Doris de Pont

Doris de Pont has kept a black and white photograph of the ‘White Swan Road kids’ she grew up with in her tight-knit community of Mount Roskill, Auckland. The suburb was practically still farmland when her family made a home there as Dutch immigrants in the 1950s, and you can see the grass sticking out from under the party of 10 youngsters’ shoes. The girls in the photo are mostly wearing Mary Janes with sweet cotton frocks and cardigans, but not Doris. Front left, hand on hip, she’s wearing a short-sleeved little jumper and a pleated skirt with lace-up shoes and socks. “In that picture, I don’t look like those other kids,” says Doris, now 64. “And probably that’s still how I feel.”

It’s a surprising remark given Doris, fashion designer and founder of the New Zealand Fashion Museum, is integral to defining our country’s sartorial style – both with her own designs and in documenting others’. Without her, we wouldn’t have a Fashion Museum, not as it stands. We wouldn’t have this colourful bigger picture of what it means to be a New Zealander through our nuances of dress.