Trailblazers: Bobby Angus

Bobby Angus was a pioneering fashion designer. This advert in 'The New Zealand Herald' ran on March 17, 1948.

BOBBY ANGUS Fashion Designer

Pioneering fashion designer

Bobby Angus was one of a trio of designers who emerged from Taranaki in the late 1940s and became trailblazers for a truly New Zealand fashion industry. Along with Trilby Yates and Emma Knuckey (and Auckland's own Flora MacKenzie with her Ninette designs), Bobby Angus Gowns became a label to covet.

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, co-author of The Dress Circle, a comprehensive book of New Zealand fashion history, credits Bobby with understanding the needs of the new "working girl" especially well. She found a ready market among cashed-up younger professional women who wanted to redefine how they were seen.

Bobby and her husband, who worked in advertising, had a dress shop in New Plymouth before moving north in 1948 to open a boutique above Queen St. Her designs ranged from two-piece suits and day dresses through to evening attire that wasn't overly formal.

She provided smart everyday choices, rather than the more special-occasion frocks of some of her contemporaries. Few of her garments remain, but photographs show a nod to the new relaxed American design aesthetic, rather than more stylised European creations.

By the time post-war access to overseas fashions opened up again, the idea of local designers was accepted. (To the extent that Vogue launched a New Zealand edition in 1957, which lasted a decade.) Sadly this pioneering time is now largely overlooked, with the wave of designers who emerged strongly from the 1980s often mistakenly thought of as our first.

"We know individual fashion designers now, but if you go back to the 40s and 50s you knew who the labels were, not who actually designed them," says Lloyd Jenkins. "That's the thing about fashion, it used to be for people in the know, whereas now it's all over the media."

Bobby Angus deserves to be celebrated as a precursor to the likes of Kate Sylvester and, in her own right, as a strong independent voice who helped shape the vernacular of New Zealand dress sense.

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