New Zealand fashion, long defined by its relationship to landscape and a certain untamed creativity, has found a new voice in Olivia Cashmore. The Auckland-based designer’s Autumn Winter 26 collection, launched late last month, represents both a consolidation of her design language and a significant expansion of her material vocabulary — most notably, a first foray into leather.
The leather pieces are the collection’s anchor: a full-length wrap skirt that moves with the weight of considered construction, a trench-style coat cut with a severity that recalls the precision of Japanese pattern-making. These sit alongside more familiar Cashmore signatures — tailored trousers cut from Italian wool, corseted pants in silk that grip the body like a second skin, and a cigarette pant whose cut was developed through an anatomical study of the female form.
The palette is restrained — charcoal, ivory, oxblood, the deep green of a New Zealand forest in winter — allowing texture and silhouette to do the narrative work. There is no reliance on print or embellishment; the interest comes from the interplay of matte and sheen, the tension between a stiff leather bodice and a fluid silk skirt, the juxtaposition of structure and softness that has become Cashmore’s signature.
The Autumn Winter 26 collection suggests a designer who has found her rhythm. The leather debut is not a gesture toward commercial expansion — it is a natural evolution of a design sensibility that has always been about quality, construction, and the quiet authority of well-made clothes. In a fashion landscape that often rewards noise over substance, Olivia Cashmore is betting that the opposite approach will, in the end, be the more enduring.
For a designer working outside the traditional fashion capitals, the challenges are structural. Access to luxury fabric mills requires long lead times and minimum orders that strain a young brand’s cash flow. The distance from key markets — Australia, Asia, the United States — adds logistical complexity. But Cashmore has built a model that prioritises direct relationships with clients, using trunk shows and private appointments to create the intimacy that wholesale cannot replicate.
