After years on the fashion highway, Elizabeth Kiester is now bringing her unique sense of what’s hot to Cambodia. Nora Lindstrom talks to the woman who has made curiosity into a career. “I am a wanderlust,” says Elizabeth Kiester, owner and founder of Wanderlust, one of Cambodia’s hippest new clothing stores. Initially opened in Siem Reap in October 2008, the venture quickly blossomed, and Elizabeth opened her second shop in Phnom Penh exactly a year after the launch of the first one.
“For people who don’t have English as their first language, they might not know how we use the word ‘wanderlust’”, Elizabeth says. “It means somebody who desires or lusts to wander. My mother used to call me a wanderlust, because I’d always be searching, wandering, lusting to go, see, explore, even dumpster-dive if I had to.”
Channelling her desire for all things new into a career, Elisabeth spent 15 years as a fashion magazine editor in New York. “I was always searching, and going to find the next thing,” she says.
Elizabeth then made the world her hunting ground, by becoming the global trend director for Abercrombie & Fitch, after which she took up the position of chief creative director at LeSportsac, an American handbag brand. There she launched a co-branded collaboration with Stella McCartney, to wide acclaim.
Though jet-setting around the world following and creating fashion was exciting, all those hours on planes eventually took their toll. “I was so burnt out,” Elizabeth says. “I was commuting between New York and Tokyo, Tokyo and London, in the midst of a personal crisis, and I just thought I had to find a better way to live.”
Taking an unprecedented two-week holiday, Elizabeth joined a volunteering vacation in Siem Reap. “It really changed everything,” she says. “I just thought that I had to get off the highway. I needed to focus my attention on something that had more meaning and value to me.”
Returning to New York only to quit her job, Elizabeth moved to Cambodia in July 2008. “Within three days of arriving back in Siem Reap, I found the location that is now our flagship store,” she says. By admiring a dress on a girl, she got the number of a local seamstress. Leng, the maker of that dress, now works as head of production at Wanderlust.
A year-and-a-half on, Elizabeth is now facing the challenge of keeping up with the orders. Her 100 percent cotton clothing, designed by herself and made by ten women in Siem Reap, is in high demand both locally and further afield. She recently launched an e-commerce site. “It was like opening 30 stores at once,” she says. In addition to clothing, Wanderlust also stocks various accessories, from jewellery, through handbags, to scarves and shoes – all locally sourced or made specifically for the store.
Though Elizabeth’s base is now in Siem Reap, she has not stopped wanderlusting. “I’m interested in different, different, not the same,” she says, turning the common T-shirt slogan around. Though there are elements of her old life that she misses, she thinks of Asia as the future and notes many of her fashion friends from New York are also settling on the continent. “I just got to sell some frocks to buy airline tickets,” she says.
Wanderlust
21 Street 240, Phnom Penh, Tel: 023 221 982
Alley West, Siem Reap, Tel: 063 965 980
