THIS WEEK IN XENA NEWS... TWXN 102 08/28/97 Thursday The advance sheet of XENA MEDIA REVIEW (XMR): http://xenafan.com/xmr Excerpts from the following cites will appear in future issues of XMR. From the editor: 1. TALK ABOUT AIR-HEADS. I seem to have forgotten all about doing TWXN this week. Oh well. So it goes. At least I remembered today! 2. IAXS STUFF. IAXS reached the magic 500 mark in memberships this past week. Also, in an exciting first, the member's only e-mail edition of WHOOSH #12 was sent out this morning...4 days before the on-line release. Are we on top of stuff OR WHAT? WHOOSH #12 is the looong awaited ALL-AMAZON issue. It was fun to churn out. The next special edition of WHOOSH will be the January 1998 issue called "The Men of XWP" which will "touch base" with every single male thang that the ladies had close encounters with in the first season. It will also sport a ready to print out calendar so you can hang it up at the shop and be the envy of all your co-workers. 3. NGILA DICKSON. Ngila (pronounced NIGH-la) Dickson is the costume designer for XWP. She received a major profile in an Auckland Sunday paper back in April. I have reprinted it in full here. Enjoy. 4. TWXN #103 will be another lone star with an article about how mythology and the "classics" have become the cutting edge for Hollywood. And here's....Ngila! [ ] 04-13-97 THE SUNDAY STAR-TIMES (Auckland). Page 6. 1784 words. "Fashion's warrior princess" By Stacy Gregg COMMENTARY: Article about Ngila Dickson, costume designer of XWP REPRINT: Dickson is in her element. The former fashion magazine editor lives in constant couture chaos as costume designer for Xena and Hercules. STACY GREGG meets the modest maven of New Zealand style -------------------- SKIRTING around the body of a centaur, past a rack of peasants rags, Ngila Dickson sets a brisk pace heading towards her office. If space designates your importance in the work environment (and, sad to say, it does) it quickly becomes clear that Dickson is the head honcho around here -- while every other nook and cranny of this vast waterfront warehouse is crammed with half-sewn leather jerkins and metal body armour, her workspace is spare and vast. A pile of 100 sparkling sari lie on the floor. On the wall, pictures of supermodels in couture frocks mingle in with medieval designs -- Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless in full fantasy warrior gear. In the picture that Ngila singles out proudly, Lawless wears a gold and green gown that is most definitely modern. Despite churning out 100 costumes a week for the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules, Dickson somehow managed to find the time to design Lawless a gown to wear to an awards ceremony. "That photo was the first time in a kazillion years I had something appear in an actual fashion magazine," she says. "A kazillion" being a slight exaggeration of course. After all, it was just less than a decade ago that Dickson had a fashion magazine of her own. In the '80s, as editor of ChaCha magazine, Dickson introduced the concept of street fashion and serious style to a New Zealand market begging for local product along the lines of Britain's Face magazine. Since ChaCha's demise, Dickson's film career as a costume designer has moved meteorically -- from video clips and TV commercials through to feature films and her current post as the head designer and manager of 40 staff for the Xena/Hercules series. Obviously, all of this doesn't keep the 41-year-old busy enough, because she has also taken on the role as show designer for the Auckland City Art Gallery's Couture to Chaos exhibition which begins on April 21. Her role was to create a space where the clothes could be seen at their best and complemented with artworks from the same era as she had done for the prequel exhibition, Worth to Dior. Some might suggest that Dickson should cut back the workload and slow down a bit? Surely she'll be giving herself a breakdown at this rate? "I think I've already had several breakdowns but nobody has noticed them. Everybody around here sees me as incredibly calm and I see myself as frantic," she confesses. You can see how people make the mistake -- she has a remarkably unruffled demeanour, and an utter passion for film and fashion. It was fashion that became her first love. As a little girl growing up in Dunedin -- "as far from fashion as you can get" -- she was addicted to her mother's magazine ration -- French Vogue and Nova shipped in each month from Europe. "I've still got copies of Nova and they are extraordinary". Moving to Auckland straight after she finished school, she found a day job at Databank and focused on making clothes to sell at her Cook St market stall under the label Zappo. The style was predominantly punk: "The NZ version of the punk thing -- we weren't suffering on the dole like the young Brits -- their punk came out of an appalling lifestyle. What we had was actually a very cosy lifestyle where there was heaps of work around. We all just wanted to play with this sort of radical clothing idea." In her studio, she would stay up until all hours of the morning making clothes. Co-incidentally, in the studio next door, was a young bloke named Murray Cammick, also working late into the night pasting up his magazine, a rock giveaway called Rip It Up. They became firm friends, and when Dickson returned from a stint in Sydney -- "far too many New Zealanders there taking far too many drugs" --she started working part-time for Cammick as a paste-up girl putting the magazine together. One morning she walked into Rip It Up's scruffy Darby St offices to find that Cammick and photographer Max Thompson had organised a surprise for her. An old desk and a phone had been set up in the corner for her to sit at. "We've decided you should have a magazine," they said. Thompson called it ChaCha and Dickson plonked herself down in the editor's seat where she would remain for five years. As she says, it was a watershed moment in her life, and for New Zealand fashion -- ChaCha epitomised the '80s zeitgeist and nurtured some of our best photographic talents. The vehicle for young lens-slingers like Kerry Brown and Daryl Ward (both now work in the film industry) and Derek Henderson and Regan Cameron (both now work as international fashion photographers). At the same time, local fashion houses -- Zambesi, Streetlife and Workshop -- were just finding their feet. ChaCha gave them an opportunity to find an audience. Dickson, of course, was in there doing her 24-hour days, "the whole thing was run on a shoestring, but we worked so hard to make it look anything but. People always misguidedly thought we had a lot of money to play with." Instead, what kept ChaCha going was passion and a love of fashion. She remembers a lingerie shoot she worked on with Regan Cameron. The deadline was looming and when the pictures came back from the lab the pair of them sobbed unabashedly. The photographs were awful. "He was in tears because he thought I would run the pictures. I was in tears because I thought he wanted me to!" A last minute reprieve came of course -- the deadline was extended, Cameron went over to Sydney, got himself a model and some icy white lingerie and sent back a breathtakingly beautiful photo spread. "I was looking at old ChaChas with a friend not so long ago and some of the design in it absolutely stands up now. But most of it is really old fashioned -- I mean it was 10 years ago -- it was an era and it's gone, and that's how it ought to be," says Dickson. When the '80s' crash came, ChaCha went the way of all flesh: "We crashed along with everybody else. It took me a long time to see that connection because at the time I was just devastated -- as you are when you watch the demise of something you've poured your heart and soul into." Still, as she quickly points out, "it provided the springboard into something I think I'm even better at. Working in film you need the visual skills to understand what a garment will look like on film, and an understanding of how clothes work on the body. You have to be prepared to work all God's hours and of course doing ChaCha I was well trained at that. I just coalesced into the right place." By then she was in her early 30s. "You suddenly realise you haven't wasted your life, you've actually got a talent." Her old friend Kerry Brown gave her a job styling a rock video. Then came the TV commercials and her first feature film costuming job -- working on Gregor Nicholas' User Friendly. The film bombed, the stress levels soared but Dickson remained firm in the belief that she had found her new niche. The feature films kept coming -- Ruby and Rata, Crush and Heavenly Creatures. She is now into her third season with Hercules and Xena. "Since I started in the film industry I really haven't stopped and I am never ungrateful for that." Not even her marriage to art consultant and bon vivant Hamish Keith last year could slow her pace. "It was dinner on Friday, married on Saturday (dress courtesy of a last minute bit of sewing by the Hercules costume crew), honeymoon on Sunday, back at work on Monday. The whole thing was a blur -- I think there's a video of it somewhere." A couple for five years before they wed, the Keith-Dickson marriage seems an unlikely partnership. "I know. I thought we were a pretty unlikely coupling at the time. Hamish is 20 years older than me and he was somebody I'd heard about for years. All I can say is he's perfect for me because Hamish is probably one of the most liberal, open-minded, passionate people I've met. What I've found in him though is a person who just constantly challenges me and he never lets me use our life as an excuse not to work at what I do." When Keith suffered a stroke two months ago, Dickson says she had her wake-up call on two levels. "It teaches you a lot about what to value in life and it also teaches you you can't think about what will happen. Hamish is absolutely great now and he's back at work." The opportunity to have children, she says without regret, just seemed to slip by her. "If the opportunity had been there in the past I would have done it, but it wasn't and I feel no regret about it. I am just too selfish now. I just indulge the god children." And indulge that love for fashion. The quick turnover of modern fashion doesn't faze her. "Sure fashion gets ripped off very quickly -- and aren't you tired of it very quickly? It helps you become very sure of who you are. In many ways it gives me great confidence to say that isn't me -- or that is me. The turnover rate is phenomenal now and the best thing about it is that we're getting much better at making our own decisions about clothes, rather than what is being pushed at us. Last season's lime green was a classic example." Dickson is still positive about fashion's future. "Fashion gives you an up' -- when you put on a new colour or a new shape and it works, suddenly it's a springboard for everything in your day. That's fabulous." As for a fashion magazine to follow in ChaCha's footsteps -- "every generation produces its own vehicle to capture what's happening for that generation. Now you have Pavement magazine and I guess it's a far more -- I hesitate to use the word cautious -- they're doing all the right things to survive which is a really important thing in publishing. I don't think we had enough of that attitude. We were busy pushing the boundaries the whole time. We just desperately wanted to do the next fabulous thing before anyone else thought of it." Her own future is as uncertain as the next fashion colour trend. "I have a strong intention to stay with film. I've always liked short stints of work where I can give it maximum revs --in this instance I've had to remain on maximum revs for three series now. The reason I'm still here is because it hasn't stopped being a challenge." -------------------- CAPTION: VICKI LEOPOLD MOVER AND SHAKER . . . Ngila Dickson on the set of Xena. Everybody sees me as incredibly calm and I see myself as frantic,' she confesses. EARLY DAYS . . . a ChaCha cover (left) and a snap from the near disastrous lingerie shoot