Karen Walker on home ground

By FIONA HAWTIN

When Karen Walker agreed to show at this year's New Zealand Fashion Week, it was the fashion equivalent of Princess Anne's RSVP to a garden party.

One of the country's biggest fashion names, Walker's inclusion in the designer line-up at last night's launch of Fashion Week caused a ripple of excitement.

The expectation had always been that Walker would be in the starting box for the first L'Oreal New Zealand Fashion Week two years ago. She wasn't. Nor did she show last year. The non-appearances fuelled much speculation about the designer.

But Walker says the reality is she simply has not had the time to be involved until now.

"There has been talk the last couple of years - 'why hasn't she been doing it?' But we couldn't squeeze it in," says Walker, in an exclusive interview with Viva.

Walker is looking relaxed in a print mini-skirt and her husband's billowing jumper, in the pristine white boardroom of her Ponsonby workroom.

It's just a few hours before her summer collection goes into stores in Auckland and she's excited. It's a stressful time but even so Walker appears, as always, in control. The conversation turns to the upcoming Fashion Week in October.

"This is the first year that we felt we could do it in terms of managing it. The past four years have really been all about chasing that ambition of making it outside the Australasian market, I'm feeling confident and far enough down that track that now I could add one more thing to my list," she says.

"Really, our vision has been to have a global niche business concentrating on that full-time and obviously the New Zealand market is part of that. But to break the US, England and Japan ... it does take a hell of a lot of doing. You can only squeeze so much into a day and the timing of Fashion Week has been unfortunate in previous years, so we just physically, mentally and emotionally haven't been able to. But we've had a really good last 12 months so we'll give it a go."

Walker recognises the benefits of showing at Fashion Week, one being the instant feedback from a large group of people.

"Shows are one way to communicate your idea in under 10 minutes. You get everyone into one room. You get the mood, the feel and the actual designs and everything, wham, bam, got it, thank you. Now, can we move on to the next show."

However, this won't be a big song-and-dance production.

"It's going to be a very small affair. I don't want it to be like 'Karen Walker's doing Fashion Week - it's going to be like the hugest thing you've ever seen'. Our style of showing is very intimate, quite low-key."

Although she hopes there will be some international buyers and media in the audience, essentially she's doing it for the local retail buyers, the stylists and all of those who support the label.

Surprisingly, Walker has no expectation about picking up more international accounts. The reason is that she now has full-time showrooms in London, Hong Kong, New York and Sydney with staff who do the hard work on her behalf. That's when she's not there in person - she travels around them three months out of the year.

Not bad going for the 33-year-old, who has had her own label since she was 18. She was in her final year and still two garments short of finishing her fashion course when she decided to put $200 into a bank account and begin her designing career.

At last count, there were around 110 Karen Walker stockists globally. Her biggest market is Japan where the standard size is a 4. Here, it's 8-12 depending on which city you're in. It's size 8 at Walker's O'Connell St store in Auckland, size 12 in Dunedin.

The plan is to keep growing.

"I don't want to be huge, I don't want to be Prada. Ever since day one I knew that we would be a global niche brand. So I'm not interested in talking to every single person in that town, but maybe 1 or 2 per cent in every major town around the world. So there's a lot of room for growth, but I'm not going to be on every corner."

The "we" she refers to is her husband of 12 years, Mikhail Gherman. By day, he's a creative director at advertising agency Publicis Mojo. He's also creative director at Karen Walker, involved in everything from concept development and window displays to trying to get the buttons changed on some garments when the team are working 20-hour days finishing a range. The staff try to keep him away from the finished racks for that reason.

With plenty of cities still without a Karen Walker stockist, there is a need for more expansion. And when there are enough stockists, Walker will work on increasing the orders. She's also keen to explore other products. Already, there's the Karen Walker paint range she worked on for paint company Resene.

"I think Pierre Cardin have something like 1500 licensed products including a Rolls-Royce jet engine. And Oscar de la Renta had a papaya or a pawpaw or something. We're not going to be going down that track, but we're certainly open to new ideas."

Right now though, Walker has a hectic couple of months to get through before she can really even think about her show at New Zealand Fashion Week, although she has started designing the range.

So far the to-do list reads something like this: concentrate on the Northern Hemisphere range for delivery to the New York showroom by September 4; reproduce it all for London and get it there by September 14-15; do an off-schedule show during London Fashion Week at a carpark across the road from Jamie Oliver's new restaurant before adjourning there for an intimate party for 100; finish the Southern Hemisphere range and get it to Sydney; remake the collection for the Tokyo showroom; and then remake the Southern Hemisphere range for New Zealand Fashion Week.

Walker has been showing off-schedule in London for a year now and plans to do so every year in future.



Previously, there have been moans about those not participating in our official Fashion Week benefiting from the presence of international media and buyers being in town. Walker doesn't buy that although she agrees retail sales always go up during Fashion Week.

She hasn't copped any flak about seeing international delegates in past years.

"Last year, there were two people that we have a very close relationship with, like Kirstie [Clements, Australian Vogue editor]. They ring me up when they're in town and want to come out for dinner. Basically, what are you going to do? Kirstie Clements comes round to our house whenever she's in New Zealand and we get out the old punk rock records."

Walker just attracts international attention. It helps when celebrities are spotted in her clothes. Most recently, Kelly Osbourne wore Walker's prom dress to the MTV movie awards, Mandy Moore is on this month's cover of Lucky magazine in Karen Walker and Kate Winslet can be seen in four of her pieces in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This can translate into sales. When Madonna famously wore some of her pants, a Japanese magazine made mention of it and 48 pairs sold before they were on the racks.

She's had coverage in The Face, i-D, Dazed and Confused, various Vogues, Nylon and six pages in Britain's Observer magazine last August. It's not just fashion. She was a cover story in British Elle Decoration. What's her secret? Apart from always returning calls promptly and obliging the media with exactly what they want, she puts it down to someone on the magazine liking what she does and thinking of her when they're doing a story.

"A lot of the time they don't realise we're here [in New Zealand]. If they've never met me they just assume we're around the corner [in a London suburb]."

A gallery curator wanted to include some of Gherman's illustrations in a collection and asked if he could come by the next day.

"You can," Walker told them, "but you'll have to leave the office now to get here by tomorrow."

She is content with her idyllic New Zealand lifestyle: she lives on 4.8ha in the west Auckland suburb of Swanson with Gherman, two cats and a dog called Turkey. It's her retreat when the world of design gets a little much. She acknowledges she has two jobs. She is the head designer and the mouthpiece. At least now she doesn't have to do anything else within the company if she doesn't want to.

But all the good press in the world won't disguise the end product if it's not what high-end fashion should be. "That's what they want to see. They don't care whether it's shown at the back of a Honda Civic. It doesn't matter how big the show, how much glitz there is or how much stuff's in the goodie bag or how many PR people you hire - if the product isn't good, the product isn't good."

Walker is addicted to the thrill of the new. If you think you've seen it all before, she's inclined to disagree. She calls it sampling.

In the past 10 years there have been references to the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, punk rock and hip-hop.

"There's an original way to deal with it and a plagiarist way of doing it. A couple of seasons ago Prada took the Hawaiian shirt and made something completely new out of it. You can look at it and go it's just a Hawaiian shirt but it's not.

"There's something new in the same way Yves Saint Laurent took the idea of the tuxedo jacket in the 1960s or a safari suit and moved it forward. It can be about changing the cut or putting it in a different environment or mixing it with something else, or putting it on to a different sex or making it youthful or making it older. It's the ideas that excite me."

But so too does old stuff. She loves flea markets and garage sales. The boots she's wearing were $2 from the Swanson Rd carboot sale. Mostly though, she's on the lookout for linen from the Victorian era through to the 30s, what Gherman calls "dead people's sheets". Paris flea markets and Victorian Gilt in Remuera are good sources for the embroidered, initialled and faggoted ones she covets.

"You get it starched and it's just like getting into a bed made of cardboard. When I first got into it seven years ago Mikhail said, 'I can't breathe, the dead people are weighing me down, the people who died on these sheets.' My dream is to find something with my initials on. It's like a 1 in 5000 chance."

That's probably better odds than a bookie would have given on an Auckland teenager becoming an internationally renowned fashion designer.