Student spotlight: Macauley and Fin

The Bachelor of Design + Digital Media programme offers a framework for cutting-edge digital skills and future-focused design, with new teaching and learning methods. Students explore Design Fundamentals such as Typography and Graphics, right through to future focused digital technologies and human centred design.

Fin and Macauley are in their second year of the Bachelor of Design + Digital Media and are taking the skills which they've learned out into the world. They've just launched their new fashion brand BADCOUTURE.

Please introduce yourself and tell us what you’re studying.

“I’m Fin and I’m studying the Design and Digital Media course and I’m in second year.”

“I’m Macauley and I’m also studying Design and Digital Media.”

Tell us about BADCOUTURE.

Fin: So we started a fashion brand and we started with just some T-shirts that we both designed.

Macauley: We went around K Road and got inspiration from strip clubs, collected images and it went from there.

How did you come together to start this?

Fin: I guess it’s just something we wanted to do. Maybe, get more practical work while we’re studying, applying it in more of a business context.

Macauley: We also both really like fashion, ever since being a kid I always said, “I’m going to start a fashion brand.”

Fin: There’s something about clothes I guess, people like wearing them and it just shows a part of yourself.

Macauley: It’s quite cool, the things you get to do, like create campaigns and getting into photography a bit more, it’s interesting.

Would you say the skills you’re learning in your study have been helpful?

Fin: Yea, definitely. Doing like design context and those kinds of classes they really teach you to research and understand what you’re making. Everything that you do has a reason behind it.

Macauley: Even the website, I feel like Fin is really good at the website because of class.

What is your hope for the future with BADCOUTURE?

Fin: I guess the hope for the future is... well we always had this idea of building a community of designers. You know, being able to grow the design community locally. We have so many friends who are starting to get into creating clothes and producing graphics and that sort of thing. Having a way of them growing, as well, I think is quite important.

Macauley: Yea, have a safe space for designers where everyone can come and collaborate, a little community.

Fin: We’re not quite there yet, but that’s the direction and the kind of growth that we want to go towards.

Macauley: Definitely, adding more things as well, like at the moment we’re just doing T-shirts because… I mean… time and money. But, I think eventually I’m going to start sewing a few things.

Fin: All of our T-shirts are hand printed by us and yea that’s also a bit of a learning curve. Screen-printing, the learning curve is like a big cliff and it kind of plateaus as you learn more and more like those first stages are the most difficult when you’re learning new things.

Is there somewhere people can find you in person?

Macauley: Not as of yet, we’ve only just set up our Instagram and Fin just finished the website. So it’s very new.

Fin: It has been very “go, go, go”. Yea, the brand wasn’t quite started and didn’t have such a clear direction as now, but last year our class had a market and we wanted to be a part of that and have a stall. I guess that’s the only one [market] we’ve done so far.

What does Create Meaningful Change mean to you?

Fin: We want to be quite ecological; we’ve gotten into packaging our stuff… I know when I shop they always give me a plastic bag and I’m like “oh, what do I do with this now”. So, we’ve been looking into compostable packaging for our designs and just making ourselves a bit of a smaller carbon footprint. Especially with water-based inks, some of the stuff that is less damaging to the world.

Macauley: A lot of fashion brands… I’m doing a thing in class about fast fashion, it’s just so bad. So helping to change that would be amazing. Helping that in a way, even with just our packaging, the inks we use… or cotton.

Fin: I always think about this DJ shop, called Basement. They used to have local DJ’s and a radio and Youtube, they’d come play and post about it and tag them all. I really like reading Youtube comments and it was like “I live in America but if I was ever to go to New Zealand, it would be to see this shop” and I feel like doing something like that, bringing people together makes it more meaningful. Having a community of people who share the same ideas, I feel like it all grows from there with creatives we all bounce off eachother.

Visit BADCOUTURE