Kowtow Bows To No One!

Kowtow are shaking New Zealand’s fashion scene to its foundations. I never thought I’d put the words fashion and New Zealand together, but there’s always a first for everything! My partner Christina spent a good few years of her childhood over there when her father tried to seek his fortune as a landscape architect. It didn’t work out, mainly due to the abundance of other Brits who’d had the same idea at the same time, but what Chris bring back was the memory of a drab and rather conservative fashion sense which she spent her teenage years ripping apart as a goth, a hippy, a raver and so on and so on.

Luckily the current generation of NZ fashion addicts can rest easy, Kowtow.com has it all under control. They tick so many my style boxes, that it’s hard to fault anything about these guys. For a start their designs mix the absurdist theatrics and wordplay of the Surrealists with a highly acute sense of style, something reminiscent of both American underground comics of the 60’s and the early British punk movement of the 70’s. Stylish and funny, gritty and colourful, it’s been fun roaming their collection, there should be something there for all of you to enjoy.

I was rather perturbed by the prices, fortunately they’ve shown all of them in New Zealand currency, rather confusing at first, but not quite as pricey as I’d initially thought. Many of their tees are on sale right now at $52.25 NZ which is actually around $34.8250 USD. Furthermore all of their designer t-shirts (and hoodies) are fully certified fairtrade and organic by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation and certified organic by the Control Union Group, which goes some way to explaining the higher price tag. I think this is a problem we’ll all be facing in the future, with rising costs around the world smaller creative companies will have to consider outsourcing farther and farther afield to compensate the costs, and their respective accumulating carbon footprints.

Bus T-Shirt. I’ve heard of a road to hell, but a bus to purgatory? The adventure of travel is over, or at least it is for now (barring a sudden development in warp-drive technology). Almost every square inch of this planet has felt the weight of a human presence, whilst we as a race continue to grow exponentially. Within 20 years we could have a population of more than 9 billion. Our urban conurbations have grown to the size of all the earliest kingdoms of the world. Ancient Rome had less than a million inhabitants, modern London has almost 8 million inhabitants, Mumbai over 13 million.

We will have to get used to the fact that from the day we were born someone somewhere has already seen what we have not even imagined. Beyond that, what we do find on our travels pales in comparison to our own imagination. I have ventured forth the idea in many a drunk argument that we are in fact living in purgatory right now. There are hells on earth to be sure, but they are mostly the making of an evil dictator, the cruel fate of nature, or our own idiocy as a race. Without a journey of the unknown, a travelogue of the senses, we are all in our own self-made purgatories. If re-incarnation does exist, could I please book my next life on another planet? This one has lost all its sense of adventure.

Banana T-Shirt. You can’t go wrong with a banana, it’s iconic (re: The Velvet Underground), it’s subconsciously offensive to the moral minority (bent phallus), and always seemed a little alien to me, I used to think bananas were from space when I was a kid, gawd knows why. I suppose the pod-like casing did it, and besides it actually felt like a treat compared to most fruit when I was that age, if it tasted good it was alien. British food sucked even worse then than it does now. Then again we were all poorer in the UK, we couldn’t rely on refrigerated tankers hauling them across the sea every week, and the climate wasn’t even warm enough for greenhouses (except the Summer of 1976).

So what’s Kowtow up to? A tribute? A phallus? A call for all of us to eat more fruit? It doesn’t really matter, the image is proven, it works, and so much better than most fruit-based connotations out there. a pineapple = a cheesy tropical holiday, an apple = religion, learning to spell, dentists, a grape = a drunk…

Corset T-Shirt. This sexy little number is for the girls, it’s simple and direct and definitely creates an impact as a t-shirt. I’m not usually keen on trompe l’oeil or rather, illusory t-shirts or any fashion of that ilk (piano key tie?). I’ve created a few of my own and know how corny most of them are, but this works and I think it’s all down to the laborious contraption they’ve featured. I’m assuming it’s a Victorian or Edwardian undergarment here, and we all know the hell women went through back then in the name of beauty.

I know that women these days do much the same, but I can’t imagine any self-respecting girl deciding to have a few ribs removed to perfect her hourglass figure. You can take a pair of fake breasts out, you can’t put a pair of ribs back in. The corset is a perfect representation of the divide between man’s desire for woman and woman’s need for perfection of beauty.

There’s plenty to think about at Kowtow and they take no prisoners with their designer collection, so prepared to be shocked, cajoled, titillated, and flabbergasted by this New Zealand team of art bullies!

P.S To further bring awareness to Kowtow’s ethical garments, Kowtow is supporting independent and unsigned artists by giving away a free compilation c.d. with each Winter ’08 garment!