Internationally, women are at the forefront of changing fashion and rejuvenating agriculture, New Zealand fashion designer Liz Mitchell said in Alexandra on August 13.
Mitchell was in Central Otago to judge the WoolOn event, at The Canyon at Tarras, along with Clyde residents Touch Yarns founder Marnie Kelly and ReCreate Clothing creative director Marielle Van der Ven.
"Working with woollen fibre empowers you. I can’t describe it.
"It’s a living thing you are working with."
The trio delivered judges’ comments at Central Stories Museum and Art Gallery, in Alexandra, on Sunday following the two-night fashion event. Entries in WoolOn had to be a minimum of 75% wool. Garments entered ranged from accessories to evening gowns and men’s suits.
Mitchell, who began her eponymous label in 1990 and in 2005 was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for service to the fashion industry, is known for her bespoke tailoring and passion for wool. She is an ambassador for the international initiative Campaign for Wool, whose patron in the UK is King Charles.
"I think initially I just loved using quality fabrics and wool was the logical natural material to work with for tailoring."
She was always wowed when a client brought in a garment they had owned for 20 or 30 years and it still looked beautiful, she said.
" I was doing sustainable fashion before we even knew that was important.
"For me that’s been the evolution of my journey and wool has been at the heart of it."
Pure wool was the ideal fibre to create long-lasting, beautiful garments and homewares, she said.
"There is an international movement, and women at the fore of this, which is what really excites me just looking at the craft, the growing, the different animals, the different fibres animals have and recreating, in a way, the old techniques ... and small scale manufacturing where you can really appreciate the quality of say a ... Corriedale or a Romney or a Merino."
Using pure wool was crucial as combining wool with synthetic fibres meant it lost the ability to be recycled.
"It’s not going to decompose. We have to stop consuming rubbish, buying throw-away c... and plastic clothes that are poisoning us."
If the manufacturers of cheap, fast fashion produced overseas were held accountable for the disposal of their synthetic products it would make them significantly more expensive.
"I’m really really angry. We need more voices, we have to speak louder.
There were some amazing wool products being developed including needle-felted wall panels to be hung like wallpaper. That had great promise in public buildings as it improved acoustics and met building codes for fire safety without adding any synthetic products, she said.
"The wool industry is in disarray, we know farmers are getting very low prices for wool and yet I believe this amazing fibre has so much potential for our future, to make our world better, to make our world more healthy."
She had been working recently with creating wool felt, which she was using for homeware items and accessories. WoolOn’s supreme award winner was a collection of three outer garments, a jacket and two coats, made from felt created from merino wool grown at Callum and Dayna Paterson’s Ida Valley Station.
Mitchell was in the process of setting up a textile hub in Auckland to explore felt and other processes using wool.
At WoolOn she showed garments she had prepared for New Zealand fashion week including a wool dressing gown which was made entirely in New Zealand — the wool was grown, spun, manufactured into cloth and then sewn here.
At the WoolOn event Mitchell explained her own ongoing relationship with wool.
Seeing coloured Romney sheep inspired her to wonder if she could make a Harris tweed kind of coat and that started her thinking about what she could do with a fleece and how to process it and what to do with it.
"As a designer who has always bought beautiful woollen fabrics from all around the world ... actually having this fleece and the transformation of it into the fibre and spinning yarn and both knitting, weaving and also felting ... I’ve really connected with felting ... it’s such an amazing fabric ... I’m really lucky I have my beautiful bespoke tailoring that I do but this wonderful new journey that I’m on.
"I really believe we need wool to be seen in beautiful designs to put it on the world stage again and really showcase it.
"We grow the best wool in the world so we really need to be showcasing that."
Merino wool only accounted for about 1.5% of New Zealand’s wool production and the best came from Central Otago, Mitchell said.
Production had become incredibly technical with traceability from sheep to garment demanded world wide. That created a lot more work for farmers, lots of audits and certification.
"We need to know these things but you don’t want to punish the farmer with the cost."
The government needed to reduce the cost of compliance. Small farmers found it difficult to meet the cost of certification which cost three times as much in New Zealand as Australian farmers paid, she said.
