The most famous old coat in New Zealand? Shona Wilson wears 2007 Kate Sylvester on the 2025 Fashion Week runway. Photo / RadLab
It was Fashion Week and the before party was behind the Balmoral shops.
Auckland’s Central Flea (so cool it dropped its “market” qualifier) is where clothes go to be reborn and the shoppers look like off-duty models.
Rifle through the racks. Sylvester. Hailwood. Curate. Cybele. Thornton Hall. A honey-coloured spotted faux fur with a collar label that says, simply, Fashion.
Tops from $2, jeans from $5 and don’t throw out your dead grandfather’s tie collection because you could sell them for $10 apiece.
“This is the Ru Paul Drag Race chair,” said a seller. “That could be a moment,” said a buyer.
A small dog wore a leopard skin jacket and its owner held up a kimono. “Is it my look?” she asked herself. “Over denim cut-offs?” she answered herself.
At a flea market you can reinvent yourself for peanuts.
I once paid $5 for a shirt with a ripped hem that I absolutely know started its life on a plus-size rack at a Farmers department store. I restitched the ragged edges and, every time I wear it, someone asks where I bought it. “Oh,” I say lightly, “It’s thrifted.”
Everything old is definitely old but if the underside of the pudding bowl you are coveting is stamped “microwave and dishwasher safe” this may not be your Antiques Roadshow moment.
Sunday Central Flea finds I have recently resisted include a 40-year-old set of pale green glass serving dishes with one careful owner, a hand-tinted aerial photograph that may or may not have been produced by White’s Aviation and a Bissell Zoom Broom.
I stopped by a freshly washed Smurf and browsed a complete set of The Children’s Encyclopedia (originated and edited by Arthur Mee, publication date unknown) with a bonus bespoke shelf.
“Twenty dollars for the lot,” said the seller. “The shelf alone is probably worth more than that.”
The first page of the first volume was a colour plate. “In his cottage days at Stratford we may be sure that Shakespeare, fancying some new rhyme, would call Anne Hathaway to listen as he proudly read it over,” said the caption.
Sold!
But there were nine volumes in the set. Too heavy to carry home. “I’ll drop it off,” said the vendor, because who won’t go to the ends of Auckland to rid themselves of 25 kilograms of ancient literature.
Take a leaf out of Catherine Chidgey’s new book and search the encyclopedias for references to New Zealand. We’re there on the map that lists characteristic travel modes by country. We get “motor” and “railway”. Australia has “camel” and “bullock wagon”.
The off-duty models, meanwhile, rifle through bins thick with fabric. A Frankie Says Relax sweatshirt is, surely, a knock-off. The box of turquoise heated hair rollers is, surely, a case of buyer beware. “Gucci!” screeches a young woman and I wonder if a fake bag becomes more ethical if you are its second or even third owner.
The day after Central Flea, I go to the opening of actual New Zealand Fashion Week Kahuria. It’s being held in the last original building on Auckland’s Queens Wharf; a 115-year-old former storage shed for overseas cargo. Servers circulate trays of trevally sashimi and mushroom arancini and you have to watch your heels don’t catch on the enormous square nail heads and age-bowed wide floorboards.
Outside, an egalitarian seating plan. Everybody in the front row. All eyes on Taika Waititi, Bic Runga and Lorraine Downes walking the runway. The show is called Into the Archives. There are 35 looks and 33 of them are entirely from seasons’ past.
A 1986 Marilyn Sainty skirt. The Overstayer Clothing Company shirt that Bill Urale aka King Kapisi released in 2003. The Karen Walker pearl dress (2004), worn by the woman who styled the Kate Sylvester Wolf show (2006) that gave New Zealand an iconic red-hooded cape. A Vita Cochran picnic bag (2023). An Annie Bonza jacket (1990-something). That time Doris du Pont collaborated with artists John Pule (2004) and Richard Killeen (2007).
It is a national identity in three decades and counting.
Earlier, Fashion Week owner Feroz Ali had called designers “storytellers of our culture”. Into the Archives creative director Dan Ahwa said the show was “a love letter to the designs, stories and people who make up the country’s unique fashion DNA - past, present and future”.
Everything old did not look old. It looked like us.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on the lifestyle desk.