KEY POINTS:
Contemporary New Zealand fashion is celebrated with fervent passion - writers, stylists, fans and customers lap up new collections, news and tidbits about current day local fashion icons. But what about the designers of the past; those who first helped create a local fashion scene?
It is easy to forget that there was a fashion industry before the 1980s and before the "New Zealand Four" - Karen Walker, World, Nom.d and Zambesi - took their designs to London Fashion Week and helped kick-start New Zealand fashion's worldwide infiltration. But the Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery is celebrating New Zealand's oft-forgotten fashion of yesteryear with an exhibition featuring timeless designs from Babs Radon, one of the leading local high fashion labels of the 1960s.
Designed by Barbara Herrick, the Babs Radon label began in 1957 in Auckland and won several key national fashion awards including The New Zealand Gown of the Year. Melbourne-born Herrick first established the brand with an Auckland store called Contessa, which eventually closed so she could focus on selling her classic designs around the country. She is widely considered to be the country's first successful designer, with simple, classic clothes that neatly sum up the 1960s look.
"Barbara specialised in quite simple, elegant classically styled women's clothing for the high fashion market," says exhibition curator Lucy Hammonds. Think of the smart chic classic lines of Jackie Onassis or Tippi Hedren.
And while many of our current local fashion designers are looking to the 1990s, with grungey oversized knits, ripped denim and plaid, Herrick's simple and elegant designs provide a refreshing change of pace. Appropriately then, the exhibition of roughly 15 pieces from the Babs Radon archive is entitled The Elegant Moment.
The exhibition continues the Hawke's Bay museum's focus on design and local fashion history, with past exhibitions including Modernism in New Zealand design, and a New Zealand view on the fashions of London's clubland. This leaning is in part due to design curator Hammonds, who has a background in design history. While studying she examined boutique fashions in Auckland during the 1970s, but is excited about looking further back with this new exhibition. "There was a cluster of high fashion designers at the time [the 1960s], so it's nice to go back and look at that period," says Hammonds. We agree, and think it's time to celebrate our former fashion heroes just as much as we celebrate our current ones.
* Babs Radon - The Elegant Moment runs at the Hawke's Bay Museum and Art Gallery, 9 Herschell Street, Napier, until 22 February 2009.
