Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand 1840 to 1910 by Claire Regnault (review)

‘EVERY GARMENT prompts a set of questions’, Claire Regnault explains in her introduction: ‘Who made it? Who wore it and where, and what were their lives like?’ (pp.9–10). In examining a stunning array of dress and accessories from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and other collections, Regnault’s search for answers to these questions spans social and cultural history, identity and consumption, gender and social change, together with resistance and settler ambition.

Regnault’s compelling book moves from the deeply intimate out to the networks of empire, demonstrating how dress histories hold the potential to open up richly layered and sometimes-unexpected aspects of the past. Her deep research shines through seven themed chapters that reveal a history of Māori and migrants, socialites and businesswomen – bringing to light the often-hidden world of female makers. Regnault supports her examination of a vast selection of apparel, lavishly and lovingly photographed for this publication, through an extensive range of letters and diaries, contemporary fashion advice and reports from the local press, advertisements and accounts, together with visual sources such as paintings and photographs. This method is taken by the best dress histories. Dressed shows why.

The opening chapter, ‘Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!’, examines the dress of the first wave of settlers and the Māori people they encountered. It considers the missionary zeal to cover Māori bodies in European dress, and the role that clothing and blankets played in bargaining and trade. It investigates the advice from emigrants’ guides on appropriate clothing for colonial life, the stores that supplied early settlers, and the requests for clothing and cloth that traversed the globe. In doing so, it reveals the critical place of sewing for settler women, whether to establish themselves socially or survive in this new land.

Chapter 2, ‘Hard Shopping’, engages with the developing opportunities for consumption as towns flourished, beginning with the fascinating example of Georgiana Hector. Regnault pieces together the detail of Hector’s style, shopping habits and the dressmakers, drapers and haberdashers she frequented using hundreds of surviving household accounts. The reader thus comes to appreciate that Hector’s presentation as a well-dressed woman of influence was achieved through the garments made visible to her peers and the undergarments that remained hidden beneath. The ‘hard shopping’ of this chapter’s title refers to Hector’s shopping spree on a visit ‘home’ to England, though Regnault ably demonstrates throughout the book the existence of a fashionable New Zealand.

With her third chapter ‘Rites of Fashion’, Regnault turns her gaze on wedding, maternity and mourning gowns; in the following she focuses on those worn to ‘Balls, Plain and Fancy’.

A standout chapter, ‘Feathermania’, draws together several captivating threads: the lives of female furriers, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century flows of people, fashion and feathers across the empire. This chapter superbly describes the ways in which fashions from London and Paris were adapted to local contexts and available materials, in this case, the use of the plumage of New Zealand’s native birds at a time when feathers adorned an array of womenswear. Regnault’s examples include the albatross of the southern seas and the little spotted kiwi. Their feathers were prized for muffs and tippets. Other body parts were made into fashionable accessories: the albatross’s feet into purses, for example, and the kiwi’s beaks into brooches. Regnault also explores the voracious appetite for New Zealand’s feathers in Britain. She articulates ‘feathermania’s devastating consequences that first brought about concern for native species, then protective legislation, though for some this came too late – proving that our current concern for sustainable fashion has much earlier origins.

Chapter 6, ‘Dressing for Royalty’, interweaves the careful if not strategic selection of clothes worn and gifted during royal visits to New Zealand. It also examines audiences granted in England, including the tour of fourteen rangatira to London in 1863 and...