THE JOURNAL
We love a big idea here at MR PORTER. So when the fashion designer Ms Kat Tua applied to our development programme in 2021 with her pitch for MANAAKI – a menswear brand inspired by her Māori heritage and the indigenous culture of her native New Zealand, with nods to both Mr Bob Marley and the Polynesian Panther Party – we knew we had to see more.
The MR PORTER FUTURES finalist delivered and presented a debut collection that lived up to her high-concept pitch and then some: 1970s-style tracksuits! Flared leather trousers! It was a wild ride and it more than justified our faith in Tua and her talent for designing fun, fanciful yet highly wearable menswear. It also got us wondering where the brand would go from there. The answer, as it turns out, is back to nature.
Available now on MR PORTER, MANAAKI’s follow-up collection, The Simple Life, continues the theme of colourfully drawn concepts by placing at its centre a semi-fictional character named Daryll, a 30-something Auckland urbanite who yearns for the great outdoors.
Described by Tua in tongue-in-cheek terms as something of an urban lumberjack – the kind of guy who carries a Scandinavian bushcraft knife, but uses it mostly to carve sourdough – Daryll may be a caricature, but he’s one to which a lot of us can relate. “I think we all have that hunter-gatherer instinct in us,” Tua says.
There are autobiographical notes here, too, echoes of the designer’s decision to relocate to her native New Zealand last winter after years living among the urban sprawl of Sydney. “I’ve been going on bush walks and spending time at the beach,” she says. “It’s been really nice to reconnect with nature.”
This can be seen in pieces such as the Mana shirt, a short-sleeved shirt decorated with Tua’s paintings of a local bird known as the welcome swallow. “I used to see these swallows in Sydney all the time and then I started seeing them again when I returned to New Zealand,” she says. “It turns out that the species migrated from Australia to New Zealand, so it seemed fitting to paint them when I moved back.”
“I think we all have that hunter-gatherer instinct in us”
Further symbolism can be found elsewhere in the collection, with knitted cardigans and vests that reference traditional Māori weaving with an intertwining, broken herringbone pattern designed to represent togetherness. Meanwhile, denim – one of MANAAKI’s strongest suits, thanks to Tua’s previous experience as a denim designer – is updated with functional details that speak to the collection’s central outdoorsy theme.
What is Tua’s pick of the season? “The Tipene knitted shirt is one of my favourites,” she says. “It has an open knit inspired by Māori weaving, but looks kind of retro.” To check out the shirt for yourself, along with the rest of MANAAKI’s The Simple Life collection, click here.