Wellington’s Fashion Darlings Kowtow On Finding Their Dream Team, Going Plastic-Free & Building Their Blueprint For The Future

Their clothes? Fabulous. Their credentials? Plastic-free. Their mission? One million wardrobes. There’s change afoot for Kowtow, the brand that has been sowing seeds as one of New Zealand’s most innovative fashion labels.

Gosia Piatek has always sought more than a surface story. She wants a backstory. When she founded local fashion label Kowtow in 2006, she tells me when we talk by phone, she was “more interested in the understanding of where something came from and how it was made and whether you could trace the whole supply chain”. She’s calling from Mount Maunganui, inside a warehouse full of “tiny eco homes”, a business she’s started with her brother.

Gosia has been in New Zealand for a couple of weeks, a yearly trip she makes from her Victorian home in North London’s Crouch End, where she lives with her partner, film director Thomas Napper, and their 9-year-old son, Laker.

She finds it hard to come to terms with the environmental implications of flying between countries, but time with her family is too important. She’s been camping in Ōakura, in Taranaki. It’s been magical, despite the fact that her face is peeling. The sun of high summer is sharply drawn here.

At the time of our interview, she was set to visit Kowtow’s chic, understated Te Aro headquarters in Wellington in a few days. “The scary boss from England walks in,” she jests. She has a natural charisma, light-hearted with a disarming frankness. It’s an exciting visit, not least because there’s going to be a whole range of clothes she hasn’t seen before.

A few years ago, she knew the cuff length of every garment, the stitch length, if it had a 2cm cover seam or a 1.5cm cover seam. But working in a different time zone with a child changed how Gosia orientated her life. “I tried to fly back for meetings. It’s too much. It’s too much sustainability-wise and it’s too much on my health.”

In a crucible moment for the company, Gosia stepped back. “I had to completely let go and trust.”

Gosia and Thomas met in a storybook moment at a hotel in Kolkata in 2014. She was eating pancakes, there to visit a factory (Kowtow’s clothes are made ethically in India); he was waiting for tea, there to shoot a music video for Anoushka Shankar. They then spent 24 hours together, and now spend their lives together. She says that maybe part of the blessing in meeting him “was the fact that I got more people on board so that I could pull out. Maybe I wouldn’t have ever pulled out of it as much if I didn’t have a reason to.”

One feels that without her absolute commitment to being progressive from the beginning, the company would feel more wayward, unmoored. When I visit the Kowtow office on a trip to the capital, it’s clear that her team has faithfully traced her conceptual scaffolding. There has been no detour, no compromise. They speak of going out and planting trees together, of native birds, of how they’d never have a head of sustainability because everyone in the company needs to be working on sustainability in whatever they’re doing. There are pencils instead of pens. Compost is collected by a bicycle on its way to a local farm. If you bring rubbish in and it can’t be recycled or composted, you have to take it home.

All of this conspires to leave you with the very specific sensation that you’re at once part of a watershed moment and an echo chamber: In its principles, the business, which is B Corp certified, exists almost like a self-generating island (it’s still fully owner-operated) allied to something outside of the realm of fashion, cliches of Devil Wears Prada callousness and all. They say Wellington is distractionless, their sartorial autofocus.

Gosia describes Kowtow’s trajectory as a slow burner. Even so, there are changes afoot. In part, this is because fashion has a taste for dream teams, and Kowtow has found the right leadership alchemy.

The brand’s managing director (and former production manager) is Emma Wallace, a gentle empowerer who is a part of industry non-profit Mindful Fashion New Zealand, and who apologises for being preachy. Her job, she tells me on a warm, bright morning in the showroom, is “to talk to people”.

On one side on a mood board, there’s a collection of ephemera: photos of a boy lying in a field of daisies, the sinewy veins of a leaf, two blue rocks next to each other as if lost in conversation. On the other, books: Earth by Nicolas Cheetham, Clay by Amber Creswell Bell, another on minerals.

Gosia says that over the 10 years of working together, she and Emma have never had a disagreement, and that includes where they want Kowtow to go. It is a mutual influence that isn’t limited to saleable products but extends to how each thinks about purpose. “For Gosia and I,” says Emma, “it’s not about producing more and more clothing, it’s about increasing the impact of our message and offering the solution that we have been developing to more people.”

Their goal is eye-wateringly ambitious: To infiltrate a million people’s wardrobes with just one item, replacing something plastic with Kowtow’s Fairtrade organic cotton — the brand’s full output, from straight-leg jeans to ruffled blouses, is made with the monofibre, meaning everything for every season is created from scratch.

She asks my follow-up questions before I do. “How do we do that? And how do we do that in a way that’s sustainable? That comes down to our circularity. It’s about extending the life of one garment, so that one garment has more than one life with someone. Of those one million wardrobes, half of those could be secondhand. We don’t just want to be creating new garments from limited resources. If we can’t nail the responsibility of the garments at the end of their life,” she says, referencing the brand’s dual repair and take-back programmes, “then that big goal isn’t going to make sense for us anymore.” It means expanding the company almost 10-fold.

Their ongoing success will perhaps be in their reverence, patience and sheer determination, and their latest achievement: their first plastic-free collection, out on January 25. It is hard to overstate what a significant feat this is, one predicated on years of extensive research and development.

Creative director and former head designer Marilou Dadat, who has been at Kowtow since 2018, has been at the helm of feeding this wealth of information and letting it synthesise into expression. “Every garment you see, all the panels, all the parts, are stitched together with a thread. Historically and technically, it’s always polyester [a plastic],” explains Marilou of the magnitude of what they’ve been working on.

Instead, they use an alternative thread that’s natural, long-lasting and resistant. Buttons are made from shells and nuts. There are no zips, no synthetics in the collars (an industry standard to make them more structured, crisp). They use a natural elastic to provide stretch and ease in waistbands and cuffs.

For someone who has had to repeatedly return to a blank canvas every season like a Ground Hog Day dress-a-thon — same material, same trims — Marilou has found her entry point for each range: she starts with an emotion, a slipstream of feeling that she wades into and will darn to the why, the where from. Then she gathers images (hence the mood board), which all have to be harmonious and tell a story.

This milestone collection is rooted in the idea of being at home in nature, she says, of finding comfort in it. She mentions shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing. “At Kowtow, you wrap yourself in nature, because you wrap yourself in organic cotton fibre,” she adds. “There’s this parallel, because our body is also our home. I think it’s really beautiful that we provide this layer between you and your environment.”

The clothes are beautiful, a push-pull of play and pragmatism (heavy on the pragmatism). You dance in them, dash in them, in a believable way. And then there’s that wonderful straight-from-the-earth exuberance. A khaki jacket with a just-so boxiness. A speckled print that emulates light softly leaking through the trees, or komorebi. An exaggeratedly draped trouser that’s so vivid that it’s like green for beginners.

I ask Marilou about what’s been inspiring her lately. “I can’t tell you that, actually,” she says, laughing, “because you’re going to see what’s happening in our brains in two years.” Kowtow’s collections are designed roughly 18 months in advance.

What, or who, I can ask about is Dayne Johnston, the new head designer, whose appointment in July, after working for 20 years at Zambesi, has allowed Marilou to fully embrace her role, and given new energy to the atelier, an airy space where you won’t find reams of paper patterns. “He’s an artist. He’s sensitive to everything: colours, details, cut. He’s really a 360 creative. It’s so perfect for Kowtow, where you design from nothing.”

In fact, quite a few people go gushy when asked about Dayne. Emma describes him as “incredibly talented” (“I think there’s something around Kowtow that people come here when it’s the right time to come here,” she says). Gosia adds that “he’s just the kindest human on the planet, I swear”.

Dayne’s first collection won’t be out until 2025, says Gosia, “but it’s really exciting because when Marilou came on we saw a definite shift, and when Dayne comes in we’re going to see a shift again”.

Soon, the clothes will carry his particular sheen, but for now, Dayne is in the depths of his prism of ideas. He’s feeling more confident with the design language of the brand, about leaning on the stores of his experience in menswear. “With the Kowtow aesthetic,” he tells me, “a lot of what we do is bringing it back to simplicity. The balance of everything is considered.” Good design, he says, is always something where you go through a resolution. “If you’re happy within yourself at what you’re producing, that’s a [testament] to good design.”

What all of this has meant for Gosia is that she is happy in what she is, or isn’t, producing, and can be more in tune with her own calendar than fashion’s one. She’s learned to embrace the communal experience of her London neighbourhood, which shares a plot of nearly a hectare. There’s an orchard and a vegetable garden that grows wild strawberries. In summer, she yells out to her son to let him know dinner’s ready, like something from another era. His school offers ceramics workshops and the chance to try iron forgery.

Her life moves, too, between theatres and museums, to soak up the things that “hit you in your soul”. Like fashion, they surprise you — and reward your attention. “The funny thing is, the same stuff in your life, in your spirit, follows you,” says Gosia. “You think it’s not going to follow you, but it does.”

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