Ara Institute of Canterbury’s three-year Bachelor of Design (Fashion Technology and Design) easily rocks a reputation for excellence – students on the course have scooped the prestigious Avant Garde section of the Hokonui Fashion Design Awards for the past three years.

The killer course is well known in the fashion industry for emphasising technical skills, but the consistent wins in the boundary-pushing Avant Garde section of the awards – New Zealand’s longest running competitive platform for upcoming designers – show its students can also deliver on conceptual work.

In their first year of entering, Rachel Macnab and Ethan Allchurch-Rush, two second-year Fashion Design students at Ara, turned their personal experiences into haute couture gowns and captivated the award judges.

Macnab, having had serious symptoms from a concussion, looked at how she could turn her experience into a dress that would tell her story. She excelled and received the Hokonui Heritage Precinct Open Avante Garde Award for her design.

Allchurch-Rush combined nature with mental health, in particular a problem common in the trans community of body dysmorphia and dysphoria, and won the award for Best Use of Wool. Body dysmorphia is a disorder in which a person’s perception of their body does not align with reality, while gender dysphoria is a sense of being in the wrong body.

Ara’s programme leader for Fashion Technology and Design, Nathan Ingram, says Ara’s consistent wins in the Avant Garde section has its roots in the focus on technical skills. “This technical background provides the fundamental framework, and the aim is for them to push boundaries of where fashion can go and what fashion means to them as contemporary designers,” he says.

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