All posts filed under: Admire

Hoopskirts in the Park

Our first photo location for last week’s hoopskirt photoshoot with Theresa was a big park on the edge of the green belt in Wellington – the same park I used for the pet-en-l’aire photoshoot. I’ve long thought that the park, with it’s long, sloping green lawn interspersed with pohutakawa and eucalyptus trees, had distinct English pastoral possibilities. If Capability Brown had had access to pohutakawa he would have planted in them. They are the perfect representation of 19th century New Zealand’s complicated relationship with identity. For 11 months of the year they are elegant faux English oak trees, and then for one month of the year they break out in flaming red SOUTH PACIFIC WONDERLAND! colours. This is pretty much how New Zealand was for a good century: torn between being more English than the English, immensely proud of not being English and their new national culture, and not sure what to do with the Polynesian culture they were living side by side with. In any case, the pohutakawa lawn was perfect for a hoopskirt …

A hoopskirt photoshoot – a few of my favourite shots

Published by The Dreamstress

Every time my friend Theresa visits Wellington we dress up and do a photoshoot together. She was in town this weekend, and one of the top things on her to-do wish-list was to take photos with me. I know that one of her lifelong dreams has been to wear a hoopskirt, and I’ve never actually worn my Greek Key ensemble, so massive crinolines was the theme for the day. I wore my new engageantes and 1860s bonnet, and put Theresa in the 1850s Raspberry swirl dress, which she fit beautifully. We went first to the park where Madame O & I photographed the pet-en-l’aire ensemble, and then to the Massey Memorial, which is a much better photoshoot location at sunset than it is at high noon! Here are a few of my favourite images from the shoot: I particularly love these two because Theresa and I each took almost precisely the same image of each other: The light was just amazing as the sun set. Sadly, we didn’t have an artsy fashion student to photograph …

A souvenir fan

Published by The Dreamstress

I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I collect is antique fans. I like that they are small and easy to store, and that they are so evocative of the events they might have been carried at. I wonder where they came from. Were they a gift from a beau? A commemoration of being grown-up enough to go out from a parent? What secrets were told behind them? What faces did they cool after a spirited dance? What frocks were they worn with, and what flirtations did they signal? So many stories in a fan! This particular fan from my collection is particularly gorgeous, and particularly evocative of a fascinating back-story. Whose face was reflected in the mirror. Did she use it to spy on other partigoers? Or to check that every hair was in place? The other side of the fan tells the rest of the story. The fan was a souvenir, brought back from somewhere exotic. Did the owner buy it herself, as a memento from a special trip? Or …