1940s: Post-War Department Store

September 27, 2023

By AHNZ

Seems avant-garde for the 1940s. Wish we had a more exact date. Clearly the wartime deprivations and austerity are being ejected by this aesthetic.

We have the look of a confident, athletic, youthful new Zealandia here.

War is over. Let the post-war boom and Golden Weather begin.

“The post-war period in New Zealand was the golden age of the department store. Before the advent of shopping malls in the early 1960s, visiting department stores was a leisure and social activity as much as just being part of a mere routine of purchasing goods. The stores’ often central locations meant that some travel was typically involved for suburban customers, making a visit to a department store an event, and a reason for women (their predominant clientele) to get dressed up and meet with friends, where shopping, browsing, and teas were all on the day’s menu. These temples to relaxed, stylish consumerism were not even known as stores, but rather were personalized by name. Depending on where in the country they lived, women would go to Smith and Caughey, Blackwell’s, Hay’s, Arthur Barnett, Milne and Choyce, or James Smith’s.” – Moon (2011)

This is our post-crisis era; The First Turning/High.

Sorry we don’t have a more accurate date than ‘the 1940s’ but certainly it’s a match for the new National 1.0 Ministry and the changes that came in during their watch such as the ‘first’ international airport at Christchurch. With it, the lifting of import blockades and travel restrictions imposed by the wartime measure of the old stuffy Labour 1.0 State.

I cannot see this girl standing with old man Prime Minister Peter Fraser and his lot. But she would fit in with Sidney Holland and his young go-getters like Keith Holyoake. But did ‘she’ (by which I mean this energy and aesthetic) make them or did they make her? National 1.0 did not take power until virtually the stroke of midnight 1950.

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Image ref. Clifton Firth photos, Milne and Choyce model. 1940s. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collection

New Zealand in the Twentieth Century, Paul Moon (2011)

Note: Darian Zam, Expert in art history, suggests the picture comes from the 1940s. Ref. Correspondence to AHNZ (2023)

Note: The poster within this photo comes from the Swiss Tourist Office. Herbert Matter (1934.) So Zam could be right. I’m relying on it being a retro use to be in the late 1940s

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