It’s Country Calendar meets Project Runway ‒ an “only in New Zealand” story of a successful farmer amassing one of the country’s most significant collections of Kiwi fashion of the 1970s and 80s. Initially displayed as a “fashion museum” in a former tractor shed on his Maniototo farm, the dazzling wardrobe amassed by Eden Hore now has a newer, more fitting home.
Opening this month, Eden in Dunedin is a new exhibition at the city’s Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, where it will hang for two years. It will let new generations of fashion and handwork appreciators admire the garments up close. In addition, Te Papa Press has published a sumptuous book, Central Otago Couture: The Eden Hore Collection by Jane Malthus and Claire Regnault, both extremely well-credentialled in the fabric of Aotearoa’s fashion history.
This history of both Hore and his collection is illustrated with contemporary photography by Derek Henderson, a renowned Kiwi-gone-global fashion and art photographer.
Regnault, a senior curator at Te Papa and author of The Dress Circle: New Zealand Fashion Design Since 1940 and the Ockham award-winning Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand from 1840 to 1910, says Hore’s collection has always captured the public imagination. The book offers insight into “a unique chapter in [our] fashion history that defies tropes and stereotypes”.
Malthus, a dress historian and current patron of the Eden Hore Central Otago initiative, agrees. She says Hore “was driven by a desire to do something for his community, but that something was unexpected in a rural environment”.
Born and raised in Central Otago, James Eden Hore loved the region’s dramatic landscapes and initially decided to show his fashion acquisitions in a gambit to lure tourists to his beloved Central.
Malthus and Regnault provide detail of the fabrication of the garments, and paint as full a portrait of Hore as possible (he started an autobiography, Eden’s Story, but it was never completed and most of it is lost). Woven around his story is rich context of the local fashion industry of the times and how events such as the Benson & Hedges Fashion Design Awards and the Wool Board-sponsored Miss New Zealand contest were integral in promoting local designers.
After returning to Otago after service with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in World War II, Hore bought an 8100ha sheep-grazing farm at Glenshee, near Naseby. He later added crops and cattle and the book reports he was regarded by other farmers as a very good stockman.
In 1947, he married Norma Gaskin, whom he’d met when she was nursing at nearby Ranfurly. The couple adopted two children but the marriage foundered after a decade. Norma left and Alma McElwain came to Glenshee as a housekeeper and “land girl”.
McElwain, who modelled, effectively became Hore’s muse. He delighted in buying fabulous creations for her to wear to the social “bunfights” they attended in Dunedin. He continued as an astute collector after she, too, left Glenshee. Following her death in 2022, several outfits Hore had given her were donated to the collection.
Hore died in 1997. The Central Otago District Council acquired the collection in 2013: 226 garments by 41 designers and manufacturers, plus 49 accessories, including hats, shoes and costume jewellery. l
Central Otago Couture: The Eden Hore Collection, by Jane Malthus, Claire Regnault, photos by Derek Henderson (Te Papa Press, $70). Eden in Dunedin opens at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum on April 2.
