Life + Style 22 January 2016

21 August, 2015

life+style The Weekend Sun 1

Photo: Bruce Barnard

CREATIVE COLOUR See page 2

THE WEEKEND

Featuring Weddings | Fashion | Photography

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22August, January, 2016 life+style The Weekend Sun 21 2015

Making a statement A wardrobe full of colour, sparkle and fun

That’s exactly the ethos behind her and husband Nathan’s family fashion business, Augustine.

Established in 2008, Augustine is full of colour, playfulness, embellishments, sparkle and fun.

It’s not for wallflowers; it’s for women who want to look and feel amazing, and catch the eye of onlookers when they enter the room. And all eyes are on Kelly today, looking radiant in a multi-coloured floral maxi dress and silver sandals.

She feels a million dollars, looks like a billion, and paid only a little more than a hundred. The secret is in the bright blues, pinks, purples and greens.

“With Augustine it’s all about colour, not any particular colour, any colour,” says Kelly.

“I’m on a crusade to encourage women to wear less black in New Zealand. Women feel so amazing when they wear colour but they don’t realise it until they put it on.”

Nathan and his Tauranga-raised wife built the business from the ground up. They now own three Augustine boutique stores, with a further 75 retail outlets throughout New Zealand stocking their brand.

Kelly designs the collections, while Nathan is the “brains behind the business”.

“We both work together so well, but we’ve also got different strengths,” says Nathan.

Meeting with Life + Style at Mount Maunganui,

outside Kelly and Nathan’s first-ever Augustine store, the couple is poised, professional and putting their best face forward during this interview. But there’s a constant reminder of their other big commitment – family.

“We’ve never had a nanny or an au pair, we’ve always done it ourselves,” says Kelly, who juggles school pick-ups as well as designing new clothing collections.

“We’re talking about business with our five-yearold all the time. She’s on board with it and trying to negotiate, she’s hilarious,” says Nathan. “She’s our little entrepreneur.”

Photos: Bruce Barnard

She looks like a model with the glitzy, bright-coloured clothing, making a statement everywhere she walks – but Kelly Coe is just your regular down-to-earth kind of gal.

“With Augustine it’s all about colour – not any particular colour, just colour” The husband and wife team travel to China about four times a year to find the perfect fabrics and trims to compliment Kelly’s designs, which are also made there.

When Indi was born, Mum and Dad brought their baby with them.

“She used to come to fashion shows,” says Kelly.

Family is what inspired the company name. “I liked the name August if we had a boy,” says Kelly. “I’m born in August. My mum, grandad and my good friend are also born in August, so it kind of came from that, but to make it more feminine it became Augustine.”

Augustine’s sister label, Charlo, was

started to spruce up Kelly’s weekend and ‘mummy’ attire. She wanted something practical, comfortable and effortless enough to wear to the school drop-offs but still pretty and feminine enough for meeting her girlfriends for lunch.

Next to be sewn up on Kelly and Nathan’s list is a new label for the plussize market, with the couple recently hiring a talented designer from their Mount Maunganui store to create clothing for 16-plus women.

In June, Kelly and Nathan will be opening their first Australian Augustine store in Melbourne, with plans to open another Trans-Tasman location by November 2016.

Zoe Hunter

22 January, 2016 21 August, 2015

The sparkle in a jeweller’s eye

life+style The Weekend Sun 3

“I like the hands-on side of it”

The smile on her face when she slips on that gold bracelet she’s been dreaming of, or the sparkle in her eye when you ask her to marry you.

It’s these special memories that prove jewellery pieces aren’t just precious metals and diamonds – they can show someone you love them or symbolise a forever relationship.

Nathan Steiner knows the story behind the shine as the man who turns gold, silver, platinum and palladium into timeless treasures.

“I like the hands on side of it, the actual making of things,” says the fourth-year jewellery apprentice at Greerton’s Artisan Manufacturing Jewellers.

“There are a lot of components that go in to different pieces you make and it’s quite cool making little things that people can’t even imagine.

“Especially if you do some drawings for them first and you see the piece that they hold in their hand is identical to the picture that we’ve drawn. It’s quite cool.”

The 24-year-old declared his love for wife Jodie with a piece of his heart in the form of a diamond ring he made himself.

“The engagement ring is quite cool,” says Nathan. “It’s got a nice diamond in the middle, a cross over design with some little diamonds running down the outside.

“It’s engraved on the side with something that symbolises her and I. It’s all very specialised to who we are.

It was a yes straight away!”

Nathan wears a thin gold chain and his wedding band he designed himself.

“I wouldn’t want to wear something that I hadn’t made myself,” says the talented jeweller.

“It’s a fairly normal design, a plain band with a few detailings through it and a little yellow stone that I’ve put in it.”

He’s recently added another precious

Photo: Tracy Hardy

Nathan’s time to shine

metal to his repertoire – a trophy he received for winning the Australasian Nationwide Jewellers Apprentice of the Year Award.

The Nathan Cameron Perpetual Trophy sits proudly in his home after he became the first Kiwi to win the award.

There are four different categories representing each year level, and as a fourth-year apprentice Nathan entered the hardest at Level 4.

Nathan was provided the metal and was given certain specifications to create from home.

“We had to accumulate our wastage and

measured everything,” says Nathan.

“You got marked on how good you were, how good the piece met the specifications and how well you used the materials. So you had to give back any extra wastage you didn’t use.”

It took Nathan three days to design his masterpiece. “It was quite a cool, big cluster ring. It was an intricate piece.

“I entered last year, but this year I put a lot more time and effort into it as it’s my last year. I really went for it and I was stoked to see it return a win.”

Zoe Hunter

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22August, January, 2016 life+style The Weekend Sun 21 2015

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22 January, 2016 21 August, 2015

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Right: Guipure Lace Gown, designed and made by Nicky at White Silk Bridal Couture.

Above: Gorgeous diamond engagement and wedding rings, made to order at Artisan Manufacturing Jewellers, Greerton, Tauranga.

Left: Meticulously designed and crafted gown by Nicky at White Silk Bridal Couture for bride Joline .

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January, 2016 life+style The Weekend Sun 2122August, 2015

Life in liquid silver Paul’s iconic creations Sophie’s stare is striking in silver as she sits in her highchair with peaches. Peering out from the photograph with eyes wide open, they are silent with wonder and curiosity, yet whisper infinite possibilities and tales of life to be written down.

Photo: Chris Callinan

Of all the portraits Tauranga photographer Paul Alsop has captured over the years, this image of his two-year-old-daughter is his favourite.

The 35-year-old “hobbyist photographer” has quickly gained an impressive reputation for the images he captures using an antique photographic process called ‘wet plate collodion’, which dates back

to 1851 and is the third oldest form of photography.

From start to finish, the process takes roughly 20 minutes per image and involves taking a polished glass or aluminium plate, pouring liquid on it called collodion, then dipping it into liquid silver before loading the plate into a large format camera.

“You take the lens cap off and expose the plate for up to 20 seconds before putting the cap back on, so when shooting people they have to stay still otherwise they just disappear,” he explains.

“As you can imagine, taking a photograph of a wriggling two-year-old with this process is quite hard.

But I managed to do it with Sophie.

“I focused on the area where I thought she would be and got a really nice image of her. It’s the only child portrait I’ve taken.”

Hailing from Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s northeast, Paul and wife Joanna emigrated to New Zealand in 2010. They initially settled in the Coromandel where Paul would complete his studies as a general practitioner at Thames Hospital, before moving to Tauranga in 2015.

He works fulltime as a GP at the Papamoa Pines Medical Centre, but says he’s strict about keeping his two worlds separate from each other.

“When I’m at work I am a doctor and nothing else. When I’m at home I am a photographer and an artist.”

Paul’s photographic journey started some 10 years ago and is a wander backwards through time, initially starting out with digital photography, then celluloid, and finally wet plate collodion, which he discovered in 2012.

Wet plate is a very “DIY form of photography” he says, with Paul making the plates, chemicals and even

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22 21 January, 2016 August, 2015

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his mahogany camera himself. And because wet plate photographs needed to be developed then and there, Paul’s even converted an old caravan into a mobile darkroom.

“My DIY attitude was definitely born out of necessity. I mean, I failed woodwork at school and knew nothing about auto electrics or chemicals.

“Everything right from the start I had to learn, but if I get something in my head that I want to do I just got to keep pushing until I do it, until I reach that final goal no matter what the hurdles are.”

But it’s this drive to succeed which has taken Paul to places he’d never imagined.

Last year he featured in a segment on TVNZ’s ‘Seven Sharp’, was invited to collaborate on ‘The Auckland Project’ with photographer Luke White of Kingsize Studios, and was even a guest speaker at the NZ Institute of Professional Photography’s conference in Queenstown during August.

“So here’s me, a GP at the NZIPP conference hobnobbing with and presenting a talk on photography to professional photographers,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m kind of on this wild ride at the moment, it’s great.”

For Paul, his favourite style of photography is portraitures – it’s the interaction with people, the final aesthetic and the look on his subjects’ faces when they see the image develop in front of their eyes – that’s what he loves the most.

Comparing photographing people to shooting landscapes, he says he would often go to beautiful spots, sit there and capture the image without any interaction or dynamic.

But when capturing portraits “it’s just a beautiful thing” – the light, be it from the sun or a big flash

bulb, bounces off the subjects’ face, goes through the camera’s lens and punches out an image in silver that’s then on the plate in front of their eyes.

And because there’s so much ritual and rigmarole involved in the procedure it gives a different type of portraiture, says Paul.

“You don’t capture that decisive moment, like when you capture someone in the middle of a laugh, the length of time it takes to make an image, people lose all the fakeness is what I find, they kind of lose that facade and it’s just them coming through.

“People often say they can see their own soul in the photos.”

David Tauranga

Photo: Chris Callinan & Paul Alsop

“People often say they can see their own soul in the photos”

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