Harakeke dress (@Home collection A/W 2004)

This dress, which features a repetitive pattern of flowering harakeke, is by the Christchurch-based fashion designer Sharon Ng. She showed the garment as part of her @Home collection at New Zealand Fashion Week in 2003, where it was enthusiastically praised as ‘grown-up Kiwiana’ due to her use of indigenous floral prints.

The prints were designed and hand-printed by Tim Main, who had graduated with a Bachelor of Crafts majoring in sculpture and textile printing, from the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology. Featuring highly formalised yet rhythmic designs of kōwhai flowers and seed pods, flowering harakeke and curving ferns fronds, Main’s rendered his prints in the Arts and Crafts style of William Morris and obeyed the movement’s edict to draw inspiration from indigenous flora.  Of his attraction to plants, he states: ‘Laying plant motifs in a repeating pattern symbolizes the regenerative quality of nature and embodies the sense of order that comes from the perception of pattern in our environment.