Fashionista
A new Te Papa exhibition looks at Mollie Rodie, who back in the years of World War II designed costumes for lavish Wellington pageants. She remembers it well, the 93-year-old tells Diana Dekker.
A new Te Papa exhibition looks at Mollie Rodie, who during World War II designed costumes for lavish Wellington pageants.
WHILE World War II raged in Europe, a young Wellingtonian was lifting local spirits and helping the war effort by designing costumes for glamorous fundraising events. Mollie Rodie was barely out of her teens when she dreamed up gorgeous gowns for the grand finale of the Victory Queen Carnival in the Wellington Town Hall in 1941. Her sketches are on display at Te Papa, as fresh as the day she created them.
Rodie is 93, feeling, she says, as if she is 30. She lives, quietly but enthusiastically, in an Australian retirement home. She clearly recalls the Queen Carnival, which raised the massive sum of $100,000.
‘‘I remember it extremely well. The Town Hall was packed. And the war, a terrible time. The war years were pretty grim.’’
Rodie’s life revolved around fashion and words.
‘‘I picked up a pen at three and I never stopped writing and drawing,’’ she says. ‘‘I particularly loved drawing and mother never stopped me. I was quite fascinated by fashion and my mother sensed that. I made it clear and my mother caught on. She had a broad music and arts background.’’
Rodie trained in art at Wellington Technical College. At 17 she was taken to London by her mother for a year to study fashion drawing, design and cutting. Rodie’s mother was prominent in various Wellington charities and, after the return to Wellington, Rodie found herself designing gowns for the Centennial Exhibition Spirit of Empire pageant, then a grand Red Cross pageant, and finally the Queen Carnival, in which the Queen of Victory was not necessarily the most beautiful but had patriotically raised the most money from everything from balls to baking to a burlesque football match.
In 1942 Rodie married an Otago farmer, Henry Mackenzie, but continued to live at home in Wellington until he returned from the war. She sketched, and wrote fashion articles as a freelancer for several magazines and newspapers including The Evening Post, a forerunner of The Dominion Post.
‘‘There was a very happy atmosphere at The Evening Post,’’ she says. ‘‘ It was the breath of life for me, striding along Lambton Quay, my copy in my hand, and presenting it to the women’s editor. They couldn’t give me enough work.
‘‘I always worked in my own studio-cum-bedroom-cum-everything else in a lovely situation at my mother’s house in a little knot of native bush in an enclave of other beautiful 1920s houses in Aurora Tce. I was working in the day and sketching at night.’’
The collection of sketches Rodie gave to Te Papa in 2009 was a tiny proportion of what she accumulated over the years. She gathered thousands of pieces of mid-century clothing with the intention of starting a museum and eventually realising this was impossible. She sold nearly 3000 items, for an undisclosed sum, to the Canterbury Museum.
Sarah Murray, curator of human history at the museum, says the Mollie Rodie Mackenzie collection is significant because of its ‘‘sheer quantity, quality and range’’. Rodie collected men’s and children’s clothing as well as women’s attire she or people she knew had worn or that she might have bought in second-hand shops or sales.
‘‘I collected it over many years,’’ says Rodie. ‘‘It did sprawl around. It was the fashion of that era.
‘‘In many countries they collected fancy clothes. I wanted to collect what real people wore.’’
Everyday clothing is one of the collection’s biggest strengths, says Murray. ‘‘I’ve never seen anything of that kind of quality or quantity in New Zealand and probably only a handful internationally.’’ The collection ‘‘sheds a light on key New Zealand design’’ where most collected fashion is of high-end clothing. There are some designer-quality pieces.
‘‘Mollie’s work, her writing work and fashion and illustrative work, was her absolute love and the collection literally embodies that passion and love.’’
Rodie and her husband shifted to Australia in the 1980s but though she remained interested in clothes, she never wrote about Australian fashion. ‘‘My pen was sealed.’’