Menopause is a shift, not a crisis 🌡️
+ feminist art on tape
Menopause is big business, valued at NZ$29 billion in 2024. So it’s no surprise that women, who previously had little in the way of resources or expertise to support them through this period of their life, are now completely swamped in products, content creators hawking products, and information and misinformation coming at them faster than their foggy brains can process.
Two wonderful voices that cut through the noise in Aotearoa are Niki Bezzant and Petra Bagust. Niki’s bestselling 2022 book This Changes Everything includes in depth interviews with health experts and a vast array of resources, and Petra Bagust has interviewed many wāhine on her acclaimed Grey Areas podcast, where her frank style opens up conversations that may have previously been considered taboo.
In April Niki and Petra are hitting the road together on the Hot Mess Tour, travelling Aotearoa to impart wisdom, compassion and companionship, bringing these open conversations to a live audience.
Rebecca caught up with them to find out what the audience can expect, and discovered that they’re both keen to change the narrative around how menopause is being discussed.
Rebecca: As a woman it feels like we could constantly be playing a game of, ‘is it modern life, old age, am I going mad or is it perimenopause’. I think there are over 50 different side effects right? Some are extremely niche. So where do we start?
Petra: I would start by de-pathologising menopause. It's a life transition. I’m trying to take words like ‘symptom’ out of my vocabulary, and use words like ‘sign’. It’s a life transition that can take 10 years. What's on the other side of it? What are the things I need to support and manage it? And what are the things I can be like, ‘yes, this is a doorway into giving less fucks about what somebody else thinks about me’. There are massive positives for me. So I go back to curiosity.
Pay for the stories that speak to you 🗣
Menopause isn’t a problem to be “fixed” — but the way we talk about it is. Join Ensemble in reshaping the conversation around women’s health, and more.
Rewind, repeat: 'Having it all, all, all' is a feminist archive on tape
Curator Lisa Beauchamp talks to Zoe about an exhibition exploring second-wave feminist art, and how many of the works on display still have relevance in 2025 – including the fallacy, still perpetuated by some ‘women’s interest’ media, of having it all.
Ensemble Presents: A private tour of Having it all, all, all
On Thursday April 3, our paid subscribers are invited to an intimate, after-hours tour of this must-visit exhibition. Led by curator Lisa, this private experience will include art, conversation, snacks and wine from Three Fates Wine.
Want to join us? Upgrade to a paid subscription for $7 a month or $75 a year, then email us to RSVP (spots are limited).
Your support means a lot to this independent, women-owned business, guarantees our future and makes fun events like this possible!
Find more details here:
We hosted a celebration of style with a purpose
Inside our intimate evening with Untouched World, showcasing some of Aotearoa’s most innovative B Corp brands.
The Ensemble Edit
Things we’ve seen, saved and shared. This is a weekly column of recommendations from Zoe and Rebecca (and sometimes special guests), usually for paid subscribers but this week it’s free.
💜 Her Festival returns to Tāmaki next week, from April 2-6, offering a wide range of talks, panels, workshops and events ranging from tyre changing to sexual wellbeing for teens. Much of the programming is free, all of it is cool. Check it out here. — Rebecca Wadey
🆒 We missed out on attending last year’s Te Wiki Āhua o Aotearoa shows, so we’re excited to be heading along to some this week. There are shows each night as part of the self-described “underground fashion week” — make sure to head along and support emerging creative talent and people making cool shit happen in Tāmaki Makaurau. Last night’s show in a dairy looked SO GOOD! Find the schedule and buy tickets here. — Zoe Walker Ahwa
🛍️ There are a few sample sales on this weekend, including Harris Tapper at Kingsize Studio in Auckland (Friday 10am-6pm; Saturday 10am-4pm) and Jimmy D’s online archive sale from 8am this Friday. — ZWA
📖 I’ve heard so many good things about Ione Skye’s memoir Say Everything and will definitely be buying it to save for Easter break. The 90s It girl isn’t shy on spilling the goss on her tumultuous time in Hollywood, and naming names. Exactly my kind of read. — RW
🇵🇸 Thanks to Charlotte at Metro for introducing me to Bayyāra, a local online store bringing Palestinian products to Aotearoa — including olive oil, olives, hand-embroidered bags, ceramics and these adorable scrunchies that are hand-embroidered with a traditional tatreez motif. — ZWA
🍲 A fun follow on Instagram is Eva Hurtigkarl, the head chef at the canteen at Ganni (Poor little Aotearoa, where none of the fashion designers have chefs on staff). Her food compromises colourful, playful wholefoods that I always save to never repeat. — RW
👎 I am really, really fucking angry and bummed out by this New York Times story about the return to very thin models on the runway. Fashion’s progressive era is really over and seeing it so blatantly in the data is depressing. I hope local designers reject this ‘trend’; I will be watching. — ZWA
📚 As a media and magazine nerd, I’m obsessed with all the new dishy reads about a truly bygone era of budgets, glamour and gossip. My reading habits have been terrible lately (blame TikTok…) but I WILL be picking up Graydon Carter’s When The Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (this NYT profile was so brilliant and bitchy), Maureen Dowd’s Notorious: Portraits of Stars from Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech and the upcoming Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America. In a year or so, maybe NZ will get its own dishy read about our current era of medialand chaos. — ZWA
🌼 I’ve had a tab with this Wynn Hamlyn dress open on my computer for the past month, desperately hoping I’d somehow become someone with an income and lifestyle befitting it. Sadly I have not, but it’s so beautiful I keep the tab open to remember the joy fashion can give me. — RW