Jenny Lynch: New Zealand Woman's Weekly Ready to Wear

Author interviewed by HEATHER TYLER

From the bustle to the flapper, the beehive hairdo, witches britches, mini skirts, power shoulders and low-rider jeans - New Zealand women have done them all. But living far from the world's fashion capitals, women in past decades often had to just make do.

Many used the New Zealand Woman's Weekly free pattern service to make clothes vaguely emulating styles from Paris. They also used Lifebuoy soap to combat body odour and lure their man, Listerine antiseptic to combat lank hair and dandruff, achieved a flat tummy with a panty girdle and wouldn't be seen dead in town without a hat and gloves.

How times have changed, says former Weekly editor Jenny Lynch.

Lynch was editor from 1987 until she retired in 1994. However, she had worked as assistant editor at the magazine and as a teenager in the late 1950s, a decade where women were expected to look pretty and submissive, in direct contrast to the austere years of World War II.

Fabric shortages during the war forced skirt lengths upward, and boxy, padded shoulders and straight skirts dominated. It was not an era to be looking frivolous and women were increasingly filling the roles of men while they were away at war.

But in 1947 Christian Dior said goodbye to all that and ushered in voluminous skirts, tiny waists and softly rounded shoulders. Boxy styles still filled the Weekly's pattern service a year later, but by 1950 the new hourglass look was emerging with pointy-tipped, missile bras as the must-have accessory.

"The 1950s was seen as the decade of the housewife," Lynch recalls. "When men returned from war, women were expected to return to the home and look pretty. We were expected to step out of the house looking very formal with hats and gloves. It was terribly awkward in terms of underwear, ghastly girdles, over-structured bras."

However, as one picture in the book shows, many New Zealand women were behind in the 1950s.

The snap shows Lynch in a group of 1956 American Field Service scholars heading to the US. Most looked much the way their mothers also dressed, in prim, pleated, mid-calf-length skirts, sensible jackets and hats.

Lynch said she got a real shock when they arrived in the US to find denim pedal- pushers, billowing petticoat-boosted skirts and sloppy joe sweaters - essential wear for dancing to Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley.

"Americans were horrified to see what we were wearing and I went shopping to update quickly. Until then women didn't have a dress culture of their own - they literally copied what their mothers wore.

"We had also slavishly followed concepts of French fashion until the youth culture began to emerge. We didn't have mainstream fashion designers as such, for old or young, although there was a small, select designer market for avant garde."

However, the time was ripe for change. The trends of 1960s swinging London, fuelled by a social revolution and the arrival of the Pill, made a deep impact.

Jeans, little-girl dresses, patterned and coloured tights, bright colours, moulded plastic shoes, knee-high boots - New Zealand women embraced them all, Lynch among them. It was her favourite fashion era. And the trends received an unexpected boost from English model Jean Shrimpton.

At the 1965 Melbourne Cup she stood out from the prudish hat-and-glove brigade with a simple shift dress revealing 10cm of slender, bare thigh. The mini brought sneers of derision from matrons, but younger women jumped at the new look.

The mini survived and shrunk to become the micro, pop icons such as Sandy Edmonds and Dinah Lee leading the way.

The Weekly's columnist Max Cryer commented that the average Kiwi knee might be better covered up. He had looked around a few knees, he wrote, and "some were a bit crepey (and) others all fleshy rolls like plaited bread loaves".

Fortunately women didn't take any notice of Cryer and hemlines remained short, and got shorter.

The hippy era was big here too - a focus on natural fabrics and peasant styles along with caftans and tunics took over from the minis by the mid-1970s.

The 1970s also saw a radical change in the workplace with more women earning better wages and moving into positions of authority. They demanded a wardrobe for business, and by the 1980s the power shoulders and tailored jackets were a reflection of major social changes.

Lynch's recollections in the book are unflinching - she lists the ridiculous as well as the sublime.

She remembers the beehive hairdo as a health hazard. Once the savagely backcombed effect had been achieved at the hairdresser, women would go without washing their hair for weeks in an effort to maintain it, and end up with dry, split ends and bald patches.

Women also loved killer stiletto heels and tottered in platform shoes.

Until several decades ago, she says, New Zealand women made most of their own clothes. Patterns were widely used. Not many could afford to buy them off the rack or have overseas designs copied for them.

"Nowadays designers and department stores are working much closer to the market and there's a tremendous volume of ready to wear clothing that was once only available in very limited quantities."

Wardrobes have changed, particularly over the past four decades of the last century, Lynch says.

"Once a woman hit the age of 40, she was advised to drink gin and it was all downhill from there. Today I wear jeans - my mother would have had a fit - and there are beautiful, youthful clothes for all age groups. New Zealanders favour casual street wear, and we don't dress up as much. We can wear what we like."

Emerging New Zealand designers have also shown women no longer rigidly follow what's being cranked out of the fashion capitals. Kiwi designers have become a lucrative export. Hollywood superstar Julia Roberts buys Trelise Cooper and so does Reese Witherspoon. Karen Walker's fans include Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Clare Danes, Kelly Osbourne, Mandy Moore, Bjork and Madonna.

* Random House New Zealand. $26.95.

- NZPA