20 Nov 2019

Bookmarks: Kristine Crabb

From Afternoons, 2:19 pm on 20 November 2019

Her designs have been worn by Lorde and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern when she met Barack Obama, so it came as quite a shock in the industry when Kristine Crabb closed down her label Miss Crabb after 15 years of being in business. 

Crabb tells Jesse Mulligan she needed a break from the label and it feels good to be free of it. 

Kristine Crabb

Kristine Crabb Photo: Supplied

“It’s the best thing that I decided to do and I’ve had the best year off on hiatus doing other things. I just needed a break really. I wasn’t feeling creatively fulfilled and so I just knew I had to stop doing it. It wasn’t really making sense to me anymore.” 

She says that when she made the call to shut the label, a friend told her it was like a bomb going off in the industry. 

“It was really cool stopping it and getting all this amazing perspective and look at it objectively as a project and celebrate all the successes. It’d been such an intense time; I’ve got three young children and so it was just head down a lot of the time.”

While she won’t be going back into the fashion industry, she still wants to create products but is still formulating ideas. But after working up to 16 hours a day in fashion, she’s keen on doing something a bit more family friendly this time around.

She says that in the moments leading up to decision to close the label she suffered from depression. 

“It was a really dark time and I just knew I had to something and to do everything I could to survive. I had to take action to get better… I knew that life was better than what I was going through.” 

For now, she’s still very much in post-career mode and wants to spend as much time with family and friends as possible. 

“I’m still thinking about my dreams and what I want to next 40 years of my life to be.”

She says that in the last couple of years at Miss Crabb, they started making suits - it’s something she would like to continue doing. She’s also keen to do one-off projects like dresses for weddings. 

Kristine Crabb's bookmarks selections:

Television/Film

Stranger Things

RuPual’s Drag Race

Tom Sainsbury - Various Snapchat vids

Music

Bailey Wiley, Melodownz - Sugar

MILOUX - Pocket

Tom Scott - Old Dogs

Books

Don Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements 

Lawrence Crane - Love Yourself. 

Keri Hulme - The Bone People

Janet Frame - Owls do Cry