Murray Bevan shares his gratitude for those who shaped New Zealand Fashion Week 2025 and his confidence in what’s to come
After what seems like an eternity but in reality was just six days of hard work, New Zealand Fashion Week: Kahuria 2025 has come to an end.
The reality of what was achieved last week has not yet been seen, despite the mountains of coverage across social media, TV, print and radio. The true results will, I believe, slowly make themselves apparent over the next few months as we head towards summer. However what is abundantly clear is that New Zealand Fashion Week has reset itself to a far more open, inclusive, positive and successful project for many of its participants and those who orbit within New Zealand’s fashion galaxy.
New Zealand Fashion Week owner Feroz Ali and the event’s new board director, Liam Taylor, contacted me in November 2024 with what was then a request for help to steer the event in a new direction, along with a small team who would be responsible for setting a new cadence for the event. To be honest (as is often the case with good ideas that take a long time to come to fruition) none of us could have said in November 2024 that what we were trying to create would work. There were times in January and February this year that I was panicking because we simply didn’t have enough time to turn the ship around. I remember saying to Liam on several occasions “We needed to have started this last week”. After having worked in fashion for over two decades and run my own business (having started it from nothing) I know all too well that good things take time. Traditionally New Zealand Fashion Week has a full 12 months of preparation which all boils down to that one magical week at the end of it all. We had five months, if that, from our official industry launch at Onslow on March 27th, 2025.
One of the greatest takeaways from working on the 2025 event with such a new team, is that many of the team’s members were not from the fashion industry, meaning they brought efficiencies that weren’t previously thought of. However everybody, without exception, was an absolute expert in their field. From Sarah Meehan who ran and organized the team more efficiently than anyone I’ve ever worked with in my career, to Becs Lawson who managed hundreds of hours of designer onboarding and backstage production with aplomb, to Dan Ahwa who floated above the day-to-day admin as a steady hand on the creative vision, there was not a single moment where I looked sideways at WIP meetings and thought “That person’s not doing their job well enough.”
Of course they were areas where I had to encourage change. Diana and Chenae from Tailored Studio probably bore the brunt of my early over-enthusiasm and desire to take the event in the new direction. As the person in charge of New Zealand Fashion Week’s new marketing and PR direction, I was desperate to give the event a new visual identity which would help to jolt people into at least paying attention, if not also increasing their own perception of the event’s currency and value. In a world where people’s attention spans are shrinking, we were not doing ourselves any favours by constantly posting throwbacks to Fashion Week highlights from 2005. What I implored many times to the team was that we needed to create an energy around fashion week that was as if it was its own medium, much like a magazine or podcast or TV show or, better still, all of those things rolled into one. To their credit, the first iteration of the new social media identity that Diana and Chenae presented was perfect, and from there we didn’t look back.
Above all (and this goes for Feroz, Liam, Dan, Natalie and all of the other senior members of the team) I was pushy to the point of being annoying in my demand that we must all act as if the industry needed Fashion Week more than Fashion Week needed the industry. When you read that line the first time it sounds quite arrogant (and slightly crazy), however the reality is that New Zealand Fashion Week had been sliding towards a future where it didn’t know what it was supposed to be, and I believed that people could sense that. It manifested in a kind of desperation, but mostly it just looked like the event was trying to do the same things it had done for two decades, expecting people to still be in awe. But I knew that people were getting bored.
The luxury I have now is to sit here and say that a lot of what we did worked very well. The main runway venue at Shed 10 seated 688 people and for most of the week the shows we had inside the venue were full. Occasionally we would strike out the front row on both sides which made the venue slightly more intimate and was slightly easier to fill. But even then at 588 seats it’s no mean feat to fill that size of venue over and over again for five days straight in Auckland. The data we have collected shows us that besides the many delegates who signed up to attend, as well as industry insiders, VIP customers and other people who fill the guest lists of fashion week’s many designer brands, Kiwi fashion fans turned out in droves to be a part of our event, just like they would for an All Blacks game or a Taylor Swift concert.
In my search for perfection in what I do, the next job is to speak to people who think we could have done better. In this respect almost all feedback is welcome. I spoke to a very good friend this morning who told me that if you are 80% of the way towards your goal then that equates to success, and I know for sure that we are far beyond the 80% threshold in terms of people’s enjoyment of the event last week. Everything I have heard for the past six days has been intensely positive, but that’s where I start to get worried. Rarely do I hear from my friends that I could have done better (I need more honest friends!) I need to dedicate my time to listening to people who thought they didn’t get good value for money or were unimpressed because their glass of champagne might have been warm. It also goes for designers who maybe wanted a different lighting setup, or event crew who may have needed more help to put rubbish bins in place or refill the water dispensers. Feedback is equally as important from the influencers who feel like they needed more help to curate better outfits, or maybe they wanted to monetize their content with brands who are investing in social media platforms. Every single piece of feedback is valuable to me and it will only help to refine what we do in 2026.
In the meantime of course New Zealand Fashion Week has struck a very exciting deal to create a three-day event in Christchurch in early November 2025. So after the next two weeks of reporting and number crunching we will turn our attention to bringing a slice of the event that Auckland has owned for so long to the Garden City. For me this is a very exciting evolution of New Zealand Fashion Week because it is exactly what I’ve always thought the event should do. I believe the event needs to have a year-long footprint and manifest in many different ways. The success of the ‘Beyond the Runway’ speaker series, curated in 2025 by Tatum Savage, shows us that there is a huge appetite for experiences outside of traditional runway shows and that content could also push into the realms of podcasts, pop-up stores (such as this year’s hit Britomart location, curated with The Iconic), satellite shows, overseas trips, and many many more iterations of what we traditionally think about when we hear the words New Zealand Fashion Week.
Lastly, I am incredibly proud of how our entire industry showed up last week despite all of the negative talk we have endured for the last couple of years that has silently persuaded people to think that the chips are down and everything is just a bit too hard. What I hope last week did for many people is to show proof that things are actually not that bad, especially within the fashion industry; a place that is so often filled with privilege and prosperity. I think it’s easy to err on the side of sitting on your hands or saying “We’ll just wait”, or maybe “We’ll do that next season” or “We’re going to take that event spend and put it into Meta advertising”. Last week showed me that there are thousands of people willing and able to get together and put on a show in whatever form that show may be. Last week showed me that those same people that were motivated enough to put on a show with us should also think about putting on a show in a few months’ time. Or maybe they’ll decide to open a pop-up store or collaborate with an artist. Or maybe they’ll host a series of movies or record their own podcasts or engage some digital creators for social media content or take out an ad in a local magazine or all of the above. What I hope is that last week has proven to people that all we need is action and positivity and encouragement and motivation and belief. We shouldn’t just look to farming and dairy and sports and rockets as the measures of success in this country. The fashion industry is strong and thriving; it’s full-to-bursting with people who have world-class talents and we simply have to learn to acknowledge those talents, promote them, and be inspired by them.
Thank you to everyone who not only attended New Zealand Fashion Week 2025, but also to everyone who read a story in the lead up to the event or watched a TV clip or stopped to listen to the radio, or who commented and liked a social media post, or who purchased one of New Zealand’s many exceptional print magazines whose teams dedicated many hours to following the event and sharing it across multiple platforms. Thank you to the many thousands of fans and lovers of fashion in New Zealand who turned up last week: you are often overlooked in terms of your power and value in the industry. The fashion industry is very good at patting itself on the back and forming small cliques, however we should all remember that none of this would be possible without people who visit shops, try on clothes, buy them, wear them, love them, mend them, re-sell them and share them with their friends. Our industry is nothing without you and we will continue to build an event that aims to appreciate you as much as it does our designers, stylists, hairdressers, digital creators, editors, publishers, makeup artists, models, and every other industry insider.
Imagery Credits: Rad Lab
