Vicki Taylor

Vicki Taylor is a New Zealand fashion designer whose career combines independent womenswear, retail direction and long-term engagement with domestic garment production. She studied art and design at Auckland Technical Institute before completing fashion design at RMIT University in Melbourne, where commercial subjects such as economics and accounting sat alongside design training. On returning to New Zealand she spent roughly five years at Suzanne Gregory, eventually becoming Head Designer and gaining practical command of commercial womenswear, production schedules, fitting, textile sourcing and the specialist manufacturing network around Auckland.

Taylor left Suzanne Gregory in late 1998 and launched her own label publicly in March 1999 with a small Jervois Road boutique in Ponsonby. She built taylor through direct retail and local production, retaining creative control as the business expanded across New Zealand. Her later projects broadened that practice: in 2014 she and Mark Taylor founded The Shelter as a multi-brand concept store, and in 2018 she introduced Symetria for Northern Hemisphere wholesale. More than two decades after the first taylor store, she remained the designer behind both labels, with recent work moving between seasonal retail collections and installation-led fashion presentations.

Taylor designs from the textile outward. Her work repeatedly uses architectural tailoring, asymmetric construction, transformable details, elongated layers and controlled volume, allowing a garment to shift in relation to the body while remaining practical enough for daily wear. Limited fabrications from Italian and Japanese mills, New Zealand merino and other distinctive materials often provide the starting point, with weight, drape and surface determining how a pattern is cut and how a silhouette holds or releases its shape.

That attention to construction extends into the production system around the clothes. Taylor has sustained relationships with New Zealand pattern-makers, cutters, sample machinists and specialist outworkers, using short runs and recuts to keep fit and finish close to the design process. The Shelter translates her preference for editing, texture and spatial clarity into a retail environment, while Symetria adapts the same material discipline to Northern Hemisphere seasonality. Collaborations with artists such as Rebekah Farr add another dimension, turning commissioned paintings into prints that become part of the structure and atmosphere of a collection.