Once there was an angel
by CHARLES ANDERSON - Nelson
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Down the quiet end of one of Nelson's central streets is the headquarters of one of the largest niche clothing companies in the world. The thing is, Charles Anderson discovers, niche is hard to define.
You can find the work of Caroline Keill in the midst of 30,000 people at the United States' largest pop culture convention. You can find it with full leather boots, strutting the neon streets of Tokyo, Japan, or in your estranged English second cousin's wedding album.
It could be part of an international production of The Merchant of Venice or in a carnival that has its roots in that Italian city long before Shakespeare was around.
Keill's latest shipment has just left for the Czech Republic, but she lives in Nelson, New Zealand.
For the past 15 years, she and her partner, Steven Baldwin, have created The Dark Angel, a brand which started as an alternative clothing company and grew from there.
And it grew a lot. On the company's database are about 20,000 regular customers worldwide looking for something they cannot find anywhere else. They are looking for escape and their five minutes of fantasy.
"It's based on the idea of clothing being a theatrical statement for a lot of people," Keill says, "and everyone can be theatrical."
Those customers range from magicians, fortune tellers and rock bands, to those who simply enjoy wearing something a bit different. But The Dark Angel's mainstay is weddings, often for those people who may have never dreamed of getting dressed up in normal life. "This is their one time in their lives to become that fairy or that 18th-century poet or whoever they choose to be."
In Keill's experience, those people's choices are varied. They choose cloaks, coats, corsets and shirts with cravats: "There are those people out there who don't want to go down to a local High Street store and buy their clothes. They're not just freaks and weirdos. They can be quite regular."
Keill, along with her clothes and her clientele, does not fit neatly into categories. She does not wear the designs she creates, despite having a lifelong passion for period dress and costuming. And she is a fashion designer who calls herself "anti-fashion" - a position that comes from her disdain of the industry.
Keill can't identify with the idea that someone would stop wearing clothes simply because they are "out of fashion". She has seen the misery that idea carries with it.
Keill has travelled to India and Nepal. She lived for almost two years in Thailand and four in Singapore after it became impossible to produce her pieces in England, where the concept was born.
"I thought, `If I have to move production overseas, then I want to be there to oversee it'." So she did, and now has manufacturing bases all over Asia and four full-time staff members still working in London.
So why would a successful fashion designer move her family almost 20,000 kilometres to a small corner of New Zealand?
Four words synonymous with four others: Lord of the Rings, fantasy and New Zealand.
"There is a huge market out there," Keill says. "The fantasy market has this love of New Zealand because of how people like Peter Jackson have brought it into the forefront.
"It's a strange thing that has happened but since Lord of the Rings, people see New Zealand as being Middle-earth, it is real."
When the movie trilogy was released, Keill had customers who had always wanted an elfish wedding coming to New Zealand to get married.
Living and creating her pieces here is the closest she says you can get to that sort of fantasy. She wants to sell that back to her clients from the place that inspired it.
Now, with The Hobbit being tipped for release in 2011, Keill expects a resurgence of that kind of fanaticism and is planning wedding packages to accompany it.
She says she knew almost before they travelled the length of New Zealand two years ago that the family would settle in Nelson.
"It's such an inspiring place to live. There are so many people here doing their own thing and you don't get that in other places. I have travelled considerably and I have never found that community of artists and designers who all believe in what they do. It's amazing."
The move was to help break into the Australian and New Zealand market. Keill says there is not a huge following here, but the worldwide appeal of her brand shows her something.
"People need that escapism. They want to buy into some sort of fantasy because life is boring, it's dull. You get people who go to a movie or read a book. They want more."
LONDON FAIRY TALE
Nelson had its five minutes of fantasy fame last week when "fairy" artist Myrea Pettit displayed the city's flag atop the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London.
The performance was part of sculptor Antony Gormley's project asking people of Britain to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, a space normally reserved for the statues of kings and generals, in an image of themselves and a representation of the whole of humanity.
During her hour-long performance, Pettit wore a dress created by The Dark Angel's Caroline Keill. About 16 minutes in, Pettit pulled out a Nelson flag with the words "Carri, Dark Angel, Nelson NZ".
"We liked the connection," Keill says. "It was quite quirky, she is pretty much the epitome of our market so it was good for us to be up there."
- View video footage of Myrea Pettit's Trafalgar Square performance by clicking the link at the top of this page.
