Even women from Central Asian countries dressed in clothes made with precious, finely ornamented hand-woven fabrics wanted to be photographed with Kanak women, who wore robes mission tailored from an industrial printed cotton fabric with floral motifs, white on a red background.
The choice of fabric colour and floral motifs was made by a member of the delegation. I later realised that it was the colour code of the village in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, where the woman and her husband a pastor of the Evangelical Church were living at the time.
I start from this vignette to look into the complex semantic and symbolic dimensions of the robe mission , an article of clothing of colonial origin worn by Kanak women in Lifou, and more generally in Kanaky New Caledonia. It is an introduced garment, which has been appropriated by Kanak women and incorporated into their customary and daily life as a versatile outfit: worn on important and formal occasions, its life continues as a garment for working in the fields and then, once old, crumpled and torn, finishes its life as a useful rag.
In time its materiality, meanings and values have been transformed. A flourishing entrepreneurship centred on the robe mission is growing. The mission dress is thus quite distant from the image of the monotonous garment and never-changing style which looms so large in the early writings from Lifou as well as in the rhetoric of researchers up to the s, who have never shown interest in a garment that they assumed to be imposed by European colonial rules.
The robe mission is one of those exogenous elements that have been indigenised, showing local capacity to appropriate what comes from other contexts and at the same time that a variety of elements coalesced in the process of indigenisation see Paini I consider this as a privileged arena for illustrating how agency is retained with local actors—women in particular.
