Fashion highlights social histories at Whanganui Regional Museum

Whanganui Regional Museum kaihapai taonga/curator Maeve Egan led the development of the Past, Present, Pose fashion exhibition. Photo / Karen Hughes

A new exhibition at the Whanganui Regional Museum uses fashion to illustrate local social history.

The collection, Past, Present, Pose, is made up of the garments featured in the museum’s monthly series Outfit of the Month.

“The garments are a selection from three different time periods from our first year of outfits of the month, which has been a really popular series,” Whanganui Regional Museum director Bronwyn Labrum said.

“It gives you a taste of 19th-century colonial fashion, all the way up to the 1990s.”

The museum closed on Friday, February 28, to allow the new exhibition to be set up, with a specialist spider crane needed to lift the garment cases on to the second floor.

Analysing historical fashion allows an insight into the lives and experiences of the times, offering a chance to learn about Whanganui’s social history.

“If you think about it, you are what you wear,” Labrum said.

“When you look at someone, you can tell a lot about them by what they choose to put on.

“So in the absence of other kinds of records, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, when you can’t interview someone and they didn’t leave any papers but they left their garments, it can tell you quite a lot about them and about the social history of the time.”

The pieces highlight migration, international fashion trends, unique personal tastes and milestones such as weddings.

Fashion often being a female-dominated interest gave an opportunity for women to feature in museums.

“It’s a way to get more women and women’s history into a museum that’s had a long-developed collection mainly focused on men,” Labrum said.

The exhibition is in the new “fashion gallery”, set up down a long hallway to encourage visitors to insert themselves into the history.

“The idea is that you’re going to be walking past a series of cases of garments as if you’re on a catwalk, and imagining yourself wearing those garments.

“We’re inviting visitors to look at the detail, look at the design, look at the silhouette and imagine themselves back in that time.”

Labrum planned to frequently change exhibitions in the fashion gallery, using the museum’s extensive, mostly donated, fashion collection and continuing to highlight social history.

She also hoped the Past, Present, Pose exhibition might inspire people to inform the museum of any fashion history they knew about and significant garments they were willing to donate.

In particular, Labrum was interested in building a collection of contemporary Māori pieces as the majority of the collection was Pākehā fashion.

Curator Maeve Egan, who started at the museum in October, led the exhibition’s development.

“This will be my first exhibition at Whanganui Regional Museum, and I’m thrilled to bring together these incredible garments in a new way,” she said.

Olivia Reid is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.