The past, present and future of Māori weaving will come together in Tāmaki Makaurau next week, with Dr Rangituatahi Te Kanawa helping take the mātauranga of raranga into the contemporary world of fashion.
Dr Te Kanawa will feature in Te Aho Tapu – The Sacred Thread, a special fashion showcase at Auckland Museum’s Te Ao Mārama on Friday, August 21.
Held alongside New Zealand Fashion Week, the event brings together ancestral weaving, contemporary design, storytelling and a runway featuring four designers from diverse cultural backgrounds.
For Dr Te Kanawa, the kaupapa carries particular significance.
She comes from one of Aotearoa’s most respected weaving whānau and has dedicated her own career to conserving Māori textiles while researching how muka can become part of a sustainable textile future.
The event describes Te Kanawa as a textile conservator specialising in the stabilisation of Māori textiles and the founder and director of Muka Textiles Ltd, where her research is focused on developing a sustainable muka textile industry.
Raranga carried into a new generation
At the heart of Te Aho Tapu is the idea that weaving is about considerably more than the finished garment or taonga.
Every strand can carry whakapapa, mātauranga and connections between generations.
The Auckland Museum showcase will put ancestral weaving alongside contemporary fashion, exploring what happens when traditional knowledge meets new materials, technologies and creative expression.
Rather than treating raranga as something belonging only to the past, the event positions Indigenous textile knowledge as a living practice capable of continuing to evolve.
That is reflected in the designers taking to the runway.
Ngāpuhi designer Samsara Jade describes her practice as bringing toi Māori into contemporary fashion while maintaining connections between whakapapa, whenua and memory.
Ngāti Tamaterā designer Charli Nikora combines Māori raranga with European handcrafts, drawing on her own mixed whakapapa and research into colonisation, Te Whare Pora and the loss and reclamation of traditional knowledge.
Jumaanah Vahora of Manzil explores clothing, culture, diaspora and identity, while Kaelyn Tongia Bendall works with sustainable crochet and knitwear influenced by Papua New Guinean heritage and the experience of living within a post-colonial world.
More than a runway
The evening will also feature a panel bringing some significant voices in Māori art, textiles and fashion together.
Alongside Dr Te Kanawa will be Māori arts curator Nigel Borell, fashion designer Liz Mitchell and Ngāti Ruanui designer, filmmaker and academic Dr Bobby Luke Campbell.
The discussion will be convened by educator and Māori fashion advocate Natua Kaa-Morgan, with Ōtene Hopa serving as master of ceremonies.
The combination creates a conversation extending well beyond what people wear.
It is about sustainability.
It is about Indigenous intellectual and cultural knowledge.
It is about the relationship between whenua and fibre.
And it is about who controls and benefits from the development of Māori knowledge as traditional materials find new commercial and creative applications.
Muka and the future
Dr Te Kanawa’s involvement brings another important dimension to the kaupapa.
Her work on muka explores the potential for one of Aotearoa’s oldest textile traditions to also become part of its future.
As the global fashion industry confronts questions about waste, synthetic fibres and environmental sustainability, Māori knowledge of harakeke and muka provides another way of thinking about textiles.
But innovation also carries responsibility.
For Māori, the challenge is not simply proving that traditional fibres can work within modern fashion and textile production.
It is ensuring that whakapapa, mātauranga and tikanga remain attached to that development.
That makes Te Aho Tapu more than a fashion event.
It is a meeting between generations.
The showcase will be held at Auckland Museum – Te Ao Mārama from 6.30pm until 10.30pm on Friday, August 21, with organisers promising an evening celebrating weaving, craft, fashion, storytelling, culture and connection.
And at its centre sits an idea Māori weavers have understood for generations.
A thread is never simply a thread.
It connects.
It carries knowledge.
It remembers where it came from.
And in the hands of people such as Dr Rangituatahi Te Kanawa, the sacred thread of raranga is not only being protected — it is being woven into what comes next.
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