Starting a new year in style...

Shopping seems both a frivolous preoccupation in late 2020 and a totally appropriate topic to be thinking about when so many people around the world find even the most basic of shopping trips difficult to complete. Here in New Zealand, we are so fortunate to be able to work and shop almost normally at the moment. The Imagining Arabia Summer Scholar, Katy White, has been researching shopping in New Zealand's department stores in the interwar years looking at the influence of 'Egyptomania' on some of New Zealand's largest stores. We would like to thank the enormously helpful staff at National Library of New Zealand for their assistance in this project.

Katy's findings have not been what we expected! Read on...

Egyptomania in New Zealand Department Stores between the Wars - part I
​by Katy White

In New Zealand, early department stores offered a vast range of products, and were a quintessential part of the high street. They were often the first to gain access to trends from overseas, following the fashions of London, Paris and New York.
In 1922, the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings set off a craze for Egyptomania, or Tutmania, as it was also known.. In a curious juxtaposition between the ancient and the new, the image of the pharaohs, and particularly of Tutankhamen himself, became emblematic of modernity, intrinsically linked with flappers and the Art Deco movement.  Across the globe, Egyptian imagery was used in clothing, jewellery, makeup, film, theatre and many more consumables.

Evening Post, 6 July 1923.

Ashburton Guardian, 18 April 1923.

New Zealand was no exception. Both large department stores and smaller retailers utilised the Boy King to sell their goods. This use varied widely and sometimes veered into the ridiculous, with Ford advertisementss in the early 1920s making much of the fact that theirs was the car Lord Carnarvon had used around Luxor.  Yet while Tutankhamen - and Egypt in a broader sense - appeared in advertising in New Zealand, the timing was significant. The bulk of Egyptian imagery was not used here until mid- to late- 1923, by which time the craze was already beginning to ebb away in the northern hemisphere.

New Zealand was at the end of the fashion supply chain. The Antipodean seasonal shift meant that what had been popular in the northern-hemisphere spring would not reach New Zealand until several months later. This did not mean that the New Zealand public were unaware of the trends occurring overseas: in fact, they were widely reported. Women’s magazines like the Ladies’ Mirror kept readers up to date with fashions from society events, particularly in London (this was still the era when Britain was referred to by many as “Home,” even if they had never set foot in the UK).

Advertisement in New Zealand Herald, 11 August 1923.

This  reporting created a number of problems for New Zealand department stores. They were constrained in their advertising of many of their goods because women customers were reluctant to wear fashions that had been widely seen even if only by reporters for overseas newspapers. As a result, New Zealand stores were quite conservative in their stocking of women’s fashions. 

Wellington store Kirkcaldie and Stains found this conservatism an increasing problem during the 1920s. Already deeply affected by the recession of 1921-2, the store’s policies meant they struggled to attract younger clientele through its doors, a problem that persisted until their 1931 takeover by British Overseas Stores. In 1932, James Crosser at Kirkcaldie & Stains complained that he could not understand “why no provision [had] been made in the past to cater for the younger girl and the average flapper.”  While this was a pressing issue for Kirkcaldie and Stains, it is unclear to what extent a similar lack of engagement from young people plagued the large department stores in Auckland and Christchurch. Smith & Caughey, for example, emphasised “Latest Fashion Novelties From London and Paris,” but it is unclear if this translated into younger, more modern customers. They also made note of the pervasiveness of the Egyptian influence within the store (see above) but it is clear that Egyptian ‘trimmings and linings’ were much more common than ‘complete’ garments, and the advertisement is conveniently vague about what ‘more or less’ Egyptian vogue might mean.

New Zealand department stores were heavily influenced by trends overseas, but it is difficult to research links between them. Advertising captures some of the ways department stores presented themselves to their customers, but records of stock or product lines, of window displays and in-store promotions are rare for the inter-war period. What is clear is that by the mid-1920s, the Egyptian craze was well and truly past in the northern hemisphere, and by 1925 Egyptian imagery in New Zealand was being used to advertise church events – rarely regarded as the cutting edge of high fashion (see below). The short-lived nature of Egyptomania has been attributed to fears around “Tutankhamen’s Curse” following the death of Lord Carnarvon, one of the main backers of the expedition, while others suggest that it was a reflection on the fleeting and ephemeral nature of the era, in which the new and exciting was being continually sought out. Was Tutmania in New Zealand simply an echo of the same trend overseas? In an era marked by its constant search for modernity, trends turned over fast, but a distinctly New Zealand sense of Egyptomania proves still elusive.

Church Fundraiser pamphlet. ATL Ephemera Collection.