It would be safe to say the East Otago hill country, studded with sheep and the odd horse, has never featured among the glossy pages. Until now.
In what has undoubtedly been a pinch-me moment for farmer’s wife and fashion designer Georgina Lawson, her wool coats feature in the magazine’s latest edition.
But when she first received an email from Vanity Fair about six months ago, she thought it was spam and initially deleted it.
Later double-checking and searching the sender’s name online, she discovered it was legitimate and the magazine wanted to include Ater in its Lookbook feature.
“From little old Dunedin, it’s massive,” she said this week of the acknowledgement.
Two years ago, Mrs Lawson launched a wool coat brand inspired by her dressmaker grandmother Reta, a love of fashion and a desire to show that fashionable wool clothing could be grown, designed and made in New Zealand.
Mrs Lawson lives with her husband Willie and their three young boys — aged between 8 and 1 — on a farm at Merton, about 20 minutes north of Dunedin.
A year before launching Ater, she began researching what she could do with wool. That followed conversations with her husband about depressed crossbred wool prices.
“He just said, ‘why don’t you do something about it?”
A sonographer by trade, she and her husband have been together since secondary school. They spent about two and-a-half years in London where, after about a week working in an office, Mr Lawson announced he wanted to be a farmer.
She fell in love with coats while living in London and, after moving home, she could not really find what she was looking for.
She also wanted to make wool fashionable and prove that other things could be made from strong wool than just the likes of carpet.
But it was not an easy journey — “there wasn’t people you could talk to that would hand you the information” — and each step was fully researched.
The first prototype was made in a fabric that did not use wool from Moana and she candidly admitted she hated it. The fabric was not the same, the cut needed some work and the sizing was wrong.
Describing herself as very particular, she could see the finished product in her head from the colour to the thickness of fabric.
She wanted a coat that was timeless and classic, a special piece but one that could still be worn every day.
“Something people would love and be comfortable in,” she said.
She wanted double-faced fabric but she was disappointed to learn no-one in New Zealand was making it. Then the Auckland mill she was working with started doing some samples with her wool and developed a double-faced fabric this year for the first time.
Mrs Lawson said coat sales, which were made with wool from their Romdale hoggets, had been good enough for her to continue with the brand which had attracted interest from around the world.
Attending Wānaka A&P Show earlier this month, she was excited about the “buzz” around wool and to see the various woollen products for sale.
“People are doing amazing things with wool. I feel there is a change,” she said.
True to her brand’s roots, photo shoots were done on the Lawson family’s farm Moana, a third-generation family-run sheep and beef property.
But the day the shots were being done for Vanity Fair turned out to be particularly stressful for Mrs Lawson, despite it being planned for quite some time.
She was expecting a glowing pink sunrise and the “beautiful golden hour” of light as the backdrop to highlight her latest coat range.
The day before, it started pouring with rain but there was a deadline to get the images for Vanity Fair so it was decided to proceed.
Next morning dawned fine but just as the model and photographer arrived, the rain started. Mrs Lawson had planned to go to the river but it was almost in flood so she decided to move nearer the house and see how it went.
“Squelching around in mud, it was not pretty or glamorous,” she recalled.
Photographer Sinead McGivern, from Waitati, was aware of the Vanity Fair connection but they did not initially tell model Sophie McMillan-Sinclair, from Oamaru, saying instead she would feature “in a pretty decent magazine”.
On the way home from the river, the last stop of the shoot, on the motorbike, they came clean but she laughed, not initially believing them.
Mrs Lawson said the magazine hit the shelves in London this week and, while she had seen online images, it would not seem real until she had a hard copy in her hands. She had no idea what the publicity would mean for the brand.
Another pinch-me moment was happening next Friday and Saturday when Ater made its debut on the platform of the Dunedin Railway Station for the iD Dunedin Fashion Show, an event she had long admired.
Admitting she was excited, she was also a little nervous as she had to also walk down the runway and she had no idea yet what she was going to wear as she was too busy thinking of what the models should wear under the coats, as the coats needed to stand out.
“We tried to get a sheep down the runway. It didn’t pass.”
sally.rae@odt.co.nz
