Stitchers in time

Sample machinist Carmel Hoskyn. Picture / Richard Robinson

As a teenager, Carmel Hoskyn was always getting in trouble at school — for sewing too fast. While other girls were stumbling over cross-stitch and hemming aprons in Home Ec, Carmel was whizzing up "the latest 60s dresses with puff sleeves" for her girlfriends.

"I was always so far ahead of everybody, because I'd been sewing for years — I started knitting dolls' clothes when I was 6. Some kids loved to draw, I loved to sew."

Straight from school she walked into her dream job, working as a young fashion apprentice for the smartly tailored Babs Radon label of Barbara Herrick, regarded as one of New Zealand's first successful fashion designers in the 1960s.

Hoskyn joined designer Liz Mitchell when she started her own label in the basement of her house, and 13 years on, she remains loyal to Liz, now in the heart of fashion-savvy Parnell. "Without her, I wouldn't have a business," Mitchell says.

Hoskyn, now in her 50s, is one of the country's top sample machinists — a mistress of stitches. She is a gem in a glittering rag trade, as rare as a genuine Fendi handbag at the Avondale Markets.

If only, the fashion designers lament in one voice, today's pre-teen girls made their own Barbie clothes. If only more teenagers dreamed of sewing, rather than designing tomorrow's haute couture.

Even as our designer fashion trade burgeons, the less glamorous roles in the industry — machinists, pattern cutters, production managers — have become members of a scarce and ageing workforce.

Back in the late 1980s, when the Government removed tariffs, the largest apparel manufacturers crashed and a wave of machinists was lost. Young people were no longer trained for a "sunset industry" and now the resurgence of designer fashion in New Zealand has caught the technical side of the industry flailing.

So why doesn't anyone want to sew fashion these days? Some believe the title "sewing machinist" conjures up the long-gone days of drudgery in a factory line, pushing through shirt cuff after shirt cuff, and some have adopted the name "garment technician" to overcome that. But Hoskyn knows it will take a lot more than a name change to make her job attractive to starry-eyed school leavers.

It's a great career, she says, and she has never desired to be a designer. "I've always liked being hands-on — you have to work out the best way and the quickest way to bring a design to life.

"Even though you are at the end of the line, a sample machinist carries quite a bit of responsibility. You are the one who tells the designers that they can't do it this way, and then it's up to you to sort it out."

As Mitchell's top machinist, Hoskyn sews her made-to-measure bridal and evening wear, which usually requires meticulous hand-finishing. Her work has been seen on Keisha Castle-Hughes at the Oscars, the Queen's grand-daughter Zara Phillips, and even Helen Clark. "A wedding gown can take up to 40 hours and in bridal season I will have a quite a few garments on the go at once. I'll often take work home if I have a lot of beading to do."

In the lead-up to Fashion Week, Hoskyn has been pouring over the "glamour" gowns — the one-off pieces made expressly for Liz Mitchell's show.

Although machinists do not get the kudos that designers do as their jersey frocks and skinny trousers parade down the Fashion Week runways, Hoskyn sees herself in a partnership with designer Mitchell and patternmaker John Kite.

"We've worked together as a team for 10 years — we do calicos and fittings with clients, discuss their likes and dislikes, sort out colours together. It works well," she says. "Working with Liz is never boring, it's always a challenge."

But the real challenge is getting the younger generations to love sewing as much as she does. "We are an ageing workforce, so they will have to make it be seen as special. But why would you not want the opportunity to work with New Zealand designers? They're pretty damn good."

Mitchell has two fulltime machinists in her Parnell workroom, and has been looking for a third, with little success. She has been posting fabric and patterns to one of her former machinists who now lives in the South Island.

Clothing in the Liz Mitchell seasonal ranges is made by small CMTs — Cut, Make and Trim services — but she still prefers to do samples and specialised garments on site.

"It's extremely difficult to find really good sewers who are absolutely accurate and can handle all types of fabrics. We lost a lot of people in the 80s, and now young people want to be only designers or stylists," Mitchell says. "Of course we could get everything made in Indonesia or China, but we all know about the exploitation there."

Other astute designers, such as Trelise Cooper, have been concerned for years about getting their creations on the racks each season.

"Young people aren't training to be machinists and it's a dying art. We increase our production every season and we have to wonder if there will be enough skilled machinists to make the clothes," Cooper says.

Cooper has been a judge in the annual Bernina Fashion Awards, which encourages the talents of secondary school students throughout the country. She applauds the awards for recognising the quality of sewing and garment construction, as well as creative design. "I don't sew myself, but I think it's such a vital part of designing," she says.

A study commissioned by Fashion Industry New Zealand (Finz) has looked at the country's fashion sector, and found it wanting when it came to technical skills. The greatest weakness was "the fact that few secondary school leavers are aware of non-design related positions within the industry, or see them providing viable career paths".

Donna Whittle, a former chief executive of Finz, who now runs recruitment agency Fashion Personnel, believes it is a sign of the times.

"A lot of young people see sewing as a stepping stone to something else — they do it at school to be designers, because they don't envisage themselves spending life behind a machine," she says.

"It's not just here — my husband has an engineering shop and he just can't get guys to work at a machine either. It seems really difficult to encourage young people into a trade of any kind.

"But it's got to be the industry's job now to highlight to high school students, their parents and career adviser that there are wider job opportunities out there in a buoyant fashion scene."

Sewing is not a humdrum job, she says — today's sample machinists have to be incredibly skilled, creative and clever people. "They make that very first garment — they don't have a Butterick pattern to tell them how to put it together.

"We place sample machinists but it's not easy finding them. They have been scarce and ageing for the last 10 years, and pattern makers are even harder to find. But the encouraging thing is that the roles in the university and diploma fashion courses have been increasing."

Enrolment in tertiary fashion courses across the country has steadily increased over recent years to almost 3000 last year. AUT had 100 students in 1996, and next year the fashion certificate, diploma and degree courses will have 400 enrolled. But it's difficult to know how many, if any, of those students will specialise in sewing.

Walter Hart, a veteran of 40 years in the rag trade, shakes his head at the thought. "We get groups of tech students coming through our workrooms and when I ask them what they intend to become, almost all of their hands shoot up for 'designer'," he says.

Walter Hart Manufacturing, one of New Zealand's largest privately owned fashion companies, makes clothing under the Vamp and VSSP labels, and a decade ago, Hart made the decision to "go up-market", aiming their garments at the top end of the fashion scale. Today their clothes are sold here and in Australia, in stores such as Smith & Caugheys, Kimberleys, Identity, Kirkcaldie & Stains in Wellington and Ballantynes in Christchurch.

"We're making top-end garments so our machinists are much more skilled today," he says. "There's this amazing mix of fabrics, textures and detailing — our summer range this year has 316 different fabrics. For designers it's very exciting; for machinists it's very challenging."

The days of line work, where machinists stood at a long bench sewing the same pattern piece from dawn till dusk, have gone. Most fashion companies still manufacturing in New Zealand now do short runs — around 70 of each garment in their range, as opposed to overseas factories, which won't look at an order smaller than 1000. More than 85 per cent of designer fashion is made domestically, according to a 2002 industry study, but most designers rely on contract manufacture for most of their production — only one in 10 make all their garments on-site.

New Zealand machinists are likely to sew up an entire dress, rather than just a sleeve and then passing it on.

"Forty years ago, they were called dressmakers, because they made the whole garment, so we're really going back to those days," says Hart. "It's so much more interesting for them."

Hart has three prototype machinists who work a scissor-throw away from his design team. The designers and pattern cutters give the machinists cut fabric and a sketch, explaining how they would like the garment to look, and it's up to the machinists to assemble it and make it work. The machinists jot down notes as they go, telling the designers how things would work better.

Two of those machinists, Linda and Judy — surnames withheld for protection from fashion industry "poachers" — have worked with Walter Hart for longer than they can remember. Both women are in their 50s, and say the industry has become more interesting and rewarding.

"Putting together all of the pieces is so intricate, like a jigsaw puzzle," says Linda, who started a sewing apprenticeship straight out of school. "Some of the fabrics are fabulous, but others are really difficult — like trying to sew silk velvet to satin, you want to pull your hair out!"

Judy started out in fashion in her 20s, a young mother raising five children who taught herself to sew and worked from home.

"It wasn't about machining, I just loved clothes. I always wanted to buy new clothes, but I couldn't afford to," she says. "It's such a shame that young girls don't consider it as a job anymore. It's a great job for young mothers, working their own hours and making a decent wage from home."

Wages are still a bone of contention in the industry — a factory sewing machinist is still near the bottom of the pay scale, earning between $20,000 and $25,000 a year, according to Statistics NZ. But specialised and sample machinists can make between $18-$25 an hour.

Judy and Linda agree that their status in the eyes of the public has grown phenomenally in recent years, as events such as World of Wearable Arts and Fashion Week have "put fashion in your face".

"Twenty years ago, if you said you were a sewing machinist, people would look down their noses at you," Judy says. "Now they say, 'oh, that's such a skill, you're so talented'," adds Linda. "They realise that not everyone can sew these days."

Eight machinists in Walter Hart's sample sewing room move around a bank of 50 well-oiled machines — plain sewers, safety stitchers, overlockers, buttonholers and hemmers.

Many of the women are Asian, who have come to New Zealand with a background in factory-line machining and are up-skilled here. "They are wonderful machinists, and we need them," Hart says.

Many businesses have been lobbying the Immigration Department to put the fashion industry on the skills shortage list and have succeeded in having highly skilled machinists put on the immediate list in Auckland and Wellington.

It's not only immigrants who are helping to plug the gaps in the sewing rooms, but a growing number of people from other professions, who have always harboured a love of fashion, says Kevin Smith, managing director of NZ Fashion Tech, which trains people in the industry.

"Sure, we have people say they want to be designers — fine, but there are many pathways to a designer. Everyone has to remember, sewing is the base for all fashion."

So, that Russian baroque brocade skirt, silk chiffon baby doll, or tweed trenchcoat on the Fashion Week runway will not have resulted simply from the genius of a designer — there is machinist who has turned every idea into a voguish work of art.


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