Mother's Day: Celebrating our fashionable mothers

Virtual exhibition

Mothers are a big influence in our lives and many designers says they were inspired by their mum’s creativity and love of fashion. The online exhibition Mother’s Day: Celebrating our fashionable mothers, showcases some of our most stylish mothers.


The exhibition is a display of personal photographs submitted by our New Zealand Fashion Museum community and found in our national archives.  For many women, memories of their mother and the clothes she made, purchased and wore, helped to form their own fashion identity. This is true for many of us individually but is also a common thread in the back story of some of our most well loved local designers.

Elisabeth Findlay and Margarita Robertson, designers for Zambesi and NOM*d, recall that their mother Zinovia loved to sew and passed her skills onto her children. "My mother was a great influence on my career with her passion for fabrics and her creativity and style," Elisabeth says. Adrienne Winkelmann and Liz Mitchell also credit their mothers for their love of fashion and Gus Fisher liked to relate the story of how at the age of about 10 he sketches some dresses for his mother which she took to her dressmaker who turned them into the real thing.

This little exhibition celebrates our mothers.

A slideshow of some of our fashionable mothers. This video has no sound.

When & where

Online only exhibition