Street Cred: Keeping the peace with a ‘smooshed’ together name
Great style, well put together, or just someone who catches our eye. Every week reporter CARLY GOOCH gets out and about to discover the people behind the clothes in Canterbury.
Never met a Marilette?
That’s because it’s a made up name to keep the peace between two grandmothers who had different ideas on names for their first grandchild.
Marilette Lötter, 29, is a Stats NZ manager living and working in Christchurch’s city centre.
She usually does “black, white and blue” but was channelling a colourful workmate when she decided to buy the cosy yellow coat The Press spots her in, she says.
“I’m on a journey of colour coming into my clothes.”
She says her name was made up to appease her grandmothers.
She was the first grandchild; the grandmother on her father’s side wanted her to carry the name Maria, while on her mother’s side, the name was to be Aletta, so her parents “smooshed the two names together”.
“It was a good negotiation tactic.”
Both her grandmothers have since died so she says her name is a “reminder of heritage and ancestry”.
She wears a coat from consignment store Time and Time Again, a scarf bought from an op shop in her uni days, a shirt that’s a “handme-down from Mum”, pants from Decjuba and Reebok shoes.
Nikki Walsh, 50, lives in Marshland, Christchurch, and is a full-time mum.
She was a full-time firefighter in Christchurch for 15 years before leaving to become a mum.
She was among the first three female firefighters in Christchurch in 1996. Her passion for emergency services started in Sumner when she would hear the fire siren and the entire village would come to a stop, she says.
She describes herself as “curious and nosy”, which led her to “follow the trucks and find out what they were doing”.
She became a volunteer with the fire brigade at 19 before going full-time.
She recently contacted Fire and Emergency New Zealand to see if she could re-enter the industry now her son is older, but it would require her to go into three months of intensive training in the North Island due to her long absence, something she couldn’t do.
Her entire outfit is from Fashion Society; the coat is Samsoe Samsoe, her jeans are Paige and the shirt with frilled cuffs is Zadig & Voltaire.
Melina Dissanayake, 34, is a rheumatologist in Sri Lanka. It was her first time in New Zealand and she spent a week in Christchurch for a work conference.
The conference opened her eyes to the medicines available in New Zealand that are inaccessible in Sri Lanka due to the economic crisis there, she says.
Sri Lanka’s health system is free, so to keep costs down, the Government supplies the most cost-effective drugs, which are usually low quality, she says.
She’s in her chosen profession because she has a passion for rheumatology.
People think it’s just the study of joints, “but it’s not, it’s the brain, nerves, the heart — everything”.
She wears Skechers (comfortable shoes for walking around town, she says), an H&M dress and everything else is from Sri Lankan stores.