Professor Maureen Molloy
Maureen is Professor of Women's Studies and co-director of "The Fashion Project", a multi-disciplinary research group investigating the contemporary New Zealand designer fashion industry. Her other research interests include identity and globalisation.
Weaving Success from Multiple Threads: Cosmopolitanism in New Zealand Fashion Design
The growth of a successful and internationalising New Zealand designer fashion industry has taken the country and often the international fashion community by surprise. This paper examines some of the factors which have contributed to that success. In particular it argues that the contents of the most successful collections draw not on the much vaunted New Zealand and Pacific influences, but on a cosmopolitanism which is deeply marked by both irony and nostalgia for an imperial European past. Thus the characterisation of New Zealand design as edgy and intellectual, owes at least as much to its sharp 'takes' on British, French and East Coast United States upper class fashion of seventy years ago, as it does to the so-called Kiwi ingenuity and outdoor-influences with which it has been credited. The paper argues that this design success embodies in a literal way the ethic of New Zealand neo-liberalism, with its nostalgia for a tradition which was never 'ours' and its imperative to exploit international markets.
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