The fashionable lady in the 19th century

This book belonged to New Zealand designer and fashion journalist Marion Florence Mackenzie (née Rodie, aka Mollie Rodie) (1919-2020, New Zealand/Australia), and helped inform and inspire her work. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has significant collections of dress and fashion illustrations, and published this book based on its collections.

Mollie Rodie was born in Invercargill on 25 October 1919. All her schooling years were at Samuel Marsden Collegiate School in Wellington. She showed an aptitude for writing and drawing from a young age and went to study art at Wellington Technical College in 1935 when she was 16.

In 1936, when 17 years old, Mollie sailed with her mother to Britain for a year. She attended Heatherley’s School of Art in London where she took classes specialising in black and white illustration for fashion drawing.

When Mollie returned to New Zealand she worked for Fashions Limited in Courtenay Place, Wellington, which produced the popular Fashionbilt label (it was one of the largest dressmaking firms in New Zealand). She learnt invaluable skills about materials and how they hung, fastenings, and pattern drafting – all of which she applied throughout her career. She also worked for Screens Advertising Ltd in Lambton Quay.

Mollie was versatile and reliable. She could write copy and illustrate – these skills attracted the attention of the Evening Post where she began contributing to the women’s page. During the Second World War (1939-45) she wrote columns on upcycling and making-do. She eventually had a long and successful career in writing popular fashion columns and features for several newspapers and magazines, including the New Zealand Herald and the New Zealand Weekly News.

During the war, Mollie harnessed her fashion knowledge for the greater good. She provided advice on revamping clothes and upcycling scraps of fabric and became a creative force in fundraising pageants and queen carnivals. While working full-time, she volunteered to design the participants’ costumes for events between 1939 and 1941, including the huge Victory Queen Carnival in Wellington in 1941. Te Papa holds her design sketches from some of these events.

Mollie married Hal Dillon Scobie Mackenzie at St Paul’s Cathedral, Wellington, on 15 August 1942. He left afterwards to serve in Italy during the war, returning to New Zealand in early 1946. The couple moved to Central Otago where Hal ran the historic Kyeburn sheep station, and Mollie continued a busy freelance career in fashion and design for thirty years. For example, during the war she ran a Clothes Consultancy Service providing advice on how to make the most of wardrobes during a period of rationing. Thousands of women wrote to her, and she replied to them all with advice and design sketches. They later moved to a low country farm near Timaru, where Mollie began illustrating fashion advertising (press and catalogues) for the Christchurch department store, Ballantynes.

In the 1960s and 70s, Mollie amassed a significant collection of New Zealand-made clothing mainly from the 20th century. Her aim was to collect everyday clothing and to show some of the key developments in textiles and dress development. The collection of nearly 4,000 garments and accessories is now held by Canterbury Museum. More recently she also presented a small collection of Victorian clothing to the Ferrymead Heritage Park, also in Christchurch.

Mollie and Hal moved back to Central Otago for a time. They began spending winters in Australia, moving permanently to Burleigh Heads, Queensland, in the mid-1980s, where Mollie spent the rest of her life, living to 100 years of age.