This week’s wedding dress from Te Papa’s collection is not an extravagant affair, but an exercise in simplicity. It is a homemade wedding dress made by Elizabeth Clark, the eldest daughter of a mason from Adelaide. Elizabeth Clark married William Millar in Melbourne, Australia on the 25 March 1872. News of their marriageRead more
Photographer Andrew Ross has said that ‘frontier societies like New Zealand [lack] the visible evidence of our history. It gets nipped in the bud…[and] you hardly get any sense of what has happened more than ten years ago.’ You only have to look at his work in the Collecting ContemporaryRead more
Following a Te Papa Art After Dark session on the little details that matter (hats, shoes, jewellery, fabric and a well dressed man), I am on the couch awaiting my Thursday night telly treat – Project Runway. This week the battling designers are being asked to ‘join forces with art students to create artworkRead more
This week I am deviating from my own rules, as this Friday’s Wedding Dress is from neither the V&A’s or Te Papa’s collection. It is from Vinka Lucas’ Wedding Empire! The marvellous Vinka Lucas is the topic of Lucy Hammond’s Unveiled lecture on Sunday 18 March at 11am. Vinka, pictured below,Read more
This week, as I walked around Unveiled with Wellington fashion designer Alexandra Owen who was prepping for her Thursday floor talk, she stopped in her tracks in front of this dress. The dress was worn by Monica Maurice for her wedding to Canadian doctor, Arthur Jackson (1904-1985) in South Yorkshire in 1938. It isRead more
Twenty-four years ago, New Zealand Post announces that 432 post offices are to be closed (8 February 1988) The first post office was provided by the government in 1840. By 1900 there were 1700 branches servicing a population of around 800,000. They were sources of information, places where you could sendRead more
This lilac satin dress from Te Papa’s collection was worn by Rosa Criscillo at her wedding to Antonino Moleta in Wellington on 5 May 1909. It is a dress that marked not only Rosa’s transition from a single woman to a wife, but heralded the beginning of a new life on the other side of theRead more
Zandra Rhodes is the first fashion designer I became aware of as a child. I think I must have been 10 or 12 when I saw a picture of her in a magazine. I was captivated by her pink hair. I had never imagined that grown-ups could look like her. Certainly none of the mums inRead more
I awoke to find that the boat had moved over night to the bottom end of the Auckland Islands, into Carnley harbour, with Adams island to our south. Adams island is home to Gibson’s wandering albatross – DNA research is currently being carried out to determine if Gibson’s Albatross is distinctRead more
Usually February 14 is a day where the lovers of the world get to indulge their romantic sides in the buying of fine food, nice flowers and maybe even jewellery of sorts, St Valentine’s Day at Te Papa has a second layer of celebration attached. It’s our birthday! So, asRead more
While in the mid-twentieth century many young women continued to pursue the dream of a white wedding, complete with a full-skirted Cinderella gown, Dawn ‘Velma’ Harris of Auckland was not amongst them. When she married James Turner on 27 May in 1961, she walked down the aisle of St AndrewsRead more
Many apologies for the lateness of this post. It was programmed to be published last Friday as I was fittingly in Dunedin for a wedding, but autopublish failed me! This week’s wedding dress provides the inspiration for Maureen Montgomery’s forthcoming Te Papa lecture on The World of Charles Frederick Worth –Read more
One hundred and eleven years ago, Queen Victoria dies aged 81 (22 January 1901). A profound sense of grief followed in the wake of the Queen’s death. This black-edged silk portrait was issued by a woman’s magazine so that readers had their own, personal memorial of the late monarch. Victoria’s deathRead more
Happy New year all! I hope you all had a good holiday break and had your cameras out snapping away. Maybe your images will one day be part of the Museum collection……you never know. I’ve been doing a lot of image research lately around significant events, where an imageRead more
One of my most favourite fashion terms is passementerie. Its a French term that looks and sounds good, and which economically describes a luxurious array of frivolities used to adorn dress and interiors, including pom poms, bobbles, braid, ribbon, fringing, buttons, tassels and gimp. The English equivalent is the equally delightful ‘haberdashery’. Read more
