Rookie + AD15
Final year fashion students transformed the newly-reopened St James’ Theatre into a fashion hotspot last week.
About 800 turned up for the annual Rookie show took place at the Theatre on Lorne Street.
The crowd was made up of about 200 members of the fashion industry and 40 from the fashion media.
This year’s students stood out with their personal stories influencing their collections.
One of them was Monique Burgess who suffers from a condition which gives her brain tumours. Her collection was based on her idea of teenage years, which she says wasn’t the norm for her with her health issues.
Another was Annaliese Wheat who screen-printed bruises onto her garments to show that something that is typically ugly can be beautiful. Her battle with depression inspired that idea.
Other standouts include Brendon Lee who created a uniform for cyber trolls and Lulu Liu’s whose was inspired by the Chinese puzzle-tangram.
Nicola Luey took home the Eileen Kerr Memorial Award for Top Fashion Student, taking home a $2500 Brother industrial machine as a prize.
Also, on the Arts Calendar last week was AD15- the festival celebrating the end of year work from the School of Art and Design Students.
Each department showed off their students work in their own exhibition spaces in WG, WE and WM blocks.
Sakina Ewazi won the top prize for Visual Arts for her moving image piece about her life story.
Ewazi was a Tampa refugee, and used a movie featuring old news clippings to tell the audience how she got from Afghanistan all the way to New Zealand.
Her moving image was played in a container brought in especially for the festival.
Sakina’s also told her story to Radio New Zealand and North Shore Times to mark the opening of the festival.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201778458/photography-project-sakina-ewazi
http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/north-shore-times/73930263/between-the-devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea
Olivia Labb won top prize for Spatial, Praveer Srivastava for product, Alistair McCready for Communication, Katarina Kuzminska-Markovic for Digital and Michele Peddie for Fashion and Textile.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/better-business/73033321/university-return-sparks-electrical-idea