It is wet the day I talk to Kristine Crabb. The fashion designer’s curly mane is tied loosely with a scrunchie, and she wears a bottle-green top and high-waisted black pants from her collection. She teeters along the brick pathway in front of me in towering platform Saint Laurent boots, leading me from her new showroom and studio back to her home. It’s a quick commute. We’re there in under 30 seconds, as the two spaces stand proudly side by side on Auckland’s Ponsonby Road.
“Welcome to my realness,” she says, flinging open the door to her home. Inside, I’m greeted with a reassuringly lived-in home — with a difference. At the entrance, cardboard patterns are neatly hung from racks, and, as I walk further into the living room, there are rows of freshly steamed dresses — silks in an array of vibrant hues. For anyone — like myself — who was in the original Miss Crabb fan club, it’s like reaching Mecca.
It’s safe to say I’ve had a love affair with the label for almost 20 years. I still have many of her pieces. I still wear them. When I was at university I bought the aptly named ‘party girl’ dress. Quite honestly, I didn’t take good enough care of it, but I loved it all the same. That dress defined my early 20s. Then there was the wonderfully voluminous and flatteringly cut, cream Fleetwood dress that I wore to my first awards ceremony as a journalist. And when I got married, my bridesmaids wore the classic Miss Crabb slip dress.
It’s here in this very living room that Crabb’s latest iteration, Gloria, took off — a label born 18 months ago during one of Auckland’s lengthy lockdowns. Crabb set up shop in the family’s home, where she lives with her three children — aged 15, 13, and 10 — setting up her machines smack bang in the living room.
“The kids got used to it,” she says, laughing. “They were like, ‘it’s cool, Mum’, but then just in the last six months or so they’ve been like, ‘Are we gonna get a lounge back?’ Because they’re such big teenagers now, you know. And it’s been really cramped because I’ve had stock everywhere.”
The sewing machine and tables have since been moved back to the new studio next door — housed in a rustic Victorian mansion — and the stock will follow. Even though her home worked well, the designer said it was simply time to evolve.
“I needed a separate space. Then the space next door just came out so I was like, ‘it’s too easy’.”
Gloria is a welcome return to her designs for those who, like myself, have felt the gaping hole in New Zealand’s fashion scene since her much-adored Miss Crabb label shut in 2019, after 15 years of business. But unlike Miss Crabb, Gloria has a more relaxed approach.
“Miss Crabb was a big project. We had so many responsibilities,” she says. “I found it quite stressful. So it wasn’t really fulfilling me or balancing out the stress. It just stopped making sense creatively. I wasn’t into it any more.”
Crabb needed a break, so she took one. She set up their new home, did some gardening and cooking, and spent time with her kids. Slowly, though, she began to find herself dreaming of designs, and soon she started making them.
“I’m so fabric obsessed,” she tells me. “That was the thing that I was anxious about missing the most when I stopped [Miss Crabb] — my colours, my fabrics. It was so nice to be back amongst it.”
Named after Crabb’s grandmother — an aviatrix who flew solo across the Tasman Sea about a year after Jean Batten — Gloria is markedly different from the machine that was once Miss Crabb. While you’ll still see the luxurious silks and bias-cut, voluminous dresses so synonymous with the Miss Crabb name, Gloria is an evolution of that with some more structure — a suiting collection and intimate collection will be launched this year.
But it’s not the style of the clothes that’s the big difference, it’s Crabb’s approach to making them.
“It’s still the same progression of my work — I can still reference the past — but we’re working so differently. We’re doing more custom orders, and smaller ready-to-wear runs. We have a bigger range of different products as well.”
“People can try things on and then get their own pieces made if they want certain colours or different shapes and things. It doesn’t have to be that you have a store and you have collections every season anymore.” Starting a new fashion brand is a daunting move for anyone. Add to that being a solo parent to three children, and all the pressures and time constraints of caring for them, and it’s an impressive feat. Crabb is quick not to sugar-coat it for me, though.
“It’s been really hard,” she says when I question how on earth she’s done it. “As a creative person you can get a bit exhausted emotionally from all the decisions you gotta make. Then, of course, at home you have to keep on top of housework! But at the same time I’ve kind of gotten through all this hard stuff. It’s quite amazing the resilience that you can have.”
Crabb tells me she gets up at around five in the morning, does a quick meditation, and then she’s out the door for some exercise — a walk or yoga, depending on her mood — before coming back home to get the kids ready and off to school. It’s then she sits down and has the most productive time of her day until around 1pm.
While the new label has provided some inspiration, part of what’s given her more energy is getting a diagnosis of a health condition she’s had.
“I had extreme heavy bleeding each month, and that had been going for years,” she says. “I think as women we just get on with it. We just say ‘It’s fine’. It was so debilitating that I’d have to spend two days in bed. I felt physically drained and depressed with that, my intense schedule, my kids, my house, and my business.”
Crabb consulted doctors and it was found that she was anaemic. She got iron injections for that, and a Mirena inserted to help with the bleeding.
“It’s been like a rebirth,” she says, smiling. “I’m so good, so happy and grateful because I was getting to the point where I just couldn’t do much.”
Any fashion lover held hope that Crabb would make a return. After all, there were hints of a comeback right up until Crabb’s last day of business. At the brand’s 2019 closing estate auction ‘The Estate of Miss Crabb,’ an Erica van Zon artwork sat on the podium. Scrawled in van Zon’s iconic handwriting — the same that became synonymous with the Miss Crabb brand — it read “Y’all Come Back Now Ya Hear.”
And back she is.
“This year I feel like I’ve just gotten on top of a whole lot of stuff,” she says as she walks me out of her home. “I feel ready to just be like ‘OK, I’m back!’”
I leave inspired by how Crabb has changed and adapted to live the life she wants, and I’m sure I’m not the only one excited to see how Gloria and Crabb herself continue to evolve.
