The Way We Wore

The year was 1979 and Sue Walker (far right) was 20 when this photograph, for a Tiki Togs advertising campaign, was taken at the then Suva Travelodge (now Holiday Inn Suva).

She and the girl on the far left (Corrina Costello née Gibson) were chosen from a lineup of new faces, who had only just made their modelling debuts weeks earlier at a much talked about fashion show for Elle, a new clothing store on MacArthur St that brought in Parisian fashions (where Onyx Platinum now stands). The girl in the middle is Vivien Costello.

The minimal, two-piece bikinis of the 70s also made their Fiji debut at the show, which most of the new models refused to wear.

Walker wasn’t given much of a choice – her cousin, the late Ken Wendt had put the show together at the (now long defunct) Isa Lei Hotel in Lami. “I was pretty shy in those days,” she says. “It was a horrific experience”. The show broke the mould on two more fronts: it was the first in Fiji to feature dancers as well as a single, bare-chested model sporting a sheer black blouse (as was de rigueur abroad). Tanya Whiteside (who had won Miss Hibiscus the year before) art directed the subsequent photo shoot for her family’s fashion brand, which appeared in Fiji Beach Press, the weekly tourist rag of the time.

Her mother, Tiki Togs founder Cherie Whiteside kept a watchful eye over the proceedings. “I don’t think we were paid anything,” says Walker, now a freelance advertising consultant in Suva.

“Tiki Togs was already an established brand by then so it was like they were doing you a favour.”

First published October 2012 in Salon, a lifestyle section I edited for Republika Magazine.