Anjali Burnett

Anjali Burnett, known earlier as Anjali Stewart, is a New Zealand fashion designer, co-founder and company director of twenty-seven names. She met Rachel Easting at school in Wellington in 1996 and began making clothes with her as a teenager. In 2003 the pair moved to Dunedin, where Burnett studied fashion design at Otago Polytechnic and graduated in 2004 while Easting pursued fine arts.

Burnett and Easting founded Love Lies Bleeding in Dunedin in 2005, beginning with Dog eat Dog, then moved the business to Wellington. An American rights claim led them to register TWENTY-SEVEN NAMES LIMITED in June 2007 and adopt the twenty-seven names identity across the following year. Burnett has remained a joint creative principal throughout, co-authoring the label’s womenswear, campaigns and presentation language with Easting from the early Love Lies Bleeding collections to the AW19 New Zealand Fashion Week opening show and the 2026 City Gallery Wellington retrospective. She remains a director of the company.

Burnett’s fashion training gives the partnership a strong grounding in garment construction, pattern and proportion, within a process that she and Easting have consistently developed together. Tailoring, dresses, shirting, knitwear and custom printed fabrics recur across the label’s seasons, giving pop-cultural, floral, collegiate and more sombre references a practical clothing structure. Details shift with each collection, but the clothes remain recognisable through clean proportions, familiar wardrobe forms and a controlled use of print.

That pragmatism continues through production. twenty-seven names works with specialist manufacturers in Aotearoa, and its seasonal rhythm increasingly uses staged drops that keep quantities and deliveries measured. Burnett’s design practice links construction and fabric choice to this local scale: tailored pieces, repeatable separates and distinctive textiles are developed as parts of a coherent wardrobe, allowing each season to change mood while retaining the house’s established fit and everyday function.