Te Wiki Āhua o Aotearoa - Mana Wahine

In the third installment of our Te Wiki Āhua o Aotearoa story, we find ourselves seized by the echo chamber. A space where the glamour is loud, the pressure hits harder and the line between opportunity and exploitation becomes dangerously thin.

This is not your hero’s journey. It’s a mirror held up to an industry that grooms and consumes. Where control is dressed up as mentorship, and creativity is traded like currency. Yet, we find ourselves returning. Not because it’s easy, but because it matters. Our stories matter.

We give everything because we know, every season of Āhua, that this might be the last time we get to make this stand. We’re a community of young, scrappy, and hungry creatives that show up to the arena seemingly ill-equipped and eyes bigger than our stomachs.

Every show this August 22nd – 30th is more than just a runway, it’s a declaration. It’s a stand for what we value, what we protect, and what we carry forward as a community.

Runway 02

Show Title - Mana Wahine

She wears her whakapapa on her shoulders. Not as weight, but as shield, as signal.

“Mana Wahine” by designers Charli Nikora and Mike De Wet is a reclaiming, a resistance, a return to the threads that colonisation tried to sever, and a reweaving of what was never truly lost.

Eurocentric forms are displaced, undone. In their place, silhouettes that honour kākahu and the quiet power of Te Whare Pora. Each garment is a reminder that fashion, like language and memory, can carry harm or healing.

Mana Wahine moves through time. It speaks to what was taken, what endures, and what can be reimagined when wahine stand in their full ancestral power.

This is not costume. This is sovereignty, stitched.