Being A Fashion Designer

Sounds like a fabulous job, right? Add in travels to fashion weeks in Paris and New York, and you have a very glamorous gig indeed – but a little scary, too. As I was saying to Singapore-based fashion designer TESSA LONT, I wouldn’t even know where to start!

- Rebecca Bisset

New Zealander Tessa is the creative director and founder of Lontessa, her own fashion company based in Singapore. So, how do you go about being an international fashion designer? Everyone’s story will be different, and Tessa’s own journey started with studying industrial design in Wellington. She then took that knowledge and went to Portugal to work. But, on her return to New Zealand, she found that the available jobs in industrial design were lacking the creative flair she was craving.

Tessa had always loved drawing; she drew all the time from when she was a small child – it was what had led her to industrial design in the first place. She’d also drawn clothes and asked her grandmother, a seamstress for an iconic Kiwi brand called Swandri, to make them up. Then, in 2009, her grandmother booked her to showcase an art collection in the local gallery. This progressed to Tessa showing a collection of woven fabrics, and then to a fashion show at Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum.

But she still couldn’t sew. So, she went back to college – to the Academy of Fashion in Auckland – where she learnt sewing and how to make patterns. Tessa initially focused on lingerie, and actually ended up making costumes for dancers and performers. Working with stretch fabrics is a very different technique – quite specialised – and she found she had a real connection to this. Then she went on to making other fashion items, working both at a wedding couture shop and a men’s clothing franchise to learn about the business side of fashion.

Once she felt she had enough knowledge to get started, she opened her own shop in her home town in Taranaki.

The move to Singapore