Style, in gear
Giltrap Group is two years into its naming rights partnership with New Zealand Fashion Week. As spring brings the runway spirit to the mainland, Shaun Summerfield looks at a partnership built to celebrate Kiwi talent.
Cars and clothes are closer relatives than they first appear. Both get judged in the half-second before anyone reads a spec sheet. Both live or die on line. And both depend on someone who has spent months getting a seam, or a shutline, exactly right — then spent another week deciding it wasn’t.
That shared instinct brought Giltrap Group to New Zealand Fashion Week in July 2025 as naming rights sponsor on a three-year deal. The Group had backed events through its individual brands for years. This was the first time they came together, giving NZFW something it had been missing: the certainty to return to an annual schedule.
Giltrap Christchurch is the mainland’s home of automotive high style, and the thinking behind it mirrors the Fashion Week partnership: back Kiwi talent, wherever in the country it happens to be working. When the runway spirit reaches Christchurch in spring, it draws on the same designers, students, and buyers the national week exists to serve.
NZFW Kahuria 2026 opened at Giltrap Group’s flagship showroom in Grey Lynn with The Art of Style, curated by NZFW Creative Director Dan Ahwa. Some 375 guests spent the evening among the cars, marking 25 years of New Zealand fashion.
Brands including Bentley, Volkswagen, McLaren, Volvo, and Lamborghini partnered with Kiwi designers or marquee shows throughout the week. McLaren paired with Zambesi. Volkswagen backed Caitlin Crisp. Volvo has Kathryn Wilson as an ambassador.
Then there’s the Helping Kiwis Fly Award: Fashion Edition. The name nods to the decades Giltrap Group has spent helping Kiwi motorsport talent take on the world.
In 2026, it went to Winnie Solomon, a 25-year-old Wellington designer behind Winnie Catherine, a label named for her great-grandmothers. She works from a compact, supremely orderly workroom beneath the family home, making shirts, trousers, coats, and dresses to order.
Made-to-order started as a business decision rather than an aesthetic one. “It’s just me making everything and I didn’t want racks of unsold garments waiting for the right customer,” she says. Orders now arrive from Copenhagen, New York, and the UK.
At NZFW, she showed as one of eight designers on the Future of Fashion driven by Giltrap Group platform and took the top prize, having built 20 pieces for eight models in a matter of weeks, all around a part-time job. “I was working 18 hours a day,” she says. “Doing my part-time job, then coming home and working until 2.30am.”
The prize gives her a chance to change scale. Money and mentorship will fund conversations with machinists and other businesses, allowing the label to grow beyond one pair of hands. That is the point at which many promising New Zealand labels stall, and it is where a sponsor can actually matter.
“That’s the beauty of fashion,” she says. “We can always try something new, and we can evolve together.”
A country that makes beautiful things needs someone willing to pay for the room they’re shown in. Two years in, that’s what this partnership is about.