Woman Today
By Kris Herbert
It’s hard to imagine New Zealand fashion without iconic Dunedin label, Nom*D, yet when Margarita (Margi) Robertson and her husband Chris started the company 1986, the words “New Zealand” and “fashion” were scarcely uttered in the same sentence.
By Kris Herbert
It’s hard to imagine New Zealand fashion without iconic Dunedin label, Nom*D, yet when Margarita (Margi) Robertson and her husband Chris started the company 1986, the words “New Zealand” and “fashion” were scarcely uttered in the same sentence.
What’s even harder to imagine is that Margi, who is now recognised as one of our most important fashion icons, left school with plans to become and “office girl”.
“It was the 60s and at that time, most girls, if they weren’t going to be a nurse or a teacher, then they would work in an office,” Margi says. “It was never really an option within our family for myself or any of my siblings to go to university.”
So Margi studied commerce, learned shorthand, typing and balance sheets, and worked in an office for seven years before she opened Hang Ups Boutique in Dunedin.
“I’d always had a fascination with fashion and clothing. My mother always worked in clothing factories and we always sewed at home.”
For a family of six children, including for girls, sewing at home was a necessity.
“As soon as we could use the sewing machine, we were making our own clothes. My mother taught us about manipulating patterns to give garments your own style.”
Hang-ups Boutique started in 1975. After 11 years of retail, Margi understood the industry well enough to get involved from the production end. The Nom*D label first appeared on a modest knitwear range in 1986.
“Being in retail, I had an understanding what customers liked and wanted and it was also an opportunity to use my own creativity,” Margi says.
Margi describes the mid-80s as buoyant time for fashion in New Zealand. Dunedin manufacturers were doing well and exporting to the US, but the garments were main stream and commercial.
“There was not a lot of high end or avant guard fashion,” She remembers. “New Zealanders weren’t really aware of what fashion was on an international level.”
The first Nom*D collection as just 12 garments, all made in Dunedin. “We were quite sort of very very small time,” Margi says. “The opportunity to have it made in Dunedin is probably what got us started.”
Being a creative hub, Dunedin was also a great place to experiment and Margi says the years from 1986 to 1999 were a huge growing time.
In 1999, Nom*D hit the big time. Margi and her team, along with Karen Walker, World and Zambesi, became the “big four” of New Zealand fashion when they landed on the catwalks of London Fashion Week, where they were hailed as style leaders for their “dark and intellectual” look.
Nom*D may be the smallest of the “big four”, and that was entirely by design, Margi says.
“I like where we are in the fashion world,” Margi says. “I feel proud of what we’ve achieved on an international scale.”
About 60 percent of the company’s sales are exports, with Japan being Nom*D’s biggest export market.
Nom*D is often compared to Zambesi, which was started by Margi’s sister Elisabeth Findlay in 1979, but Margi has worked hard to maintain individuality.
“In the early days, there was a little bit of thinking that Nom*D was part of Zambezi because we used to sell our collections together – we would set up in the same room.”
But Margi says she deliberately gave Nom*D its own space to avoid confusion. “I wanted to give credit to the people in Dunedin who worked so hard to create the brand of Nom*D. At the end of the day, Zambesi is a really big company and we’re not.”
The sisters do sometimes travel to Europe together and, Margi says, “We are each other’s best customers.”
Some of Nom*D’s retail stockists have been with the label since its inception.
“I’d been in retail for all those years and so I started to find like-minded retailers and started to build relationships with them. Then, when we started going into Australia, we started with one store in Melbourne and built it from there. It’s amazing the way things grow and you find like-minded people.”
Margi now has a network of like-minded people all over the world that includes many loyal customers. Margi says retailers around the world tell her that when people discover Nom*D, they come back for it season after season.
“We find that once people get their first few Nom*D garments, they are hooked,” Margi says. “I think that’s because they’re so comfortable and easy to wear. We can do the layering and styling for you all in one garment or it can be as simple as you want it to be.”
So, who are Nom*D customers? “We make clothes that anybody could wear but not everyone would wear,” Margi says. “Our clothes are not flashy. If you want to stand out in a crowd, you wouldn’t choose Nom*D. I think our customers are people who are quite comfortable with themselves.”
Margi says Nom*D is utilitarian and wearable above all else. “There’s a sort of toughness about it – both in the garment and the style.”
“Individual” and “unique” are also words she uses to describe her garments. Like Dunedin, Nom*D is real. It has a sense of humour and is influenced by tradition – Gothic in feel but never too serious.
Margi says there’s no doubt Nom*D is influenced by Dunedin: “This is where I live,” she says plainly.
But the Nom*D values are more general. “Nom*D is very real – very wearable. There is not a lot of frivolity about the garments. They do have a bit of a dark side but there is also a bit of a sense of humour about what we do. We don’t’ make things that are frivolous. We make things that can be worn – a lot.”
Margi’s love of tradition and utilitarian forms means that garments have a sense of familiarity. “They have a feeling of tradition – like you’ve seen it somewhere before but not quite the same.”
Last year, Nom*D created a motto that has stuck: Cum Grano Salis, which means “with a grain of salt”.
The motto came from a collection Margi did last year, which used a lot of ideas from school uniforms, which often feature a crest and a motto. Cum Grano Salis sums up Margi’s philosophy and sense of humour.
“I hate it when everything gets too serious and too thought out and too perfect. We’ve started naming our collections, and they are usually a bit of a play on reality,” she says.
Operation Bombshell was a collection that used lingerie.
“A lot of the collection had been influenced by corsetry but by same token on the t-shirt prints, we had images taken from bomb testing in Nevada desert, which was a real contrast of ideas. H-bombs are quite serious but at the end of the day, we showed ridiculousness of what was going on in Nevada desert - silhouettes of guys watching the bombs as if they were a tourist attraction.”
To Margi’s surprise, the H-bomb t-shirts sold really well in Japan.
Another collection was called Caveat Emptor, or buyer beware. “It’s quite a funny thing to call a collection,” Margi admits, “It was just saying everything’s not as it first seems.”
Winter 2009 is the Bedlam collection, which started with an old eaten school blazer.
A blazer with screen-printed stripes came into form and the collection was built around it. “We thought, okay, we’ve got this full-on, colourful garment, what are we going to put with it. And the idea was that we would make it quite crazy and use pyjama prints.”
Rummaging around for ideas of chaos and madness, the word bedlam came up and a quick Google search unearthed the story of the unruly Bedlam asylum, where the inmates were on display for the amusement wealthy 18th century Londoners. And so Bedlam came to be a word for disorder.
The name was a good fit for the collection, as Margi says fresh ideas are often born from the chaos of creativity.
Bedlam continues Margi’s well-known experimentation with form and construction. Boiled blazers and double waistcoats are thrown into the mix with vintage-look pyjama prints and Fair Isle knitwear. Securely wrapped dresses have a suggestion of straightjackets.
Her favourite garments this year? “I tend to get a couple of things from the collection and they tend to be my uniform.”
For her trip to the northern hemisphere, Margi pinched a few garments from the winter collection, including a toasty zipped anorak, which she says served her well.
“People talk about Dunedin being cold but you don’t know what cold is until you’ve experienced New York in winter.”
A garment Margi says she “could wear everyday if I let myself”, is the Mercury vest, which is loosely based on the Mercury motorcycle jacket. “It hides a multitude of sins,” she says.
The way the Bedlam collection evolved is typical, Margi says. “One collection grows off another, so often we’ll reference back to something we’ve done before. It’s an evolution of one style falls into another. Or it starts with one garment. For Operation Bombshell, I bought this amazing old corset. I never ever want to reproduce an old garment, but it’s a case of looking at it and saying, how can we take some ideas off this?”
There’s no formula, Margi says. “We never consistently start with an idea and build on it from there. The collection grows off a couple of different ideas and towards the end we start to think about what the collection telling us.”
Margi’s collections do have something to say, but they are never overt.
“I don’t think we have to verbalise it too much. If people don’t get it, they don’t get it,” she says.
If not everyone “gets it”, Margi doesn’t mind. “We’re not prepared to compromise our style ideas for the sake of commercialism. If we wanted to be wealthy, we probably would and could.”
For Margi, the rewards come from those people that do “get it”. Asked what she loves most about Nom*D, she says, “I love the way that the staff really believe in it. And the great feedback that we get from people outside of our world. When people can relate to what we’re doing, that’s a huge accolade for us.”
“It was the 60s and at that time, most girls, if they weren’t going to be a nurse or a teacher, then they would work in an office,” Margi says. “It was never really an option within our family for myself or any of my siblings to go to university.”
So Margi studied commerce, learned shorthand, typing and balance sheets, and worked in an office for seven years before she opened Hang Ups Boutique in Dunedin.
“I’d always had a fascination with fashion and clothing. My mother always worked in clothing factories and we always sewed at home.”
For a family of six children, including for girls, sewing at home was a necessity.
“As soon as we could use the sewing machine, we were making our own clothes. My mother taught us about manipulating patterns to give garments your own style.”
Hang-ups Boutique started in 1975. After 11 years of retail, Margi understood the industry well enough to get involved from the production end. The Nom*D label first appeared on a modest knitwear range in 1986.
“Being in retail, I had an understanding what customers liked and wanted and it was also an opportunity to use my own creativity,” Margi says.
Margi describes the mid-80s as buoyant time for fashion in New Zealand. Dunedin manufacturers were doing well and exporting to the US, but the garments were main stream and commercial.
“There was not a lot of high end or avant guard fashion,” She remembers. “New Zealanders weren’t really aware of what fashion was on an international level.”
The first Nom*D collection as just 12 garments, all made in Dunedin. “We were quite sort of very very small time,” Margi says. “The opportunity to have it made in Dunedin is probably what got us started.”
Being a creative hub, Dunedin was also a great place to experiment and Margi says the years from 1986 to 1999 were a huge growing time.
In 1999, Nom*D hit the big time. Margi and her team, along with Karen Walker, World and Zambesi, became the “big four” of New Zealand fashion when they landed on the catwalks of London Fashion Week, where they were hailed as style leaders for their “dark and intellectual” look.
Nom*D may be the smallest of the “big four”, and that was entirely by design, Margi says.
“I like where we are in the fashion world,” Margi says. “I feel proud of what we’ve achieved on an international scale.”
About 60 percent of the company’s sales are exports, with Japan being Nom*D’s biggest export market.
Nom*D is often compared to Zambesi, which was started by Margi’s sister Elisabeth Findlay in 1979, but Margi has worked hard to maintain individuality.
“In the early days, there was a little bit of thinking that Nom*D was part of Zambezi because we used to sell our collections together – we would set up in the same room.”
But Margi says she deliberately gave Nom*D its own space to avoid confusion. “I wanted to give credit to the people in Dunedin who worked so hard to create the brand of Nom*D. At the end of the day, Zambesi is a really big company and we’re not.”
The sisters do sometimes travel to Europe together and, Margi says, “We are each other’s best customers.”
Some of Nom*D’s retail stockists have been with the label since its inception.
“I’d been in retail for all those years and so I started to find like-minded retailers and started to build relationships with them. Then, when we started going into Australia, we started with one store in Melbourne and built it from there. It’s amazing the way things grow and you find like-minded people.”
Margi now has a network of like-minded people all over the world that includes many loyal customers. Margi says retailers around the world tell her that when people discover Nom*D, they come back for it season after season.
“We find that once people get their first few Nom*D garments, they are hooked,” Margi says. “I think that’s because they’re so comfortable and easy to wear. We can do the layering and styling for you all in one garment or it can be as simple as you want it to be.”
So, who are Nom*D customers? “We make clothes that anybody could wear but not everyone would wear,” Margi says. “Our clothes are not flashy. If you want to stand out in a crowd, you wouldn’t choose Nom*D. I think our customers are people who are quite comfortable with themselves.”
Margi says Nom*D is utilitarian and wearable above all else. “There’s a sort of toughness about it – both in the garment and the style.”
“Individual” and “unique” are also words she uses to describe her garments. Like Dunedin, Nom*D is real. It has a sense of humour and is influenced by tradition – Gothic in feel but never too serious.
Margi says there’s no doubt Nom*D is influenced by Dunedin: “This is where I live,” she says plainly.
But the Nom*D values are more general. “Nom*D is very real – very wearable. There is not a lot of frivolity about the garments. They do have a bit of a dark side but there is also a bit of a sense of humour about what we do. We don’t’ make things that are frivolous. We make things that can be worn – a lot.”
Margi’s love of tradition and utilitarian forms means that garments have a sense of familiarity. “They have a feeling of tradition – like you’ve seen it somewhere before but not quite the same.”
Last year, Nom*D created a motto that has stuck: Cum Grano Salis, which means “with a grain of salt”.
The motto came from a collection Margi did last year, which used a lot of ideas from school uniforms, which often feature a crest and a motto. Cum Grano Salis sums up Margi’s philosophy and sense of humour.
“I hate it when everything gets too serious and too thought out and too perfect. We’ve started naming our collections, and they are usually a bit of a play on reality,” she says.
Operation Bombshell was a collection that used lingerie.
“A lot of the collection had been influenced by corsetry but by same token on the t-shirt prints, we had images taken from bomb testing in Nevada desert, which was a real contrast of ideas. H-bombs are quite serious but at the end of the day, we showed ridiculousness of what was going on in Nevada desert - silhouettes of guys watching the bombs as if they were a tourist attraction.”
To Margi’s surprise, the H-bomb t-shirts sold really well in Japan.
Another collection was called Caveat Emptor, or buyer beware. “It’s quite a funny thing to call a collection,” Margi admits, “It was just saying everything’s not as it first seems.”
Winter 2009 is the Bedlam collection, which started with an old eaten school blazer.
A blazer with screen-printed stripes came into form and the collection was built around it. “We thought, okay, we’ve got this full-on, colourful garment, what are we going to put with it. And the idea was that we would make it quite crazy and use pyjama prints.”
Rummaging around for ideas of chaos and madness, the word bedlam came up and a quick Google search unearthed the story of the unruly Bedlam asylum, where the inmates were on display for the amusement wealthy 18th century Londoners. And so Bedlam came to be a word for disorder.
The name was a good fit for the collection, as Margi says fresh ideas are often born from the chaos of creativity.
Bedlam continues Margi’s well-known experimentation with form and construction. Boiled blazers and double waistcoats are thrown into the mix with vintage-look pyjama prints and Fair Isle knitwear. Securely wrapped dresses have a suggestion of straightjackets.
Her favourite garments this year? “I tend to get a couple of things from the collection and they tend to be my uniform.”
For her trip to the northern hemisphere, Margi pinched a few garments from the winter collection, including a toasty zipped anorak, which she says served her well.
“People talk about Dunedin being cold but you don’t know what cold is until you’ve experienced New York in winter.”
A garment Margi says she “could wear everyday if I let myself”, is the Mercury vest, which is loosely based on the Mercury motorcycle jacket. “It hides a multitude of sins,” she says.
The way the Bedlam collection evolved is typical, Margi says. “One collection grows off another, so often we’ll reference back to something we’ve done before. It’s an evolution of one style falls into another. Or it starts with one garment. For Operation Bombshell, I bought this amazing old corset. I never ever want to reproduce an old garment, but it’s a case of looking at it and saying, how can we take some ideas off this?”
There’s no formula, Margi says. “We never consistently start with an idea and build on it from there. The collection grows off a couple of different ideas and towards the end we start to think about what the collection telling us.”
Margi’s collections do have something to say, but they are never overt.
“I don’t think we have to verbalise it too much. If people don’t get it, they don’t get it,” she says.
If not everyone “gets it”, Margi doesn’t mind. “We’re not prepared to compromise our style ideas for the sake of commercialism. If we wanted to be wealthy, we probably would and could.”
For Margi, the rewards come from those people that do “get it”. Asked what she loves most about Nom*D, she says, “I love the way that the staff really believe in it. And the great feedback that we get from people outside of our world. When people can relate to what we’re doing, that’s a huge accolade for us.”
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