Crust is a weekly newsletter on taste and culture from Tāmaki Makaurau.
Hello, today I’m looking back on Fashion Quarterly — how it shaped the industry and people in it — amidst media upheavals and a shifting landscape. It’s long, with pictures, so this might get cut off in your inbox; click through if so. I’ve also got some logistical intel on The Others Way Festival, which is happening this Saturday, and some other bits and bobs.
I’ve been reading FQ for over two decades. It’s now 45 and I’m 37, and the industry’s in upheaval. When I was a teenager, I read magazines. I imagine you did too. They were glossy portals of knowledge, accessed via the family coffee table or kitchen bench. Depending on your household, it might have been a British or American edition of Vogue, Woman’s Weekly or the TV Guide, perhaps NZ Plumber (great masthead font!)
At a certain age, which for me was around 11, you’d get your own. Pleas for Girlfriend or Dolly finally answered. Or you’d just get them from the library. I still remember those issues vividly. They taught you how to be a girl and, all going according to plan, what a woman should be — what you could be if you learned the right secrets and had enough money. When you feel like you don’t know anything and never will, the promise of guidance and knowledge is an intoxicating thing. There were barriers to access that are, now, unfathomable. At that age, knowing who you are is hard to grasp, a slippery thing with undefined edges and no roadmap or rule book. You don’t yet realise that the rest of your life will (and should) be spent trying to find out.
The information space was harder to navigate. New Zealand still felt like an island then, distinctively different to the Australia (and Papua New Guinea) I grew up in — every year or two, a new city. Through adolescent eyes and the haze of my memory now, New Zealand was colder and greyer. Even the birds were more drab. Then I found fashion magazines: Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, i-D, Russh, Lula, and locally Fashion Quarterly, Pavement (that folded in 2006, leaving a grimly influential cultural hangover in its wake), Black and No.
But FQ is still soldiering on, glamourously so even now, 45 years in. Established in 1980 by Paula Ryan and Don Hope, it presented the kind of tasteful, fashionable life that people of a certain class and means aspired to. It was kind of like our Vogue (though New Zealand had one of those too, from 1957 to 1961, one of the title’s first international editions), but the brands and models were something you’d see in the flesh around the city. Maybe.
The early 2000s were, we now know, the Indian Summer of the magazine industry’s golden era. Generations of young women were glamoured by them, and depictions in film and television (The September Issue, The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty) polished the dream. Working for one was hitting the jackpot for anyone who aspired to a byline and the inside of a fashion closet.
As a 20-year-old with a blog (remember those?) I’d see FQ editors like Fiona Hawtin and Sally Ann Mullin in the front rows of Fashion Week. Their editorial teams would wear high heels and had nice hair, and seemed like the luckiest people in the industry. They worked for a magazine!
I got lucky too when, after returning from two years backpacking overseas, I landed a job there; hired by editor Zoe Walker Ahwa to be features director, covering for Lucy Slight’s maternity leave. Slipping in the side door of a dream job, at a real glossy, and working under Zoe, who I held in such high regard for her taste, intelligence and wit. Seeing first-hand how the magazine came together, there was a thrill in peeking over art director Imogen Temm’s shoulder to see something I’d written laid out beautifully on the pages. The pace and output of work (a few features each quarter) felt humane compared to many media jobs now. Time was the true luxury, in hindsight.
It was the magazine’s fourtieth year, and we were producing editorial accordingly, looking back at the social and political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, digging in the archive at the back of Bauer. Zoe’s vision was to focus on a different decade for each issue, showing how the magazine evolved under its roster of editors to date — Paula Ryan, Christina Sayers Wickstead, Leonie Barlow, Jane Ainsley, Melissa Williams King, Fiona Hawtin, Sally-Ann Mullin — but also capturing the cultural landscape of the time. (Context is important; fashion both reflects a lot and obscures things too). The whole team started scanning; all the pages that captured those moments, that felt significant. We’d pour over credits and bylines, those telltale relics of who made clothes then and who wrote about them; historical records preserved in paper. Scanning them felt like you were doing something important.
The magazine was taking shape and then, pandemic. (Not long after — a matter of mere weeks if my dodgy memory serves right — the company that owned FQ, Bauer, shut down its New Zealand operations and, via that infamous Zoom call, we all lost our jobs. I frantically put all the archive files, everyone’s precious scans, onto a hard drive.
The world was locked down. Christian Lacroix told me all about his for an FQ issue that never saw the light of day. I’d messaged him on Instagram (!) and he’d said yes (!!) to an interview. We did it over email and I wrote up the story from my tiny, single-windowed apartment, filing it not long before we were made redundant. The sell was: The legendary French couturier discusses decadence, nostalgia and finding joy during darkness — telling the industry to look forward, not back. Reading back over it now, it feels even more pertinent.
“We were so optimistic for the world, the planet, and humankind,” Christian told me, from Camargue in the south of France, reflecting on his youth. Older and wiser, he expressed his increasing hate of global capitalism, misused media, and the growth of nationalism and intolerance. We discussed nostalgia, less distilled and acute as it is now, and how fashion finds respite in that territory. He saw it as a fundamental to how we cope. “The only possibility is to look back to (supposed) better days or past glamour.” To feel more secure, he explains, designers explore fields they don’t know, fascinated by what he calls “vanished dreams”. Christian had a theory about nostalgia, escapism, and the influence of maternal figures on fashion. “When the period is difficult, designers feel like a worrying child, hiding in their grandmother’s attic,” he explains, pointing to the maternal influence on Christian Dior’s New Look and Yves Saint Laurent’s scandalous Occupation collection. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Christian and other young people would trawl Carnaby and Paris flea markets for what was retro then, inspired by old movies and magazines. “Our parents and grandparents didn’t understand why we were wearing these horrible old-fashioned styles from dark or obsolete ridiculous times.”
That particular 1980s look, which he helped shape, had a strong foothold in New Zealand. Money was sloshing around — before Black Tuesday, the infamous share-market crash — and everyone had aspirations of status, wealth and class. They showed it. Powerdressing in Kevin Berkahn, Patrick Steel and Barbara Lee. And there was Gloss, the suitably named local TV series with a titular fashion magazine at its centre and designer Liz Mitchell doing the costumes.
It wasn’t all shoulder pads and long lunches. The 1980s were also the era of Zambesi and Marilyn Sainty, when New Zealand began shaping its “dark and interesting” look of sobriety and intellectualism. The period also saw the effects of import restrictions. As Cecilie Geary noted in her “Goodbye to the Eighties” feature in the 1989 issue of FQ, one could finally buy in New Zealand the kind of labels “previously only seen in international magazines and on visits overseas” which caused “some consternation” among local manufacturers.
That complicated decade has, unsurprisingly, enjoyed renewed interest. Fashion has spent the past five or six years revisiting the 1980s, an appetite I see as something of a cargo cult for what, from here, looks like prosperity, stability and opportunity (Boom Boom etc).
Christian said that the decade was difficult, contrary to how it looks from afar. “With AIDs and a lot of issues we had to fight for,” he said. “We had to escape from this nightmare to face it in a better, stronger way when needed, when friends were suffering, then dying.” His work - so big, so bold — captured that desire for a different reality. “We were all playing characters at that time,” he explains, even for going to work. “Ten years later, it would have been impossible.”
He was sceptical of the 1980s revival in 2020, which, five years on, has found even more momentum. “All these frills, flounces, volants, A-lines, bubbles, poufs, and big sleeves are coming from photos of my Patou time or early days at Lacroix — all the couture houses or designers from the time: Ungaro, YSL, Montana, Mugler, Versace, etc,” Christian explains, having seen it all before. “Now it’s just a façade, a trend, a surface, a look, a copy, but without the wealthy easy money behind it.”
The year before, he’d collaborated with Dries Van Noten (who’d go on to retire in 2024). Christian and I talked about that collection, shown at Paris’s Opéra Bastille, something they’d “miraculously” kept secret for months. “Dries said he wanted to give a lighter message of life and style in such a disturbed moment,” Christian said. Inspired by Barry Lyndon, van Noten had pulled so many references from the Lacroix archive that a collaboration made sense. Their initial meeting at the Puig office on the Champs-Élysées followed a day of yellow vest protests. “Press kiosks burned, a true war vision,” he describes, noting the irony. “We were there speaking of XVIIIth century lightness, carefree [feelings] and self-indulgence.”
By the autumn of 2020, when we spoke, the ground had shifted even more and fissures were deeper. It felt like the end of something. “We have a lot to learn from it if we are not foolish.” It was time for new ideas. “Perhaps these new behaviours will be far from any historic influences and inspirations, providing true newness, reflecting our times.
I filed that interview away with the before times, saving it onto a hard drive along with everything else we’d saved from the magazine archive; multiple Marilyn Sainty interviews, a 1993 profile on Rosanna Raymond, a photo essay from the 1994 Heroes Parade, a 1999 feature on “the New Zealand Four” and a quartet of 80-year-old women glamorously dressed in Sabatini, Liz Mitchell, Trelise Cooper and Ashley Fogel. There’s a 1984 feature about the Language of Fashion, which explains how “today’s world allows us to come in contact with an increasing number of people whose clothes ‘dialect’ differs very much from ours” and in this societal change, one must “be aware of the effects of our own ‘dialect’ on others.
I recently gave that hard drive, everyone’s painstaking scans, to the lovely Sarah Murray, FQ’s current editor and owner (she followed Nicole Saunders’ tenure, buying the title off its publishers in 2023, taking the magazine independent). Sarah explained — and did so again publicly last night — that the physical archive had been destroyed prior to her ownership. Handing over that hard drive of treasure felt like offloading illicit contraband or a procured artefact.
A week or so after that, she and her team had assembled 45 years’ worth of editors and staffers for a group shoot, lensed by Guy Coombes, for the anniversary issue (on newsstands now). It was a surreal catalogue of everyone who’d been through that glamorous mill; who’d had the responsibility of guiding New Zealand women in how to dress, shaping the dreams and paradigms of their respective era. You also felt the scale of influence the magazine had served as a training ground, establishing careers and giving opportunities. Many had gone on to work for other titles or establish some of their own. There were characters from the heady glamour of the 1980s, the patriotic 1990s and 2000s, and that idealistic period of the late 2010s, when it felt like morally just choices could have an impact.
Backdropping it was the big Vogue news; Anna Wintour stepping down as editor-in-chief of US Vogue and taking that job title with her. Vogue’s different now. Everywhere is. The rip tide of media pulling everywhere, its swimmers trying to find their bearings, some riding the current while others are fighting. Everyone is looking behind them, one eye on the beach.
There, we can see now with some distance, through salty eyes, the landscape that we’ve drifted from. For Vogue, the true extent of the smoke and mirrors are clear; they were laid bare in Michael M. Grynbaum’s recent book Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. Condé was selling a dream and its staff were charged with living it. They set a yardstick that everyone else tried to meet, not realising that the company’s profit was a sliver of its competitors. “Cosmopolitan, published by Hearst, made about as much money in 1997 as every Condé title combined,” Michael M. Grynbaum wrote in the New York Times in June. “In 1998, Fortune magazine uncovered an inconvenient fact: Condé Nast did not make much money. The world’s most glamorous magazine publisher ended 1996 with just $55 million in profit on $750 million in revenue.” And those were the good days.
“One could admire Conde’s dream worlds, or use them as inspiration, whereas the images depicted on Instagram are often intended as envy inducing glimpses into real life,” Grynbaum wrote in his book. “Glossy magazines never implied that an average person could have all of what they portrayed. Condé Nast offered vicarious thrills. But in the post-gatekeeper era, the old elite status fantasies have shifted from aspirations to expectations, with all the commensurate pressures that come with that shift.”
As the magazine industry and media at large becomes more precarious amidst a radically shifting information space, the idea of glossy print magazines existing at all is aspirational. Old scans (once limited to the inside-baseball of platforms like The Fashion Spot) have, thanks to the distribution of archive accounts and “aesthetic” moodboard pages (some more rigorous with crediting than others) on Instagram. But viewed out of context, you miss the whole experience of a magazine. The moment in time the thing captures. Those carefully put together pages. The hierarchy and flow. Every caption, standfirst and credit, all carefully sub-edited. Even the ads tell a story.
Nostalgia is a balm. The stagnation it fosters, the falsehoods that get a foothold, warrant criticism. Magazines do too. They were and still are a class marker, with an element of bias baked into the feedback loop between audience and editorial, as Aaron Smale recently pointed out in a clear-eyed piece for The Listener. That magazine is for sale. Metro’s editor and full-time staff are gone. Elsewhere, new titles are cropping up; there’s a new wedding magazine, Veil, and indie mag Newzician is onto its fourth issue.
Media is a current, and New Zealand’s waters are wild. But seas are churning everywhere with headwinds from digital giants who sucked up the advertising revenue that funded all those glossy titles. Attention’s being pulled too. Formats that used to be found on pages are now user-generated in an endless feed of content; fashion is, it seems, finally participatory. The business model is under pressure. Luxury fashion brands have their own problems; the dream they sold has curdled a bit too, scaled to the extreme in a digital world.
The more online we become, the more I want to read things away from the network. Retreat into pages of words. See clothes in the flesh. We were reminded of that at New Zealand Fashion Week earlier this year; hearing the beading of Harris Tapper or Claudia Li come down the runway, seeing new talent like Vince Ropitini, the joy and silliness that made Karen Walker famous, the tenderness of Zambesi with clothes adorned from Liz Findlay’s drawers of odds and ends. And the Into The Archives Show, with creative director and stylist Dan Ahwa, together with Courtney Joe (both are FQ alumni), recontextualising decades worth of local fashion in what was one of the most moving things I’ve seen this year.
And the attendees, a sprawl of characters and style that felt reflective of Tāmaki Makaurau, expressing themselves through clothes and wearing things with intention. Dressed in ideas and feelings. I see it all through a magazine lens of course (it’s hard to take off). You spy potential stories and ideas for photoshoots, notice recurring items that could be a trend, or incentive street style deserving of an eight-page spread with extended captions. It’s hard not to look.
Some of the most inspiring fashion in the city right now can be found at the corner of Balmoral and Dominion Roads on Sunday mornings. The youth are there. (Do they read magazines I wonder?) Judging on what I can discern from their ages — a hazy science — four or five years ago, they were stuck in suburban bedrooms in lockdown. The effects of that are, I think, what we’re seeing now in attitudes to shopping and style; a desire for something elusive and exclusive, the thrill of the hunt. (Which is how things used to be too). It explains the rise and rise of vintage. On the racks at Central Flea last weekend were pieces that have probably graced the pages of FQ — designs from Kate Sylvester, Trelise Cooper and NOM*d. I bought an (arty!) skirt by the old New Zealand brand Venus, screen printed with an octopus. A thing from the deep that surfaced via luck (and the keen eye of Gemini Vintage’s Helen Olivia Anstis). On hangers, and people too, are items from the past, bobbing to the surface and latched onto with a sense of need and desire. Ideas. Like all those scans on that hard drive.
With the democratisation of online image-making and the plethora of advice and explanation, the fleeting glimpse of a new idea in the flesh feels exciting and illicit. It’s there, and then it’s gone. If you’ve worked for a magazine once, you might make a quick note, putting a pin in it for… something, later, maybe.
It’s hard to know where to put it. The industry has slimmed down; that leanness, once reserved for bodies, is now felt in all parts of the system. On-staff jobs are slim pickings (to my knowledge there are currently no filled “fashion editors” roles at any of New Zealand’s media titles) and many writers have turned to platforms like this one or cobble together an income from freelancing and contract work. Stylists work on magazine editorials, content for brands, campaigns and film work; shoots are expensive to produce and some are more lucrative than others. Brand budgets (the fashion, beauty and lifestyle businesses that fund media) are stretched too, across print and digital advertising, digital marketing, content, influencers, leases, staff, overheads and of course manufacturing. For legacy titles and media brands events — FQ had a birthday bash last night, where Sarah announced they were launching a membership programme, a “new endeavour” and evolution, for readers to further support the title and be a part of that world — are an increasingly important source of revenue, audience and media impressions.
Where does that leave print? That place to capture a moment, a feeling, and give it space and time. To record it in context. Everyone with something to say has their head up, above that current, watching the shoreline change. On the beach people are, I think, looking for them.
New to Crust? There’s more to read on clothes if that’s your thing:
Vivacious (and loud!!!) stripes that cater to those with an appetite for the obnoxious.
Flaws, fallibility and shabby-chic semiotics.
Stimulating ideas for fashioning fictions and feeling alive this spring.
The side streams and underground reservoirs of Aotearoa style.
Old ideas for getting dressed.
Hedi boys, skinny jeans and the swing of cool.
Desire and destination shopping.
Planning… what I’ll see at The Others Way. The festival is shutting down a chunk of Karangahape Road on Saturday night; it’s the first time they’ve had an outside stage on the street, and I called festival director Reuben Bonner to find out what’s involved. “It’s the first time K Road has been closed off for a ticketed event, so it’s quite a moment.” The strip will be closed between Queen and Pitt Streets, with the stage located close to the rainbow crossing, facing west. Set up starts at 5am on Saturday, and the festival kicks off at 5pm. The big, “gruntier” stage means they’ve got twice the number of people coming through this year. Those blocks will be chocka. “We’re closing down the road, but it’s business as usual for all K Road businesses,” he said. With so many people around, he hopes people go buy drinks and food and support local businesses (it’s usually Whammy’s biggest night of the year). The schedule is stacked, and with nine venues in the mix, you have to be strategic (choosing between Pearly* and Elliott and Vincent, or W.I.T.C.H and Womb) “If there’s an act that you really want to see, get in there well before the act starts,” Reuben warns. “Because I have a feeling that the rooms are gonna be full. If there’s something you just can’t miss, don’t run the risk of trying to get in halfway through.”
Eating… a lot of Vietnamese food (and hoping Air New Zealand does another Asia sale soon). I went to Lixiri’s Kitchen in Glen Eden for dinner last Friday, and had a pretty good bánh mì for $13 from Happy Vietnamese Bánh Mì and Phở in Kingsland.
Reading… Helen Garner. So is everyone else, by which I mean five people I know. I finished Monkey Grip on Tuesday night, curled up on the couch after dinner as the sun dipped. Her prose is so precise — spare, people often say — with a deep feeling for life. She captures how it feels to love. And the smell of sun on concrete. Gorgeous.
There’s a bunch of Levi’s Engineered Denim skirts at Smoove right now? It’s the holy grail of vintage Levi’s (in my opinion) and usually hard to find in New Zealand. I have a jacket and jeans, which I procured from Bad News. Though if it’s an arty skirt you’re after, there’s this Marilyn Sainty number currently listed on Trade Me.
There are some of Judy Darragh’s “Dog’s Dinner” brooches left at Objectspace? Only $250!
Hills Hats is crowdfunding to relocate its workshop? The 150-year-old company said it’s “clinging on when it seems like Wellington is in freefall”.
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This was so good!
I can't believe the FQ archive was destroyed, that's so vile. And I'm glad you got at the way magazine aethetics / old pages online are dangerously void of the context around them. It's the things you didn't plan to look at and read that are what makes them such powerful vehicles.
Perfection as always xxx