Fashion Designer Caitlin Crisp Counts A Legion Of Fans. Her Secret? Herself

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By Julia Gessler

Monday Apr. 29, 2024

Viva

Fashion designer Caitlin Crisp at her Symonds Street workspace. Photo / Babiche Martens

Fashion designer Caitlin Crisp trades in bountiful florals and cosy cashmere. What makes everyone want more?

In the biggest room, the lights look like a benevolent alien ship fleet.

“They’re called Fandangos,” says Caitlin Crisp.

Made out of fabric and wire, the Christchurch-born fashion designer bought them before she

Closer to earth, her office is starting to “burst at the seams”, and plans are in place to move, to mark a new era. There are rentals and samples and fabrics, a pattern library and more samples and a rack of candy-coloured bridesmaid dresses that were released in April and are a commercially bankable star.

At the time of our interview, the 28-year-old was waiting to see how they’d sell, and like everything, she’ll measure their success on feeling (a word she uses liberally) — on whether her team is happy — and then on whether she can realistically live off it all.

Part of the reason that things are good emotionally and numerically is that the brand is an incarnation of Caitlin. While some fashion designers claim their power in relative anonymity and others work hard to put their stamp on things, hers is like entering her pool of consciousness.

In a way, you can be seen as she is: These are fun, capable clothes for never looking bored in, that translate entire feminine vistas (the music at this moment, Shania Twain’s Man! I Feel Like A Woman, which is playing softly in the background, is too convenient), but also of what is happening in Caitlin’s life right now.

That includes her wedding this February to property development manager Andrew Vincent, at his family home in Karaka. She didn’t know what to wear before and after her nuptials, so she designed her entire autumn collection as her solution. “Everything’s got to have a story, otherwise it doesn’t have an intention,” she says. “I set myself a theme, and then after that, I break it down into: what in this collection is my mum wearing? What in this collection am I wearing? And what in this collection will my younger self be wearing?”

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Karen Walker, the eponymous New Zealand designer with whom Caitlin interned as a production assistant in 2017, stresses this careful consideration of community. “She has a strong sense of their style and needs,” Karen tells me over email. “Her commitment to creating work that will be loved shines through.”

Caitlin taps at her phone and brings up a bird’s-eye view of the wedding premises. “You can’t see from here, but under here are the most beautiful gardens,” she coos, pointing at the geographical blur, an amphitheatre of green that would be captured in fern motifs and bulbous sleeves. Her wedding dress, which took roughly a year to make, is at the drycleaners. It’s a waterfall, a breathless cascade of ruffles that could realistically require five people to lug it along.

She thinks it could look incredible in the entranceway of her office where we’re talking. It would.

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A post shared by Caitlin Crisp (@caitlincrisp)

Caitlin is a designer in a bone-deep way. Her grandmother was a seamstress. Her great-grandfather was a tailor. When she was 12, her auntie bought her a sewing machine, and the rest is incandescently good dresses and a business that boomed during the pandemic years. “It takes 10 years to become an overnight success, but it’s been 20 years for me. I’ve done it for so long.”

She says there hasn’t been “one big bang moment”, that everything has grown organically, though really her spot on the fashion-competition show Project Runway New Zealand, its first (and only) season, in 2018, was a tipping point. It was baptism by way of unconventional materials challenges, and Caitlin, a relatable ray of sunshine-blonde, was soon fast-tracked to favourite status after her first peach silk cocktail dress.

It wasn’t until episode nine, when tasked with designing a collection inspired by a Pascoes jewellery range, that things unravelled. Her pearlescent jumpsuit with its fringey tiers took fire. “I love a sexy lampshade,” said judge Benny Castles, director of the brand World. “White in this instance doesn’t work. It was a misstep.”

In retrospect, her subsequent elimination couldn’t have come at a better time. “I got kicked off just before they did their final collections,” says Caitlin, “so those contestants, the top final contestants, had to go and spend all of their time hidden away, and couldn’t tell anyone they were on Project Runway, because this was before it aired.”

Untethered from reality television, Caitlin was shoulder-tapped to show at New Zealand Fashion Week. “I got a head start because I was doing the same thing, I was working on my debut collection, but it was shown on a platform that actually translated to our local fashion industry.” That is, the eyeballs of buyers.

While it gave her “a little bit of a profile” and let people get to know her, Caitlin sees her time on Project Runway as a star vehicle in so much as it gave her confidence, particularly around how she presented herself. “That taught me more about branding than anything I could’ve learnt in a school,” she says.

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In person, she has a charismatic effect on the people around her, a smile that could melt solids and that widens in tandem with the list of things currently happening in her business, as obvious across the white couch that we’re sitting on as it is across her brand’s Instagram tiles. Her knees are pulled up like we’re sharing secrets. She’s sporting her own bias-cut silk pants in a jewel-like emerald, a white T-shirt, and a honeyed Wardrobe NYC trench coat that the industry’s higher forces would have gilded with praise.

The furniture goes something like this: under the Fandangos is a long dining table, her family’s, that her “girls” — a byname for her team — now work around; by the door, a life-ring in buoyant red-and-white; the designer’s childhood basket bike, which you’d imagine freewheeling through a field with your groceries, stands in the corner.

The result of all of this is that you feel that what you get from her, and her brand, is some kind of pure distillation, less technical puzzle and more Caitlin at full concentrate. “I’m so open with who we are and what we do,” says Caitlin. “I think there’s quite a thing in our industry, or creative industries at least, where people are quite hard to read, or can be hard to understand, whether they do that on purpose or not.”

It’s what attracts customers like moths to a disco ball, including long-time shopper Sally Hooper, the director of marketing and commerce at Deloitte. “Authenticity and humility define Caitlin’s approach,” says Sally. “In an industry where rapid expansion often eclipses genuine brand connections, Caitlin’s transparency and the delight of visiting her showroom offer a rare glimpse behind fashion’s typically closed doors.”

This barrier to entry is felt no more acutely than at fashion shows, which are notoriously difficult to access for those who aren’t editors, buyers or celebrities. But Caitlin hasn’t been interested in calling on the veil or the smoke. Instead, she has shown clothes that tell you exactly how they’re meant to be worn, down runways at hilltop vineyards and high-end hotels (the brand will present its winter ‘24 collection on May 1 at the Park Hyatt), for the price of a ticket. It is a document not just of her work but of belonging and spotlight lure: A parade of bow-tied sleeves and cashmere that swaddles. The romance, too, of something silken, something blue, something going somewhere.

If you follow Caitlin Crisp on the internet, you’ll know that she and her husband, who does competitive sailing and competitive-but-less-serious “rum races”, are boat people. The couple met while watching the America’s Cup in 2021, and last year embarked on a three-day crossing from Fiji to Vanuatu.

Her parents, she says, are water babies (”My mum told my dad she was pregnant with me on our boat”), and she treats being out on the ocean as her tonic — a chance to think about what she likes, lacks or has learned on route to Motuihe or Waiheke or to visit friends in the Coromandel. “When I’m out there, I’ll be working on the business,” she says. “It’s a time to step back and look at it.”

Its turbulence — its froth — feels like an obvious metaphor for the fashion industry right now, but Caitlin admits it’s the first year she feels like she’s finally got a place in it. “Even though I don’t need to prove myself to anyone, and I know that now, maybe I felt like, leading up to this, I needed to prove something to myself, that I was going to be able to keep making it work, because my goal has always been to have a sustainable business for a really long time.”

She reaches over the stone coffee table next to us that looks like part of the Parthenon and touches another one made of wood.

“But the only thing that is going to be able to fulfil that goal in my own self is time. As time goes on I feel more successful, because I’m still here.”