Event
June | Monica Brewster Evening: Vince Ropitini
June | Monica Brewster Evening: Vince Ropitini
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Tuesday 9 June | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
General: $17:50, Friends of the Gallery: $13, Students: Free
What happens when design is led by Te Ao Māori worldview?
Is it possible for fashion to stay rooted in Te Ao Māori when doing the mahi outside of Aotearoa?
Emerging from the world of fashion, our June speaker Vince Ropitini (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāruahinerangi me Whakatōhea) is reshaping what it means for Māori design to stand proudly on global stages. An award-winning emerging designer, Ropitini is part of a new wave of artists who are expanding the possibilities of Te Ao Māori within contemporary fashion, guided by deep ancestral ties and grounded in his Taranaki whakapapa.
Ropitini’s debut collection, The Art of Passive Resistance (2023) drew national attention for its bold centering of Parihaka’s lived histories, political memory and strength into clothing. Combining printing, painting, and traditional Māori dye-processing techniques, he expands the potentials of silhouettes, textures, and textile manipulation, by channeling the intergenerational strength of his Taranaki iwi.
Now developing his next collection, Ropitini continues to push the boundaries of how fashion and garments can carry, honour, and transmit cultural narratives. One of his boldest dreams is to see his kākahu walk onto the world’s largest fashion stages, carrying the stories of his people with them. For Taranaki audiences, Ropitini’s journey offers a powerful example of how local histories can generate world-relevant creative futures.
Vince Ropitini (Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāruahinerangi me Whakatōhea) is a young fashion designer with a strong foundation in tailoring, garment construction, and creative direction. Vince recently won two prestigious awards at the 2025 iD International Emerging Designer Awards: the VIVA Top NZ Designer Award and the Polson Higgs Entrepreneurial Award for collections influenced by te ao Māori and Taranaki whakapapa. “My design practice is rooted in cultural expression. Designing through a lens that reflects Mātauranga Māori is essential. It allows us to preserve customary knowledge while also innovating — imagining the future of our communities through a Māori worldview.” (Excerpted from The Hui From Parihaka to the world: the rise of designer Vince Ropitini 2025) Born and raised in Taranaki, Vince is currently based in Naarm (Melbourne) and continues to build his label, Obsolescence Clothing.
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Welcome to the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening Speaker Series — a year shaped by visionaries who remind us that dreaming is both a personal act and a collective experience.
This year, we’re thinking about visionary dreams not as distant ideals, but as layered conversations: shaped by place, ancestry, lived experience, and the work of imagining otherwise.
Each speaker brings a distinct perspective on what emerges when communities, artists, thinkers, and leaders choose to dream with clarity, courage, and care. Maria Lind invites us to consider what it means to ‘dig where we stand’ and to understand creative practice through the ground it grows from; Tusiata Avia shows us how truth-telling, poetry, and performance can unsettle power and carve space for vulnerability; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa opens a window onto the Moana as a site of deep history and visionary future-making; Vince Ropitini demonstrates how design guided by mātauranga Māori can carry ancestral narratives into global contexts and Leki Jackson-Bourke with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors reveal how rangatahi dreams can reshape regional, cultural, and artistic imaginaries.
Across the series, audiences are invited to consider how dreaming can be relational, grounded, and deeply local — as well as expansive enough to hold global entanglements.
As we gather for conversations that illuminate what becomes possible when we listen to where we stand, and to one another - Join us!
