brothers, one sister grew up in a relatively unusual, rural environment in Colville at the top of the Coromandel Peninsula.
"It was kind of an alternative upbringing in an alternative setting," explains Wiren, whose family lived in a house clad with car cases from the Thames Toyota factories at one stage. Although well aware of the novelty value of her childhood, Wiren stresses that not having electricity wasnt as bleak as it first sounds.
"Not having power just makes your life a bit different you know, with gas lamps, candles and coal ranges. And it's a bit more of an active lifestyle when you get big enough you learn to chop firewood," she says, grimacing. "And there's lots of walking and outdoorsy stuff. It's kind of cliched but I really do believe that not having a TV forces you to think of other ways to amuse yourselves. But although I was definitely a bit of a country kid, we travelled quite a bit too, to places like Wellington. It wasnt like some inbred hillbilly kind of thing, it was a lifestyle choice."
And dont you be calling her "hippie" either this tag seems to set her teeth on edge. "Im not really into big label's, they're always too simple or too broad," Wiren says. "But I do hold on to the values I was brought up with, which I suppose could be seen as quite hippie."
Love and peace then? "Definitely," she chortles. "Like, even though other people [in the fashion industry] keep telling me, 'oh, youll go too,' [to manufacture in China], I choose to keep making in New Zealand because I want to support the New Zealand economy and I care about the local environment. It's not necessarily a moral thing, it's just what works for me, keeping the product New Zealand-made and keeping it high-end. Anyway these days," she says, "I think hippie is mainly an aesthetic."
And there's no way to use this label in describing Wiren's clothes. Hip American magazine Nylon described them as frocks with attitude that "Debbie Harry [former lead singer of Blondie] would be proud to rock."
While she's been talking Wiren has moved further into the museum and now stops in front of a trio of beautiful, intricate vintage dresses. One, an incredible 1920s flapper dress covered in gold and caramel sequins, reminds her of when she first started making clothes. Then, she was most interested in the inventive and surrealist fashions of 1930s designer Elsa Schiaparelli the Italian was the first to combine fashion with figurative art and innovative construction; Schiaparelli once famously made a hat that looked like a lamb chop.
Where this early inspiration is still evident in Wiren's designs is in her complicated construction techniques. For instance, this summer's collection includes a deceptively simple black dress with large hexagons in bright blue, orange and grey. From a distance, it looks like a bold print. Closer up, one discovers that, amazingly, the dress is actually made out of these hexagons not appliqued nor printed, rather, representative of a major feat of pattern making.
Local designer Tanya Carlson has been stocking the Cybele label in her eponymous boutiques since Wiren's first fashion week showing in 2003. "When I first saw her clothes I just thought, 'wow, this girl can pattern-make,'" says Carlson. "It had that sense of intricacy and I just thought she was really talented. And I also really like the fact that, although her original market might have been younger, we now get a huge cross-section of women into her product. People are able to wear it in so many different ways."
The only minor criticism that has been made by some stylists about Wiren's work is that it occasionally repeats itself. But perhaps this is because of the way she designs. Wiren is not a stylist-designer who changes looks and themes every season.
"My design process is quite organic," she explains. "I like working with whats working, and having fun with it, rather than starting with every single outfit drawn up. I think it's more of an instinctual thing for me, it's a continuum on which you build."
And she's been building on it for a long time. Wiren's mother taught her how to sew on an old treadle machine of course, because there was no power and she remembers how later she got a Janome sewing machine for her birthday and then an overlocker for her 14th. "For me that was like other kid's getting a 10-speed bike," she laughs. "That was pretty special."
But after finishing school and then a year as an exchange student in France, she had already decided she wanted to go to art school in Auckland.
Which she did. Although after her first year she found she wasnt really enjoying it that much. "Probably because it was getting harder," she laughs. "And Ill never forget this: one of my tutors, Julian Dashper [a local artist], asked me, 'Are you having fun?' And I had to say no. So he said, 'Well, why dont you integrate what you love with what you actually have to do.'"
"What I was really into was sewing and creating stuff without thinking about the commercial value. That was a bit of a breakthrough for me, that I was allowed to do that. So I did a painting degree but I spent most of the time making clothes," she says. "But it was still always about visual expression."
Applied art, if you like.
Press releases for Wiren's past collections drop unusual names such as fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, whose drawings have featured on various rock album covers, and dark-humoured American artist Banks Violette, who references death, metal music and ritual murder.
"Art is so open," Wiren enthuses. "Being an artist, you could create something really temporary or it could be something you slave over for 10 years. And that all just seems too big sometimes. With fashion, there are parameters. I also like that fashion has a use, that you see [the designs] walking down the road. I like the practical aspect of it all."
After completing her art degree, Wiren decided to move to Melbourne in 2000. She decided she wanted to work for either a photographer or a fashion designer and began cold-calling anyone who might help.
And then there was that unexpectedly lucky break, the opportunity that sets you on a career path you were never even sure you wanted until much later.
"I went for a job I saw in the paper, as a sample machinist. And although I'd never worked on an industrial sewing machine before, I thought at least I'd learn something. To check out my work the woman gave me a little job to do, to make this velour kid's jumpsuit. I didnt even know what button to push [on the industrial machine]. I was certain I was going to lose a finger."
"It took me so long, the woman thought it was hilarious. She said that there was no way she could employ me as a machinist but she looked through my portfolio and told me she thought I was talented."
Wiren's new friend then rang all her friends to see if anybody needed help and Wiren ended up working for various Melbourne fashion label's, as an assistant to some smaller one-woman businesses and doing things like cutting fabric swatches for bigger companies, all the while doing classes in pattern-making at night.
Was it all part of some larger, cunning plan then? "I dont know," Wiren admits. "I think it's probably more about taking up opportunities as they come along. And," she stops to think for a second, "maybe it just feels like the opportunities come along but they're actually the result of things that have been going for a while."
And if you want some proof for that theory, take a quick look at a letter that Wiren's former headmistress, Dorothy Wharehoka at Colville Primary, wrote after seeing recent articles about her former pupil.
"I do remember you designing Grecian clothing for a display that you made for 'Show Day'. Later when you were at Coromandel Area School you were showing great interest in fashion. You came to borrow coloured tights (white/pale blue) from me for something you were putting together."
In 2002 Wiren and her partner, Kelly Bewley, moved back to Auckland. It was at this stage that she also decided to start her own label. As anyone who works in the fashion industry knows it's not all tottering around on unbearably high heels, looking fancy: you need creativity as well as practical know-how. And Wiren's happy to concede to accusations of "being sensible". She also seems incredibly well-balanced, working in almost every area of her business: she has done and still does everything from the accounting to the pattern-making.
Despite the air kissy-kissy hype around her in an industry that worships at the altar of the next big thing, she also seems like a no-bullshit sort of woman.
"I hope so," says Wiren, who takes this as a compliment. "You hear things about the fashion industry being wanky. But I dont really feel that way. I dont see too much point in jumping on the fashion industry bandwagon unless there's a really good reason."
ON THE day Canvas meets Wiren and tours some of her favourite inspirations, it is a mere 10 days or so out from Fashion Week; she's got a big fashion show to plan, she's employed extra staff to get everything done, and there's a large piece of fabric it forms a central part of her new collection thats still in transit, floating about overseas somewhere between the printing factory and her workroom. But even as Wiren is saying this, even as a tiny, barely visible spasm of anxiety creases her face, she remains completely poised.
Doesnt she ever feel panicky? She stops in the middle of the carefully cluttered exhibits in the Encounter gallery to think about this. "No, not really. I do worry sometimes but, well, if [the special fabric] doesnt turn up, then I guess well have to do something else," she sighs. "But if it does, Ill definitely be buying somebody a big bottle of wine."
The other rather remarkable thing longtime observers of the fashion industry may like to consider is that Wiren's label never went through the mid-life financial crisis that so many others do it's that troubling stage that comes when you move from a capsule collection sold in a few boutiques to getting your first big orders from department stores or from overseas.
The problem is where to get the cash to buy the fabric and to employ the outworkers to fill those bigger orders, without driving the business into the red and potentially, an early demise. And rumours about designers not paying their fabric suppliers' bills always surface at about the same stage, during a label's growth spurts. Many of the big names youve heard of in New Zealand fashion were subject to this kind of financial stress and tittle-tattle at one stage or another. Not Cybele though.
"She just had a really professional way about her from the beginning," says Carlson. "Business-wise I think she's very strategic, she's very aware that she's a wholesaler and she's doing all the right things." It seems that behind the pretty face and the straight posture there's a calm intellect and, one suspects, an iron will; a grown-up who will bid her employees a sunny farewell at 6pm, then stays up until three in the morning to get her own work done.
Her partner of eight years, Bewley, who Wiren will wed early next year and who has been known to make her dinner far too late at night, agrees." She's just incredibly balanced. She's got a lot of time for other people and at the same time she will put five million per cent into her own projects."
"Actually," says Bewley, who works as an exhibition preparator at the Auckland Museum and who has also worked with both of Wiren's brothers and her father at various times," they're all like that. They're all very focused. They get a project started and it snowballs. It just gets bigger and bigger and it's lot of hard work but it's a lot of fun at a the same time."
Happily, fun is a quality Wiren finds particularly important. When asked about her label's future, she talks of interest from offshore markets (she's also a leading contender for this years Air New Zealand export award, to be announced tomorrow night), maybe opening her own store one day and just keeping the business growth steady.
As for world domination, she laughs at the idea first, then earnestly worries that someone might get the wrong idea about her.
"That just sounds really wrong," she says. "Thats not really how I look at the future. I just want to still be enjoying it. I love the idea of having some new technologies available to us, maybe making some other kinds of products and really, she says, just keeping it fun."
