Menswear a winner for young fashion designer

Third-year fashion design student Jack Hill has won the Westpac Young Fashion Designer competition - an event in which all three finalists hailed from the College of Creative Arts.

The award, which includes a $5000 prize, was presented at New Zealand Fashion Week where it was noted by the judging panel that all three finalists, who also included Kerry Wong and design partners Stephanie Bellamy and Benjamin Markby, featured menswear collections. All are either student or graduates of the fashion design programme at the College.

But it was Hill’s 1990s-influenced menswear street collection, Young Heavy, including super-chunky knits and local imagery adapted into iconographic prints, which ultimately caught the eye of judges like Zambesi menswear designer Dayne Johnston.

“We chose Jack’s collection as the winner because it demonstrates innovation, originality and very clever use of texture,” Mr Johnston says.

Hill also received a mentorship at Zambesi and business banking advice from Westpac.

“Winning this award has been my greatest achievement thus far in my life, he says.

“The money and exposure are invaluable and makes setting up my own label seem possible in the future. Before the Westpac competition I had never seen anything I had made on the catwalk or had a show, so going through this process was a great learning experience.”

The keen snowboarder says by the time he was in his teens winter fashion was starting to dominate his interests over winter sports.

“I thought fashion was so cool and spent all my time online looking at New Zealand based fashion label collections. Instead of snowboarders and ice hockey players being my idols I started to look at fashion designers and collect their clothes. I wanted to make my own clothes and create a label with its own identity as they had done so I applied to a few places to study and eventually chose Massey. “

Expressing an admiration for “the individuality of New Zealand fashion,” the 21 year-old who is originally from Waipara in North Canterbury, says it is important for his own work “ to be adventurous and new but at the same time retain a sense of masculinity.”