Photo recall: Last hurrah of golden decade of affluence

Months after the 1987 stockmarket crash, the launch of Trust Bank and its corporate uniform was a last hurrah for the champagne-sozzled excess of a disappearing era.

The two models who paraded the Trust Bank's flash new corporate uniform before an admiring crowd 23 years ago have little recollection of that night.

It has disappeared into a blur of glamorous modelling jobs fuelled by the pre-crash affluence of the 1980s.

Former Trustee Bank Holdings managing director Don Brash, to whom the photo was emailed to help jog his memory, laughed at the sight of himself posing with models Cara Pollock, left, and Sarah Winkie.

"I look like the cat's about to eat the cream," he said. Brash does remember the idea behind the new corporate look.

Trust Bank was the merger of nine trustee savings banks and the new wardrobe - launched at Auckland's Regent Hotel in June 1988 - was part of creating a group-wide look for front-counter staff.

But Brash only had a few months to admire the new look. Three months later, he left to take up the governorship of New Zealand's Reserve Bank.

Cara is now Cara Pollock Turner and married to Richlister Craig Turner, of Sleepyhead.

She spent the 80s juggling a busy modelling career after winning Miss Asia New Zealand in 1980 and, later that year, came runner-up in the Miss Asia contest in Manila.

Now a mother of two teenagers, she fondly remembers the "Patrick Steele days" of flamboyant fashion parades and glamorous launches.

"There was a lot of money around and everything you did was fabulous," she says.

"That was the era. It was a good time to be a model. It was fun."

Sarah Winkie is now Sarah Cronin, and a mother to four daughters aged 8, 11, 16 and 17. She spent the 80s modelling for New Zealand companies such as Bendon (underwear) and Moontide (swimwear), as well as for catalogues and the New Zealand Herald's fashion pages.

Now her 17-year-old daughter Hester is forging a modelling career - and she certainly wouldn't have allowed her daughter to follow in her footsteps to the catwalks of Italy at the tender age of 16.

"I don't know what my father was thinking," Cronin says.

Late last year, Turner and Cronin caught up with each other at the 50th birthday of their former modelling agent, Susan Rogers-Allan.