Next week is the Hamilton Gardens’ Mansfield Garden Party, and I’ll be speaking on garden party fashions in Mansfield’s life at the Glory Days Garden Party Salon. The Hamilton Gardens have chosen to set the Mansfield Garden party in 1922, the year Mansfield’s story was published (it came out in early Feb, 1922 – and Mansfield had been living with Northern Hemisphere winters for the last 12+ years), rather than ca. 1907, which is when Mansfield was in Wellington, attending garden parties, and which is when I think the story is essentially set, based on the mentions of clothing. Mansfield’s garden party may not have taken place in 1922, but the parties of The Great Gatsby did, and the early ’20s are certainly a fetching, and easy to wear, era for garden parties. So what did people wear to garden parties in 1919-1922? A hat and parasol are absolute must-haves.  The fad for tanning wouldn’t happen until later in the 1920s, and the desired complexion in the ‘teens and early ’20s was still very pale …

One of the things that I really love about  fashion history is that clothes are both individual and societal stories.  There are general overall societal truths and trends, but there are also examples in every period of people creating things that were totally unique, making do, and making things up.  There are a lot of examples of quite unique innovations in early NZ fashion history, as people attempted to follow European fashions with limited resources and without access to a full range of materials and patterns. This particular story of someone’s clever make do, and the unfortunate  reveal of their secret has always amused me. During the recent windy weather I was meandering along Kaponga Road in the evening when I espied a fair damsel turning the Bank corner.  She wore one of those arrangements the ladies call a ‘waterfall’ which the wind blew to one side, and shewed to my horrified gaze, a neatly tied bundle of straw, doing service as an improver. The story is recounted in  Eve Ebbet’s In True Colonial Fashion: …