Calls for the $40,000 Eden Hore fashion collection to be displayed now were quashed this week with the news it might take 18 months to prepare a management plan and find an appropriate venue to show the garments.
The Central Otago District Council in August bought the collection, comprising more than 220 ''nationally significant'' high-fashion garments and accessories from the 1970s to 1990s.
At the Teviot Valley Community Board meeting this week, board member Cliff Parker suggested the summer holidays would be a good time to hire halls in the district to ''show off those frocks and make some money from them''.
''It's no good having spent $40,000 on it and have it sitting in a box,'' he said.
Central Otago Mayor Tony Lepper said he had been told it could take up to two years to write a management plan for the collection and although people had been asking to see the collection, ''we're not going to rush it''.
Council community services manager Anne Pullar said a group of people spent eight days packing up the garments, photographing and cataloguing them. A collection management policy would take between 18 months and two years to prepare and finding an appropriate home for the display could also take that long.
''It will be a big focus for staff for the first half of the year. We have something amazing and we need to relaunch it in the best manner.''
Mr Parker said the garments could surely be placed on display sooner.
''It can't take two years to get them out on display. The dresses in those days were a hell of a lot better than what women are wearing these days,'' he said. Mr Lepper said he agreed a ''strategic small amount'' of the collection should be exhibited sooner. Council chief executive Phil Melhopt said staff resources dictated how quickly the project could be done.
''There's a danger if we do it piecemeal, it might diminish it. If we could have got it out yesterday, we would've.''
Mr Hore, a Naseby farmer, displayed the collection in the Eden Hore Museum of Fashion, on his property, Glenshee Park. He died in 1997 and bequeathed the garments to his nephew John Steele and Mr Steele's wife Margaret, who were on the farm.
The couple sold the property earlier this year and offered the collection to the council, which paid $40,000. The Steeles hoped the collection would be kept intact and displayed somewhere in the Maniototo.
