A collection of fashionable garments said to be nationally significant is having its future decided by a special group in Central Otago.
They've got together to plan the fate of nearly 300 dresses collected by Maniototo farmer, the late Eden Hore.
Otago Mayor Tim Cadogan said he's at a loss at how this collection got started in the first place.
"You've got a high country farmer in the seventies (1970s) collecting fashion garments, what that must have been like back in the seventies and why he did it is an absolute mystery," Cadogan said.
When he died in 1997, Eden Hore left behind over 250 high fashion garments.
His nephew, John Steele, has one guess on what started the collection.
"Eden was different, I think the war changed him a lot, he had a terrible time in the war as did a lot of others, his nerves never recovered," Mr Steele says.
But some think Mr Eden's interest in textiles and garments was born in his wool growing days.
And it wasn't just wool. Mr Hore imported New Zealand's first head of yaks.
Mr Hore also converted a tractor shed a showroom which housed dresses far differently to garments of today.
"People still did things by hand or knitted their own fabric, or wove their own fabric and dyed their own fabric, and it’s a great sort of a snapshot on an era gone by, that won't ever happen again," fashion consultant Paul Blomfield says.
The Central Otago District Council is drawing a steering group together to decide the collection's future, after buying it for $40,000 in 2013.
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