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WORDS: CLAIRE MCCALL • IMAGERY: MARCEL TROMP

STYLE FILES

A walking tour takes in central Auckland’s fashionable past

The owner of the Man Yuan Restaurant on central Auckland’s Victoria Street West, where faded photographs of hand-rolled soup noodles and dumplings draw in only the most enlightened locals, doesn’t know whether to look bemused or confused as a small group of women, bright Blunt umbrellas set against the rain, peer intently at the shopfront from the kerbside.

Where now the ambience is unremarkable and the tiled floors and pink walls utilitarian, there was once a fashion store that caused much ado with its on-trend clothing and novel approach to retailing. Hullabaloo had a very dark, calm interior, spot-lit with Tiffany lamps and decorated with black French wallpaper festooned with birds and magnolias.

It was the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and owner Isabel Harris had emulated a moody style that had blown her away in Sydney. Hullabaloo was a raging success.

“It was so cool, it was ultra. I ate Marmite on toast for months to save up for one of their dresses,” remembers Helen Cunliffe Garner, one of the hardy souls who braved the weather to participate in a walk around Auckland’s inner city, stopping at properties that played a key role in our fashionable past.

‘Walk the Walk: A history of fashion in the city’ guided tours are hosted by fashion historian Doris de Pont ONZM, former designer and founder of the New Zealand Fashion Museum. She has put together a collection of 33 stops on an hour-long walking route that travels through the once-bustling couturier and manufacturing area centring on Queen and Elliott Streets as well as the High Street district – and from a post-war era right up to the 1980s.

“I see clothing as a lens that can teach us more about how our world was and is organised”

— Doris de Pont

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“I see clothing as a lens that can teach us more about how our world was and is organised,” she says. “Looking through it helps us understand society, technology, culture and identity.”

Today, as the tour arrives outside the District Court to stand across from the El Jay building – a family business that held the licence to manufacture Dior couture in New Zealand – Doris spots a smart black Stetson abandoned on the pavement. She can’t help but pick it up. A quick glance at the label confirms it as the genuine article. “Who wouldn’t notice that you’d lost a hat like that?” she asks despondently as she places it back on the footpath.

For many, the former El Jay premises in Kingston Street is the highlight of the walk. Set up in 1938 by Louis Jacob Fisher (hence the name El Jay) and then run by his brother Gus, it was the jewel of elegant, high-quality fashion for 50 years.

The somewhat dilapidated building was closed up in the ’80s but remains in Fisher family ownership. Beyond the flaking soft-grey paintwork of the window joinery, if you stand on tiptoes you can see into the salon where there are still gilded mirrors, crystalline door handles, boxes of time-worn fabrics, and a large white porcelain dog that awaits the showing of the latest Parisian collection.

Doris brings each one of these locations alive with well-researched history (she has a degree in anthropology) and anecdotes that make the experience personal. The tour is a natural extension of the Fashion Museum, a charitable trust that she set up to tell just such stories.

“As it turns out, it became something of a feminist project because they are often women’s stories,” she says. The museum, a pop-up, has no permanent location and the trust owns no garments, which is why they are drawn from personal collections and how Doris has such a repertoire of tales to tell.

Through the walks, which have been operating since March 2017, she hopes to create more awareness of the city’s forgotten history and open up a perspective that takes in the alleyways and buildings where once the fashionable flocked and workers machined and hand-stitched garments that lasted longer than just one season.

“I hate fast fashion because it deprives people of the opportunity to have long-standing relationships with their clothes,” she declares.

1 Fashion historian Doris de Pont leads a group to the humble Asian eatery in Victoria Street West that in 1970 was

Hullabaloo, a store at the epicentre of a fashionforward generation.

2 The walking tour moves on up the stairs of the former home of T&G Insurance on the corner of Elliott and

Wellesley Streets.

3 The tour continues into the grand hall, home to the original Liz Mitchell salon.

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FASHION ON THE MOVE

‘Walk the Walk: A history of fashion in the city’ was part of the New Zealand Festival 2017 and is now back by popular demand as a free monthly event hosted by Doris de Pont. For information on dates and times, visit www.nzfashionmuseum. org.nz/walk-the-walk. A booklet that lists the 33 locations on the walk and discusses their history is available for $15 – proceeds go to support the museum. A free self-guided app is also available for download on iTunes or Google Play or by visiting https://57.myt.li.

In the 1800s immigrants to New Zealand unpicked their best dresses to pack, then sewed them together again on arrival. Lace was taken off worn-out garments and repurposed.

Even up until the 1930s and ’40s, when fabrics were still expensive, people would unpick garments to reuse the material.

In the 1950s clothes were superbly structured with detailed seaming and handmade buttons. It was only in the 1960s, with the introduction of cheaper synthetic fabrics and the rise of ‘young’ fashion, that clothing became a consumable commodity.

Doris says: “With full employment, women were starting to work more and they had more money to spend.”

She maintains that although sustainable fashion is back on the radar, it’s unlikely our sartorial exploits will swing full circle. All we have to remind us of such a creative and productive past are the few buildings that remain.

“I want to encourage people to look up when they wander through the city,” says Doris. That way the façades and washed-out signage of a modish and industrious history will not disappear from memory.

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Some highlights of ‘Walk the Walk: A history of fashion in the city’ include: 1. El Jay: 6-12 Kingston Street

The building was purpose fitted out in the 1960s for the company, which still holds the licence to produce Christian Dior originals. (Look out for the cartouches on the exterior and the remaining ‘a’ of the name on the façades.) “El Jay used exactly the same materials and patterns as Christian Dior and even the same instructions, which were written in French,” says Doris.

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2. Hullabaloo: 39 Victoria Street West

Established by Thornton Hall designer Isabel Harris in the late ’60s, the shop décor was based on the House of Merivale (Sydney) store, which revolutionised the Australian fashion industry. It sold a range of cuttingedge clothing, along with accessories such as bags, belts, hats and jewellery to complete the look. The concept was so successful that it opened a shop at 222 Queen Street in 1973.

3. Smith & Caughey’s: 253-261 Queen Street

On the top floor of this property, which is now an icon of Auckland’s main street, is a destination that once operated as a business women’s club. Doris says: “The Lyceum Club was a place where business women could have meetings. There was a reading room as well as a telephone cubicle for important phone calls.” Smith & Caughey’s (established in 1880 by drapery entrepreneur Marianne Smith) is New Zealand’s longest-surviving department store. When you are on the ground floor, look up to the ceiling and you’ll notice that it is actually four buildings in one; an extension, designed by American Roy Lippincott in 1927, can be described as early Art Deco.

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4. Milne & Choyce: 131-141 Queen Street

Auckland’s first department store (1909) grew out of a millinery and drapery business founded by sisters Mary Jane and Charlotte Milne. Later Mary Jane’s husband, Henry Choyce, joined as a partner. “It was located ‘between the banks’, which was an ideal place to attract the moneyed folk in a burgeoning city,” explains Doris. With choreographed parades (including a morning tea) showing Balenciaga and Dior just three months after the Parisian season, this department store was ‘the’ most fashionable in the city. In the 1950s the introduction of ‘teen’ departments caused quite a stir. Designer Bruce Papas produced an exclusive range for the store and Milne & Choyce garments and hats were often photographed across the road by fashion photographer Clifton Firth (another stop on the walking tour).

5. Ninette Gowns: 114 Queen Street

Before Flora MacKenzie became known as the ‘madam’ of Auckland, she trained as a nurse and, in between, spent three decades as a successful fashion designer. Her salon on the top floor of the Vulcan Buildings where she moved in the 1930s featured exotic chinoiserie, drapes with dragons and furniture embossed with mother of pearl. She was the first woman to draw up an official ‘apprenticeship’ agreement (for designer Bruce Papas, who began work there at the age of 15).

6. Emma Knuckey Gowns: 18 Darby Street

At the ripe old age of 37, Taranaki farmer’s wife Emma Knuckey established her first salon here in the 1950s with a business partner Betty Clark. She had sent her fashion illustrations to London designer Frederick Starke, who recognised her talent immediately and encouraged her to go for it. Recognising his wife’s talents, her husband, unusually for the time, left the farm to relocate to the city. “He drove taxis and looked after the children so that she could fulfil her ambition,” explains Doris.