Drawn from life
Every shirt we make carries a real plate — a hand-coloured lithograph from the great 19th-century natural-history record of Aotearoa's birds, drawn from life between 1873 and 1888 for Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand.
These were not illustrations made for clothing. They were the scientific record of their day: each feather observed, each bird set down by hand, printed one stone at a time. We reproduce them faithfully — nothing redrawn, nothing modernised.
Why it matters
Some of the birds in these plates are gone. The huia, the laughing owl, the South Island piopio — no living person has seen them. For those species the plate is the last witness. To wear one is to carry a record of what was here.
On the names
Many of these manu carry te reo Māori names generations older than the lithographs. Where we can confirm a name against a published source, we lead with it. Where we cannot, we say so plainly and use the English name rather than guess. We treat these species as taonga, and the record as something held in trust, not owned.
How they're made
Each design is printed on heavyweight cotton, made to order. Nothing is warehoused, nothing is mass-cut. The archive holds far more than we've brought to shirt — the collection grows as we go.
Agentic Aotearoa — a small Aotearoa New Zealand studio.