Growing up, Krystel English never imagined becoming a fashion designer, despite being seemingly born for the role. In the 1980s her parents, Gloria and Mel, ran Fidgit’s Fashion on Auckland’s Darby Street, a hip men’s and women’s boutique that carried its success into Australian department stores and even counted Stevie Nicks among its customers. While it was not the future she imagined for herself at the time, a childhood spent surrounded by the day-to-day working of the fashion business left its mark.
“I was immersed in a creative industry since I was born. I remember the sewing machines raging as I would fall asleep. I remember recently looking at some of their media clippings and seeing a similar resemblance from their collections back in the ‘80s to mine today.”
The collections she speaks of are for Krystel’s Sydney-based label, IXIAH, and though she may see in them a connection to her parents’ work, they are very much made for the here and now. Uniquely intricate with a sense of luxury bohemia, IXIAH represents a new era of individualism synonymous with strong femininity. Rejecting the seasonality of the traditional fashion calendar and its trend-driven approach, IXIAH favours styles that can be worn today, or 10 years from now, and passed on to the next generation. Krystel’s design approach emphasises a diversity of detail in the form of intricately crafted hand bindings, flouncy, full hemlines cut using voluminous amounts of fabric, pleating, and clever tailoring combined with hand-crochet techniques. The introduction of more pared-back denim offerings provides a wearable counterbalance to the eyecatching dresses and bodices IXIAH has built its reputation on and demonstrates Krystel’s understanding of a label’s need for versatility in an increasingly casual market.
This sense of balance is also evidenced by her intuition of when to let the craftsmanship of her pieces take centre stage against a backdrop of creamy whites and midnight blacks, and when to enhance its impact through injections of tropical colour and complex print. Rich splashes of mango orange and hibiscus red punctuate past lookbooks alongside psychedelic prints that appear to be painted in watercolour, another speciality of the label. The suite of prints and baroque details are conceptualised and designed in-house by Krystel and developed over an extended period with their factories and makers, with whom the label has built a close relationship over the past decade.
Uniquely intricate with a sense of luxury bohemia, IXIAH represents a new era of individualism synonymous with strong femininity.
This slow way of working is central not just to Krystel’s approach – “I’ll sketch out a collection and refine it continuously, often coming back to it weeks later” – but to IXIAH’s ethos of creating unique and timeless designs that customers will cherish well into the future: “When you purchase a creation of ours, you buy an investment piece knowing it will stand the test of time.” The importance IXIAH places on conscious purchasing is also motivated by another central concern: the planet. Avoiding the topic of sustainability is an impossibility for any label nowadays, and while IXIAH acknowledges that calling themselves entirely sustainable is not a realistic proposition at this stage, they are constantly striving to minimise their impact throughout the supply chain. Natural fabrics such as silk, linen and cotton feature heavily in collections, while production runs are limited to eliminate the possibility of wastage and encourage customers to appreciate the inherent exclusivity of their pieces.
The consideration shown in each step of IXIAH’s design and production has been rewarded in turn with a business that has not only managed to weather the worst of the pandemic but actually grown throughout it. Over the last three years, IXIAH’s international market has steadily expanded within Europe, having secured their initial overseas stockists in, of all places, Poland, where the brand is carried in half a dozen stores across the country and sits alongside major labels such as Gucci, Prada, Valentino, and Isabel Marant. More impressively, this expansion has occurred organically and without the use of agents – just last year they were approached by five separate stockists in Norway and now have three accounts there, along with four more in the United Kingdom, Barbados, Israel, and Egypt.
For IXIAH, the overseas market proved indispensable throughout Australia’s extensive lockdowns in 2021 and moving forward Krystel sees it continuing as a major driver of growth for the label as they continue to bring their vision of timeless beauty to the wider world.
