Fashion Designer Kate Sylvester Announces The Closure Of Her Business After 31 Years

It’s the swan song for a pioneering label that has made significant contributions to New Zealand’s fashion canon.

Fashion designer Kate Sylvester has announced her self-named fashion label is preparing to close after 31 years in business.

Speaking exclusively to Viva, Sylvester, along with partner and co-founder Wayne Conway, explained they were winding down operations and would close the label in 2025. Relaying the news to their staff yesterday, the couple said the time was right to leave on a high note.

As one of the local fashion industry’s most prolific names, the bittersweet news will shock loyal customers of the brand, many of whom have consistently worn its designs since its inception.

The couple shared their gratitude to their community in an official joint statement.

“We acknowledge and thank all our customers who have supported us all these years and most of all we thank our super-amazing team at Kate Sylvester.

“In the stores, behind the scenes, in everything that we do, it has been the people we have worked with who have kept us on this journey. We believe in the talent of the new generation of New Zealand designers, it’s your time to shine now.”

The brand will continue to deliver its forthcoming spring/summer 2024/2025 collection later this year. Its six New Zealand stores will all close, including three in Auckland, one in Wellington and two in Christchurch.

“We’ve been working on this business for 31 years and it’s been a fantastic journey. The highs have been incredible, but it’s also had its intense moments too. It’s very full-on work to continuously sustain for 31 years, but we’re proud of what we set out to achieve.”

The brand celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, marking the occasion with Viva in March, along with a coterie of friends and muses including Bic Runga, Kanoa Lloyd and Antonia Prebble.

The nostalgic moment gave the couple a chance to reflect on the brand’s evolution from the early 90s, when they started the business from a converted warehouse on Kitchener St in Auckland’s CBD with its inaugural brand Sister. It was here Sylvester designed her early collections while Conway, a graphic designer, created the prints and handled business operations.

By the late 90s, they changed the brand name to Kate Sylvester. In 1999, Sylvester showcased her first individual fashion show during Australian Fashion Week, where her conceptually driven designs sparked a bidding war between two heavyweight New York department stores at the time, Barneys and Henri Bendel.

“We did a lot of thinking during our 30th anniversary,” she says.

“During this time we thought about how we wanted to continue, and last year was a culmination of feeling proud of where we got to as a business. We realised that we have done what we set out to do. We feel complete and that we’ve done a good job.

“Now we need to make a change and move on. When you’re working as hard as we are, you start to accumulate this stockpile of things that you want to do. This is what we’re looking forward to doing now.”

The brand is synonymous with dressing a generation of New Zealand women, including high-profile names such as former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for her swearing-in at Parliament in 2017. Ardern’s blue and red “Nadia” dress with a single-breasted blazer ushered in renewed hope for the local fashion industry’s visibility on a global stage.

While most of Sylvester’s contemporaries such as Zambesi, Workshop and Karen Walker have segued into more retail-focused businesses, supplementing smaller collections with designer imports, it’s a route the couple did not want to take.

“We looked at all the different scenarios of what we could possibly do including selling the business,” says Sylvester, “but the bottom line is we’ve reached the natural conclusion of this chapter in our lives.

“To me, Kate Sylvester stands for sustainability, integrity and timelessness. We have all these pillars that are so important to us and we’ve nurtured this for 31 years. In any scenario for selling it, we wouldn’t be sure that level of integrity would stay protected. There’s too much to be compromised.”

“It’s also Kate’s name,” Conway adds. “We didn’t want to sell her name. Perhaps in the future we may do something, but who knows? So, we don’t want to lose that option. We’ve made some good investments and that’s our big return on what we’ve built for the past 30 years.”

The challenges many businesses have faced in recent times are well documented, particularly those trying to recoup business lost during the pandemic. However, the Kate Sylvester brand was one of the rare anomalies in the industry continuing to flourish during Covid, particularly with its online sales. The business has never run at a loss, something the couple are proud to have navigated as markets have changed over the past three decades.

“The fashion industry has really evolved in the last 30 years,” says Sylvester. “But the thing I love about our industry is that we are never scared of change.

“We’re an industry that will adapt and embrace change always. The journey that our local fashion industry is on, and the way we are evolving – although the Kate Sylvester as a business is finishing – is one that I am forever committed to.”

It’s a commitment already proven through Sylvester’s co-founding of Mindful Fashion New Zealand, the body instigated in 2018 with Emily Miller-Sharma, the general manager of Ruby. The organisation promotes a circular, sustainable fashion industry, a project close to her heart. “I’m incredibly proud of what we’re doing, and I think it’s incredibly important to keep persevering.

“Our three sons are also keen on contributing to the industry too. Like them, we have some really exciting emerging talent in this country. It’s important that young designers can continue to flourish, to be creative and to be supported. We know how important it is for our identity as New Zealanders.”

While the local and international fashion industries are continuously evolving, Sylvester and Conway’s shift in focus is underpinned by prioritising their creativity and life outside the industry, too.

“The actual business side becomes such a big part of what we do, and over the years we’ve been driven,” says Sylvester. “We’ve done a damn good job of our business, but there’s this point in our life now where we’re thinking, ‘Imagine what it’s like to go back to just being creative for creativity’s sake. To create for the joy of it’.”

Conway, who has played a pivotal role in shaping the brand’s visual identity, including productions for some of its memorable shows and campaigns featuring some of New Zealand’s leading models, agrees that the closure will give them the space they need to take a break.

“Creativity is what drives us. There’s no way we’ll stop creating,” he says, as he smiles at Sylvester. “We just can’t help ourselves.”

The Kate Sylvester business is set to wind up by mid-2025.

Dan Ahwa is Viva’s fashion and creative director and a senior premium lifestyle journalist for the New Zealand Herald, specialising in fashion, luxury, arts and culture. He is also an award-winning stylist with over 17 years of experience, and is a co-author and co-curator of The New Zealand Fashion Museum’s Moana Currents: Dressing Aotearoa Now.

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