You never forget seeing a frill like an Olli frill. Almost four years ago, Holly Norman, the multidisciplinary creative behind the label, captivated the New Zealand Fashion Week audience with a citrus-y girl band of delightfully frivolous frills and shirred silhouettes. As one of four designer labels in the 2018 New Gen show, Olli made its mark with Norman’s distinctive take on… “Ruching!” — the designer interrupts to help me out with the word I’m looking for during our interview, laughing while questioning herself: “I don’t even know the technical term, but I call it ruching.”
Norman’s pastel-hued, dream-like designs exude all the charm and splendour of yesteryear, so it’s startling to discover that she isn’t trained in traditional garment construction. “I’ve found my own way of doing things,” she explains nonchalantly. “Since I haven’t had that further education, I don’t know the correct way.”
But it’s this creative process of design and construction that’s arguably the most fun part for the 22-year-old (not to mention the excitement of stumbling on just the right fabrics for Olli’s designs, all of which are either thrifted, recycled or organic), simply because it’s manifested off the cuff at her sewing machine in her Vogeltown bedroom in Wellington. “[To plan a design] takes away the creativity for me, and that’s what I love. Pieces wouldn’t be as exciting or show as much joy for me if they were done by the book.
“I am a creative person in general,” she continues. “I’ve always painted. In my last year of high school, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll give sewing a go’ and just started making things for [my own] personal joy, for me to wear.” Soon enough, people started taking notice of Olli’s signature “ruching” — a nod to Norman’s fascination with art from the Renaissance period. “That [fascination] kind of came in through my painting as well,” she says. “I really liked painting clothing, fabric draping, curtains draping…Sewing was just another form of art and it’s the one that really stuck with me.”
It’s clear that the thrill of the chase is what enchants Norman. Her eyes light up and she starts talking at pace about her most recent fabric find — a large-scale, romantic, painterly print of pink magnolia flowers on 100% cotton that she’s turned into a two-piece set: a voluminous bubble-sleeved shirt with a gathered peplum waist and matching shorts. “It was incredible,” she recalls, speaking of both the rare discovery and its reception on Instagram. “I was so happy to find that [fabric]. That’s why Olli takes a turn depending on what I find… It’s really fun. It keeps me on my toes.”
Like many of the new wave of creators taking over our Instagram feeds, Norman attributes the social media platform — and her love of photography — to much of Olli’s initial success. “I started sharing [photos of my designs] and got lots of people saying they’d love this, and they’d love that,” she says. “I didn’t even think it would be an option to sell things, but of course it just gradually evolved into the brand.”
Soon enough, Norman’s youthful, maximalist approach to womenswear caught the eye of Kiwi pop princess Benee and renowned stylist Zara Mirkin. After being commissioned to make a dress for one of Benee’s music videos, Norman was tasked with outfitting her in head-to-toe Olli for her 2021 shows with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra — a defining moment in the designer’s four-year career.
“I think I caught Benee at the right time where she was into the Renaissance-Victorian style,” she says, explaining her custom design process. “I didn’t want the dress not to be Olli, and of course I didn’t want Stella [Bennett, aka Benee] to be in something that didn’t really suit her. It was finding that happy balance where we could both be represented in a dress.”
For Norman and her unconventional construction methods, this project proved to be a very fulfilling experience. “I did have to do a lot of research into how to get that structure — it was more contoured and to scale than what I usually do,” she says. “It was very fun to make… I learned a lot. I hadn’t really done something with so much volume before.”
As a self-taught seamstress, Norman cites YouTube as her go-to for discovering new sewing techniques and troubleshooting construction issues. “You can find anything on YouTube. So if there’s something that I’m not so familiar with, I can just search for it and, hey, there it is!”
But the key to Norman’s process is remaining fluid in terms of her design. “I’m not really much of a planner, so I don’t really like to draw things up and say, ‘I’ll make this, I’ll make that,’” she says. “[Instead] I’ll begin to make something and it’ll just come from there. I can manipulate it as I’m actually sewing and designing it, as opposed to doing it all pre-production. I’m not one to be inspired greatly by the world around me — it always just comes back to what I’m doing. Creating and the sewing process is so inspiring in itself.”
Since its inception in 2017, Olli and Norman have quickly joined the ranks of emerging homegrown Gen Z designers who similarly make to order — on their own terms, treading lightly on the environment and, most importantly, with authenticity. For Norman, as a creative, it’s about “stripping it back to the why. Most of the time, [design] is for yourself, really. It’s for your own personal joy. It’s amazing that you can share that with others, but at the end of the day, it’s to satisfy something within yourself.”
