The Mary Annette Hay Collection

In 2006, Mary Annette Hay, née Burgess, gifted a large collection to Te Papa relating to her career with the New Zealand Wool Board. The collection includes a range of designer woollen garments by some of Britain and Europe’s leading designers of the post-war period, including Hardy Amies, Pierre Balmain and Marcel Rochas. These garments were sent to the New Zealand Wool Board by the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) to be used to promote the wonders of wool.

The IWS had been established in 1937 by wool producers from Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Its core aims were to promote wool and facilitate research into the fibre and its possibilities. Its formation reflected an international trend towards the collective marketing and promotion of agricultural products, and an acute awareness of the emerging threat of new synthetic fibres.

During Mary Annette Hay's career at the New Zealand Wool Board, which spanned the years 1948 to 1956,  she used the IWS’s garments to ‘educate, promote and elevate wool as the greatest of fibres’. Rather than presenting standard mannequin parades, Mary Annette scripted theatrical productions in which the IWS’s garments, rather than simply being examples of couture fashions, were presented as part of a larger story about wool and its properties.

For her scripts, Mary Annette drew upon the IWS’s promotional material including educational booklets on the history of wool, scientific reports, lectures and promotional campaigns. Matching ideas to specific garments, she began to inter-weave information into a captivating story that would take the audience on a journey.

The Mary Annette Hay collection includes not only surviving garments, but also Mary Annette’s original scripts, scrapbooks featuring ephemera and photographs relating to each production, invitations to fashion shows in London and Paris, and original promotional material distributed internationally by the IWS such as posters, publicity photographs and booklets.