Trailblazers: Emma Knuckey

Emma Knuckey was a pioneering fashion designer.

EMMA KNUCKEY Fashion designer 1913

Pioneering fashion designer

Emma Knuckey transformed herself from farmer's wife to one of New Zealand's top fashion designers. This determined mother-of-two from rural Taranaki headed to London for a year's training before relocating her family to Auckland and opening her own inner-city dress salon at age 37.

She showed promotional savvy and an affinity for what women wanted to wear. Her streamlined gowns and two-piece ensembles in quality fabrics were worldly yet easily wearable, standing apart from local adaptations of the more elaborate attire emerging post-WWII.

Up until then, the nation's dressmakers and home sewers mostly copied European designs. With the war restricting access to imported patterns and fabrics, it became a case of make do.

Knuckey had ambitions to upskill. Her mother had been a seamstress and her grandmother had owned a New Plymouth drapery store. She mailed off her fashion illustrations and with support from her husband was accepted for pattern-making training at the London Model House Group. Her exposure to how overseas design houses functioned gave her an edge.

Back home in 1950, Cecelia Emma Knuckey said goodbye to Waitara, dropped her first name and hung her Gowns by Emma Knuckey shingle on premises at the corner of Darby and Elliot St. She staged intimate fashion shows and a stunt that made the newspapers when rubberneckers blocked the road to see a live Italian model in her window.

In 1959, she and business partner Betty Clark closed the salon to focus on wholesaling to the country's top department stores. Emma staged a brief return to retail in Darby St from 1971-1974, including launching Miss K, a youth-oriented label; then she retired.

She died in 1998. Her garments were back in Smith & Caughey's two years ago in a fashion retrospective exhibition.

Outfits from Emma Knuckey are held in the collections of Auckland Museum, Te Papa and the Hawke's Bay Museum.

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