Calling all fashionistas – with a home sewing history. The New Zealand Fashion Museum needs your original home sewn fashion garments…
Dianne Ludwig, Trustee New Zealand Fashion Museum and its founder, Doris de Pont are calling all fashionistas – with a home sewing history.
The New Zealand Fashion Museum needs your original home sewn fashion garments for an upcoming exhibition HOME SEWN to be held in September 2012 – especially of those now in the NZ fashion industry themselves.
The exhibition, which follows in the high-heel-footsteps of Black in Fashion and The story of El Jay, is "a retrospective and view of the evolution of home sewing in New Zealand. With a focus on the fashion garments, the machines, the technology plus illustrations, photographs, newspaper and magazine features that highlight this era of creativity, it will reignite a memory or create a newfound interest for anyone who has a passion for fashion" says Doris de Pont.
This, from The New Zealand Fashion Museum, below:
The language of dress is irrefutable. What you wear declares what you are – or perhaps more accurately what we would like to be. And though the fundamentals of fashion may have changed in the past decades – moving from the designer dictate to a much more individual expression of style – the basics remain the same. You are what you wear.
Alternative ways of dressing however do not dispense with one singular fact. Finding that special item can be elusive. Way back when, availability and choice were marginal, necessity harboured a home sewing industry. Today there’s resurgence for different reasons. Self expression, individuality, the need for novelty are nurturing a newfound interest in creating your own clothes. And the skills required by such a craft are suddenly being recognised as an art form rather than simply home sewing.
It wasn’t always so of course. If we hark back to pioneer times needlecraft was taught at the knee. Proficiency was handed down from mother to daughter when New Zealand’s very remoteness demanded it – even for the most basic of wardrobe needs. And though ultimately the choice widened, for any woman who had an inkling of style, home sewing – whether by you or your dressmaker – was the only means of getting it. The figures related to the dress pattern industry even as late as the seventies are proof.
Now the tables have turned. The choice is almost overwhelming. And when anything goes, the getting of what you want to wear can be equally as challenging. Much easier then to simply sit down and sew it yourself. And increasingly women are doing just that – searching the fabric shops for the perfect piece of fabric, the pattern that sparks the imagination and taking great satisfaction in making fashion for themselves that suits their style."
Below: Not in the exhibition – but things I have sewn! Megan Robinson in a cream georgette dress I sewed myself April 2012
Below: Baby dress handmade by Megan Robinson March 2012
For further information contact Doris de Pont at doris@fashionmuseum.co.nz or 021680860.
Megan Robinson
14 May 2012
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