Editor's Note by Peter Mitchell, 5 August 2009
WELL, give us a break - I was just a kid. Twenty-nine years old and with a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket from my mum. I just managed to pay the rent on a little back office in Emily Place. Strangely enough, the offices later became the home of Peter Nola's Peppertree Fashion after he split with Bill Hall at Society.
So, after six weeks of sheer slavery, interviewing, selling the adverts, and doing all the artwork by hand, the baby popped out. It was, of course, a reincarnation of The NZ Draper that ran from 1921 to 1960, then became Clothing & Footwear News, which I edited for five years, and then Apparel from 1969. But it was mine, and with a history stretching back now 88 years, it certainly is the oldest traceable trade magazine in the country.
It changed hands when the editor at the time, Val Blomfield bought it and later passed it to her son Paul Blomfield. But the wheel turned full circle back in 2001 when it came back into the fold and is now owned by my wife Tania and her trusty team.
Enough of that... What you did want to hear was the good old "bad" times when the ragtrade was a bit like the wild west - but you ain't because some of the husbands are still around town. Very wild days in deed with parties, buyers with real power, a little bribery and corruption - and a helluva lot of fun. Going to the collections in Paris (that was walking the streets with a camera photographing what was in the windows), trade fairs that nobody now would believe the goings on and a life that today would be extremely un-PC.
Great times. Great people. Times haven't changed that much except that the source of supply is now no longer the back workroom, and of course the people are a little more couth. The characters may have been lost, but the character of the industry will always stay the same. It just reminds me of the food old days when the boys came up to sympathise with my dad. "Jeez Hymie, sorry to hear about your fire..." "Shush you fool, it's tonight..."
