Graduates’ collections to hit catwalk at NZ Fashion Week

The Graduate Collections show at Auckland’s Shed 10 on this Saturday 30 August will feature the collections of three 2023 and three 2024 Bachelor of Design with First Class Honours graduates from Massey’s Fashion School within Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts in Wellington.

Massey Fashion programme leader Sue Prescott says achieving a slot on the main runway at NZFW is well deserved after many years of hard work by these emerging young designers.

Vince Ropitini will be showing his final-year collection, The Art of Passive Resistance, inspired by the story of Parihaka, incorporating Māori design principles and referencing attributes found in contemporary Māori art.

“My design practice is rooted in cultural expression. Designing through a lens that reflects Mātauranga Māori is essential. It allows us to preserve customary knowledge while also innovating — imagining the future of our communities through a Māori worldview,” Vince says.

Take Stock is a thoughtfully crafted slow fashion collection by Tayla Stewart. Take Stock honours the resilience and mental health challenges faced by New Zealanders in the agricultural sector. Design concepts include subtle paddock-outlines derived from topographic maps symbolising the farm’s physical boundaries, spaces of work, home, and often, isolation. Visually rich and emotionally resonant, the collection invites reflection on the intersection of fashion, identity, and mental wellbeing.

Finn Mora-Hill has founded a label, Fringes which is grounded in workwear references and silhouettes, repurposed to reflect the realities of a younger generation navigating unstable work, fractured identities, and the weight of expectations. The NZFW collection, “In over our heads”, is an exploration of texture and perception, looking at the journey of young professionals coming out of the education system and into the workforce, exploring the contrast of dress codes of these two worlds.

As part of her degree, Nancy Ruck developed BRAND NEW ME, an identity crisis moonlighting as a six-look graduate collection. Her designs interrogate and parody the entanglement of creativity, selfhood, and market forces under neoliberal capitalism, exploring creative identity as both product and performance through tongue-in-cheek, immersive fashion.

Niamh Bilsborough’s collection Motherland was inspired by a visit to her ancestral homeland, Scotland. Drawing on biblical references to Eve and traditional hunting practices, the collection reflects on how both women and the environment have been subject to systems of control under the patriarchy. As the garments become increasingly overrun with moss they blur the boundary between body and landscape, imagining a world where women reclaim their connection to nature.

Quinn Kueppers collection, Dauerhaft (meaning “enduring” in German) explores the tension between authoritarianism and queer self-expression. The idea for this project was born from a visit to a former Stasi prison in eastern Germany. Through researching queer and alternative experiences under the authoritarian regime of East Germany and exploring his own queer and German whakapapa, Quinn has designed a collection which embodies a certain resistance to conformity. In an ever more politically unpredictable world, he hopes to highlight and further encourage queer subversion and self-expression in the face of adversity.

Massey fashion and textile design students have a proud track record of presenting their collections at New Zealand Fashion Week and other events including the Best Awards and World of Wearable Art (WOW).