I have been waiting years for this book. The Dress Circle is a beautiful book covering NZ fashion design since 1940 packed to its stylish brim with facts, photos and anecdotes from the movers and shakers in our nation’s fashion industry…
I have been waiting years for this book.
The Dress Circle is a beautiful book covering NZ fashion design since 1940, packed to its stylish brim with facts, photos and anecdotes from the movers and shakers in our nation’s fashion industry.
The authors chose 1940 as a starting point because around that date, original design talent began to emerge here, rather than just home sewers and slavish copiers.
All the usual suspects are in here, and hundreds more you have never heard of. And not just designers, but the entire industry, from models and manufacturing labels to the media such as New Zealand Vogue magaazine – which, I was surprised to learn – ran from the late 50s to the 60s.
Even young fashion students will recognise the NZ Four (World, Nom*d, Karen Walker and Zambesi) who went to London Fashion Week, and kick-started the NZ fashion industry that we know today.
But this book will be of huge interest to those who have been in the industry a while, and old enough to remember Thornton Hall, Peppertree, El Jay, and all those classic Kiwi iconic labels of decades past. This book is a treasure trove of information on this.
I like that the tone is not gushy and sycophantic, rather it plainly states not everything produced in NZ was fashion – or designed – but copies of overseas labels. Well, that continues still in the present day.
About the authors:
Douglas Lloyd Jenkins is the director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery and one of New Zealand’s best known commentators and writers on our design history, ranging from architecture to ceramics. His landmark book ‘At Home’ was the ‘Montana Book Awards’ Non-Fiction winner in 2005.
Claire Regnault is a fashion and textiles expert, has recently left the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, where she was an innovative senior curator, for a senior position at Te Papa.
Lucy Hammonds is a curator at the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery with expertise in fashion and textiles.
The Dress Circle: New Zealand Fashion Design Since 1940
By Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Claire Regnault & Lucy Hammonds.
Published by Random House New Zealand. RRP $75.
By Megan Robinson 4 April 2011.
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