Emilia Wickstead: London Fashion Week

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1:05Emilia Wickstead:Welcome to the documentary in the studio. I'm Belinda Naylor and I love fashion.

1:17Emilia Wickstead:The New Zealand designer Amelia Wickstead has invited me for a behind the scenes look at the clothes she's creating for her collection for spring summer 2026. Known for her feminine silhouettes, floral prints and bright colours, her fans include Catherine, Princess of Wales, who chose an elegant burgundy dress to welcome President Trump on his recent state visit to the UK. I caught up with Amelia early in the summer to find out how her ideas were evolving for her show at London Fashion Week in September.

1:53Belinda Naylor:we are pretty far advanced with that process with my design team we sort of sit around in a group and talk really for hours on end about our different inspirations we would have started this process really two three months ago and then we're still continuously changing the narrative the muse the colors the fabrics but I'm very much thinking of what's the uniform for my customer and so me being a real uniform lover I find it just incredibly joyful and fun and not too strenuous whereas the show I always put a lot of extra pressure on myself and on my team and I think that's just the nature of the business.

2:37Emilia Wickstead:Amelia Stahl is influenced by her childhood in New Zealand, her adolescence in Milan and her fashion designer mum.

2:49Belinda Naylor:We're surrounded by magazines that I've collected over the years. My mother was a big collector of British, Italian and American Vogue and I've continued to collect the exact same magazines and lots of pinnings on my pinboard. There's a shoot that we've just worked on, we're just making the final cuts and edits for that.

3:11Emilia Wickstead:I know that your previous muse was Alfred Hitchcock's women, who were memorably women like Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, who were super elegant, super smart, and that really plays into your strengths. Do you have a muse for your upcoming seasons?

3:27Belinda Naylor:So at the moment, our muse is actually a photographer, Robert Maple Thorpe.

3:34Emilia Wickstead:Many fashion designers focus on a muse, a person or a character who embodies their vision for their designs. Last season, Amelia found inspiration in the women who starred in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. So I was quite surprised that Amelia's next choice was Robert Mapplethorpe, the controversial New York photographer famous for his erotic photographs of naked men. For Amelia, it is black and white photographs of women and sculptural flowers that excite her.

4:06Belinda Naylor:his shadows from his lighting and the way that he I guess looked at a flower through a different lens but it's the really fun part right now because when I am thinking of my muse or my subject that then I will drape onto a mannequin and then I will place onto a garment we call a lot of our shapes and silhouettes blocks we'll have blocks that we've used over the years and we'll bring back the block, which is the shape of a garment, the fit, it's the cut. And then we will use that block, but we will perhaps drape something onto that block. So we're always thinking of our real woman, because we know that she likes that shape, that silhouette and that block.

4:48Belinda Naylor:But then the dream, I guess, and the fantasy gets pinned really onto it. And that's how the initial designs and strong details that are the birth of a collection come to life. And then I love the idea that you become so obsessed and in tune with this person and this character that then you want to wear what she's wearing that is kind of the way that I look at it do you dream about it do you wake up dreaming of

5:12Emilia Wickstead:Alfred Hitchcock's women and Robert Mapplethorpe I do and I think a lot about them but I think that

5:18Belinda Naylor:is a very good sign of becoming obsessed with your inspiration and when you're obsessed I always say then a good collection comes out of it when you're not those are my worst collections

5:28Emilia Wickstead:but I think Robert Mapplethorpe and obviously we know this might change is such an interesting person because you mentioned his beautiful sensual flowers but of course there's the other side of his photography another very sensual side yes it's a real juxtaposition it's a real juxtaposition and I think that's that's fascinating because your your clothes are very sensual and they really celebrate a woman's body and I'm sure his sensual photographs he's taken of primarily men must feed into that vision as well for sure and I think that that will be a really interesting

5:57Belinda Naylor:play for us as a brand and that's what I kind of like that there's a little bit of safe playing but also something that's really going to push me perhaps out of my comfort zone out of those things that feel a little bit I guess off piste comes really great new creative ideas and so I kind of hope that with this collection we don't know what we're going to get it should have a lot of surprise elements hopefully.

6:22Emilia Wickstead:I'm sure any fashion designer would say that they are terrified the minutes leading up to the big reveal. How do you feel at that point?

6:30Belinda Naylor:So I would say it's funny, it changes over time as you grow older. A good collection and a good show, all of that comes from like being quite obsessed and being very dedicated and very rigid with your thought and your process and your working hours. The feeling of it would always be a sense of relief at the end of the season and I would always describe it of like almost the sensation of like I care so much that it's almost, you know, giving birth to something.

6:59Emilia Wickstead:Would you call yourself a perfectionist?

7:01Belinda Naylor:Absolutely, and a control freak.

7:03Emilia Wickstead:Well, I think control freakery probably is a good thing in the fashion world. Is there ever a point where you think, I've nailed it? Is there a sort of a piece that you thought, yeah, that's exactly how I wanted it to look?

7:15Belinda Naylor:Funnily enough, no. When I wanted to start a business and when I was at school and my biology teacher went around the room and said, what does everyone want to be when they grow up? and I said I just want to be famous and successful. The biggest pat on the back for me is even if I walk into the studio, into the office and I see the girls wearing Amelia Wickstead or I go to a coat check, I always use this example because it did happen once where like four coats came out and they were Amelia Wickstead. That for me is the biggest part of the success story and I don't ever feel like I've made it. I always think that I can do better in terms of design and also as a businesswoman.

7:50Emilia Wickstead:While Amelia now lives and works in London, it was her love for the country of her birth and an idea of creating uniforms that led to her dream commission for an airline.

8:01Belinda Naylor:I left New Zealand at 14 but for me New Zealand is very much my home and where my roots are and I always wanted to design the Air New Zealand uniforms ever since I was a little girl and so obviously this one was a very big emotive collection because I had to enter a competition so I was up against other designers you know everyone said oh but it's a uniform and how does that work like it's so different and I said well actually it's not because everything that I design is a uniform and so that when they would say well you have to move a lot and you've got to lift bags and you've got to get from here to here and sit and stand and so forth I'm like well we sort of do that every day in our lives I'm designing for every day and every woman in the world what was it like signing for men well to be perfectly honest one of the biggest parts of the project was really listening to the people of Air New Zealand and listening to what they loved about their current uniform and it was my job to modernize it, to slightly adapt it, to Amelia Wickstify it but ultimately if someone is very comfortable in a silhouette and a shape that has worked for 12 years I'm not here to change that or to interrupt that.

9:07Belinda Naylor:So yeah so it's been an incredible ride, it's been almost three years I think of it and a real journey and I cried a lot along the journey and I felt very blessed that I was given the opportunity to do something from the place that I was born and that made me the person I am today.

9:28Emilia Wickstead:One of the people that you worked with, you've been very inspired by the Indigenous people of New Zealand.

9:33Belinda Naylor:Yes, so I had met 1992 around seven years ago when I was working on a project that was called Ordinary yet extraordinary New Zealand women, you know, athletes to scientists, to all sorts of different walks of life and showcased all of my creative ideas and designs on New Zealand women. We had a feature of six pages in British Vogue on this story and Te Rangitu did a beautiful blessing for our launch event and that was when I was introduced to his work as an artist. So he's a artist and which is Maori tattoos but he also has worked with the likes of Hermes and so that's when I saw his print design come to life on fabric there were two roles that I had to follow one was use the color purple and also that print design was going to play a big part in the uniform I very quickly called him up and we worked together it was wonderful I learned a lot from him.

10:30Belinda Naylor:I'm not Maori. I have Maori cousins and my father is half Samoan. It was really important for me to understand storytelling elements of Maori culture and to place that onto fabric. I guess my dream, our dream, was that when you're wearing the uniform you're feeling incredibly empowered by what the print design represents. So there are huge hidden messages about, you know, like I said our ancestors, just about our country. And the idea behind that is, you know, Maori chiefs wore Maori cloaks. And the idea that you're putting that cloak on because you've earned it. And also you're carrying a certain role of a lot of responsibility and pride.

11:18Belinda Naylor:But it's quite nice because it is very playful, which is very true to the airline, but it's incredibly sophisticated and it's very deep in meaning. So hopefully that really shines and people talk about it.

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13:05Emilia Wickstead:You're listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service with designer Amelia Wickstead. Now, back to the current job.

13:15Belinda Naylor:We're looking at one of the silhouettes for our spring-summer collection and I would say this is one of our sort of pieces that we've felt a little bit challenged with because we are deciding on our key silhouettes for the collection. And when we decide on our key shapes and our key architectural lines, we like to make sure that it's seen throughout. And so I guess we're a little challenged with this one. We're playing on what we call godets in the skirt, which I think is bringing this particular silhouette to life.

13:46Emilia Wickstead:So for people who don't know Amelia, what is a godet?

13:49Belinda Naylor:So a godet is basically a part of a circle. So it would be like a triangular piece that we insert into a seam and then what it does is it sort of flounces out in a beautiful shape. I guess if you were to look at that you'd look at it as like almost like a piece of the pie of the circle and it jumps out. It really elevates the silhouette because it gives it a bit of a 3D illusion but then it's also got a real sort of feminine feel to it and depending on what fabric you choose and in this case we've got quite a spongy what we call our summer cotton and it's all top stitched and so it will really jump out and it will actually feel quite powerful.

14:26Emilia Wickstead:It's a beautiful lemon color. Is this the color that it will be or is this that this is a try it out? So underneath you'll see the

14:33Belinda Naylor:calico which is the shape of the dress and then what we will do is we will often pin the fabric that we believe the silhouette will be made in and this is where we get to I guess challenge and play a little bit within the design team and collectively to decide you know what is the best color for the silhouette which is the best fabrication do we like the top stitching do we not so if you imagine there's so much development that goes into like one very simple dress what looks like a simple dress we're looking at whether we're going to double tear this dress or single tear it so you know there's a lot of love that goes into this one idea but you can tell and what I'm looking

15:08Emilia Wickstead:at the lovely fitted bodice is very flattering it's not too tight as you say it's a circular The skirt.