It’s not often that Aotearoa is afforded a collective fashion moment. The rare occasions that New Zealanders are made aware of the form tend toward uniforming; the unveiling of a new All Blacks jersey, or the redesigns for Air New Zealand flight attendants. I enjoy these occasions for how they allow the fashion disinclined (like sporting-media personalities or the average rugby fan) to become, for a brief time, passionate design critics. But aside from the earliest jerseys—with their large, hand-embroidered silver ferns—these events are almost always controversial. The unveiled clothes are picked apart, decried, derided by everyone from Air New Zealand employees speaking under the condition of anonymity, to talkback radio hosts, to Twitter users the country over. I imagine these organisations’ social media managers each time a new design is about to be unveiled, bracing themselves and wincing, a hesitant finger hovering for a moment before they post the ‘first look’.

The other popular platform for fashion in Aotearoa is the politician’s wardrobe, and here, again, the discourse is characterised by ridicule and disdain toward alarming ties and suits as highly saturated as children’s building blocks. It’s generally agreed that you don’t need style literacy to run a country successfully. Although I would add that you don’t need style to run a country badly, either.

In my living memory there has been just one occasion on which the country united in love rather than hate over fashion, and this feat, a miracle really, could only be achieved by a kākahu. There is something heart stopping about clothing produced as a result of hundreds of hours of work by expert hands, hands that were trained over decades, in a skill possessed by only a few; I’ve occasionally gasped when I see the work of Parisian couturiers, and I gasped when I first saw the many-feathered kahu huruhuru wrapped around Jacinda Ardern’s shoulders at an event at Buckingham Palace in 2018.

This was the first major instance of Ardern’s regular use of garments as a symbolic—and strategic— gesture of solidarity, and accompanying it was the what- would-become-usual fanfare and congratulations for Ardern herself. But I believe that on this particular occasion more dynamics were at play; in tandem with its political, tactical function—one to be regarded with no small amount of cynicism—what occurred was a rare collective experience of, and appreciation for, raranga. I was genuinely moved by the beauty of this kākahu, and I wasn’t the only one. That week, there were no responses akin to angry laments that the All Blacks would look tragic on the field. I remember social media feeds defined by a general consensus that the cape was exquisite, and media reporting echoed this sentiment. Infrequently does fashion get foregrounded in mass culture, rarer still for it to be not a moment of controversy, but one that affords celebration and admiration for the form.