EDITORIAL | STYLE
Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief
Illustration by Scarlett Kean (she/her) | @scarlett_k_illustrations | Contributing Artist
Tāmaki Makaurau is a wonderful, eclectic city with a host of terrible problems and orange road cones. Rent is high, food is expensive, they shut down Lord of the Fries on Karangahape Road so my pretentious vegetarian ass will just fucking starve, and the teenagers infesting St Kevins Arcade are scary nowadays. In this cacophony of misery we call a city - where does our collective fashion sense sit in the tier list of shit?
Much like the rest of the city, Auckland’s fashion scene gets a bad rep. I’ve seen multiple reels of fashion influencers setting up their phone cameras for fitchecks in the middle of Queen Street, complaining about how they’re the only people who dress well in the city and wondering why everyone thinks they’re insufferable. If you venture slightly out into alternative spaces, you’ll see a variety of beautifully crafted and curated outfits that’ll express everything you need to know about a person. A good outfit can range from a simple hoodie with nice jeans, a minimalist mixture of accessories and styles, to clothes that seem way too ugly yet work worryingly well.
This has been proven as New Zealand Fashion Week announced their cancellation of the 2024 event in the face of economic burnout. Designers have hopped onto the free space to produce Te Wiki Āhua o Aotearoa, an independent showcase of what smaller designers who’ve struggled to get their work into NZFW are bringing to the style of Aotearoa (you can learn more about this in Paris Lloyd-Beere’s piece later in this issue.)
Personally, I’ve been aiming for a specific balance between being kinda cool looking yet clearly too lazy to actually try hard. My wardrobe consists of local band tees/hoodies, a single pair of jeans, and battered Doc Martens - If I can be really fucked, I’ll wear a jacket or dungarees. I essentially dressed how I wanted to when I was 13 - like an archetypal agender person on Tumblr, who simply dresses fine. If I wanted to go all in on what I wear nowadays, I would aim to dress like a Jet Set Radio character - baggy jeans, chunky shoes, multiple accessories, and a can of spray paint in my hand. Unfortunately, that requires more than the bare minimum, so I’ll tend to stray away from what my Pinterest board and arts editor wishes for me (sorry, Stella). While I won’t be walking runways any time soon, I’ll still hopefully make random people on the street who listen to the same music as me think I’m kinda cool.
This lazy, but okay style I’ve found for myself will likely change in a couple of years' time, when I finally reach the peak fashion sense the fifteen-year-old me wanted. It’s far from what the youths are wearing these days, but it’s a mishmash of late 2010s Tumblr trends and cool guy signalling that I’m happy enough. If you wanna learn about what other students are wearing, read on - identity-defining hats, low-rise jeans, backwards caps, and some good ol’ interviews to top it off. Have fun, and have a lovely mid-sem break before we return for our penultimate issue of 2024!
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