Twenty years ago, Kowtow was a tiny office in Wellington's Trades Hall. The space was crowded with boxes, fuelled by ambition and, according to founder Gosia Piątek, blessed with one crucial feature: working radiator heaters.
It was there that Gosia first met Yoan Jolly, a recent arrival from Paris who had answered an advertisement seeking volunteers for a fashion label.
"I'd been working in cafes for months," recalls Yoan. "I was over making coffees and needed to get back into the creative world."
What followed was a creative partnership that would help shape Kowtow's visual identity for more than a decade.
To celebrate twenty years of Kowtow, Yoan returned to the archive to create the 20th Birthday Print. The design layers two decades of textile artworks into a single collage — a rebellious mash-up of slogans, illustrations and prints that have defined the brand since 2006.
While revisiting the archive, Yoan found himself rediscovering forgotten designs and memories.
"First, it was quite humbling because you realise how much work that was," says Yoan. "There was so much, and there were little ones that I'd completely forgotten about. It's like years worth of our lives."
The print is part celebration, part visual diary. A reminder that behind every collection are conversations, experiments, deadlines and creative risks.
"The stricter it gets in terms of the parameters of what we can do," says Gosia, "the more creative it becomes."
Looking back through the archive also revealed something else: how little the creative process has changed.
"It started off with me and you sitting in a room going, 'What should we base this collection on?'" says Gosia. "And it hasn't changed. It's still how we kick off a new collection."
The 20th Birthday capsule collection celebrates twenty years of creative collaboration.
