Hine-nui-te-pō: Dreaming through design
Originally Published by NITV: Indigenous designers displayed their cultural expression through fashion and design during the 5th annual The Global Indigenous Runway at the weekend.
When New Zealand Maori designer Amber Bridgman's father passed away suddenly, she turned to fashion and design as a coping mechanism.
“Death is a horrible concept for all people. Instead of, you know, obviously we get really sad, we cry, in our culture we have a certain way that we do things and takiaue, we grieve,” she said.
Bridgman would wait until her children were sleeping before locking herself away in her studio, spending late nights and early mornings crafting garments for her label Kahuwai.
“It wasn’t for anybody or anything, I was just going through old boxes, old cases, looking on the wrecks and I just started making things again,” she said.
Bridgman is just one of many designers from all over the world who flew into Melbourne last weekend to showcase their designs at the 5th annual Global Indigenous Runway, held during the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival (VAMFF).
Of the 50 models that strutted down the runway, 38 came from across Australia, six were First Nations and Native American, and six were from New Zealand, while designers also came from Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
This year’s theme was stories of creation as told through fashion, and as such, attendees saw culture and dreaming stories interpreted into design.
For Bridgman, the end result of her mourning was a whole new collection, bound together by her grief and the legend of demigod Maui.
To tie these things together across her designs is a two-tailed lizard print, which is not only symbolic to her people, but symbolic to herself.
“The lizard that you see in the collection throughout different garments is known as a two tailed lizard, or we call him the mokomoko,” Bridgman said.
The design of mokomoko originates from traditional tribal rock art that’s been found in caves in southern New Zealand, and Bridgman also interpreted it into her designs as the legend of demigod Maui.
“The southern tribes that I belong to are very different from the north; we have different legends, different stories like all Indigenous people do,” Bridgman explained.
“The lizard, if we look and we connect it back to creation, so Maui was a Maori demigod and all throughout the pacific, everyone knows who Maui is.
“He was the potiki, he was the youngest out of his family and he was ‘the man’. He was the youngest brother and he liked to push boundaries and, you know, he discovered so many things within our culture,”
“He wanted to become immortal, and the way you become immortal is you conquer the goddess of death and her name was Hine-nui-te-pō.
“So he decided he would conquer her because he wanted to live forever and be ‘the man’. The way he did that was he transformed himself into the lizard and he climbed inside her.
“She’s lying down in the forest so all these birds are around and this little fantail, the piwakawaka, saw what was happening and they alarmed Hine-nui-te-pō and woke her.
“Hine-nui-te-pō woke up, and she closed her legs and she crushed Maui. So because of that story that represents how death is now in this realm, in this world.”
