Rachel Easting

Rachel Easting is a New Zealand fashion designer, co-founder and company director of twenty-seven names. She met Anjali Stewart, now Anjali Burnett, at school in Wellington in 1996; as teenagers they shared an interest in art, second-hand clothing and making garments, then moved to Dunedin for tertiary study in 2003. Easting studied fine arts at Otago Polytechnic, majoring in sculpture, and graduated in 2005 after working alongside Stewart through their overlapping student years.

In 2005 Easting and Stewart founded Love Lies Bleeding from their Dunedin flat and produced Dog eat Dog, the first collection in a partnership that has continued for more than two decades. The business moved to Wellington and adopted the twenty-seven names identity during 2007–08 after a rights dispute over its original name. Easting has since co-authored the label’s collections, campaigns and retail identity with Burnett, including the AW19 New Zealand Fashion Week opening show and the 2026 retrospective What is done in love will last forever at City Gallery Wellington. She remains a director of TWENTY-SEVEN NAMES LIMITED.

Easting’s sculpture training sits inside a collaborative fashion practice shaped with Burnett from the outset. Their collections use tailored separates, dresses, shirting, knitwear and custom textiles as a stable framework for changing references: school uniforms, 1990s television, florals, heraldry, romantic nostalgia and darker slogan graphics have all entered the label’s vocabulary. Easting’s work is most visible in the way image, proportion and cultural reference are folded back into garments designed for regular wear.

The method extends from concept to manufacture. Easting and Burnett develop collections within a local Aotearoa production network of pattern-makers, cutters and machinists, and recurring textile collaborations have given many seasons their distinctive prints. Deadstock fabrics and natural fibres appear alongside careful tailoring and measured seasonal drops, linking visual ideas to the practical scale at which the label operates. Easting’s authorship is therefore inseparable from the founders’ shared process of research, garment development, image-making and production.