She’s gobsmackingly gorgeous and waiting for you to drop by. Janice Breen Burns plumbs the backstory of the NGV Triennial’s prettiest exhibit. (This story first appeared in Spectrum, The Saturday Age and Sydney Morning Herald arts and culture section.)
English designer Richard Quinn‘s Triennial exhibit is a lovely thing; heavily embroidered with sequins and pearls, five kilos of frocklet with integrated high heels, helmet mask, bodysuit hosiery and matching handbag glinting in its airy glass case at the intersection of an upper gallery and mezzanine corridor.
Dash through the Triennial as I did, however (hell bent to get around in two hours; forget it…), and you’re likely to miss it. Which would be a shame. And not just because it’s so dang pretty you can almost see it sway and hear it click-tinkling down the runway of Quinn’s show in London last year, but because it’s a virtual millefeuille of clues to the Triennial itself.
“It speaks to the moment,” says Danielle Whitefield, NGV fashion and textile curator. “Richard Quinn’s work’s on the cutting edge of all those conversations we’re having around the world and that make up the Triennial: the purpose of design, the intersections between different design disciplines, interrogations of new materials, environmental impacts. He’s also at that experimental avante garde end (of fashion), inventing new techniques, new processes, new ways to address sustainability, ethical supply…”
In its own weirdly British way, Quinn’s Triennial queen also tackles the hottest hot button issue in fashion right now; cultural identity and the fraught ways we all pick clothes to signal who we think we are and where we belong.
“Fashion’s a really good barometer of what’s going on in the world,” Whitfield says, “And fashion is representative of identity so in that context, (Quinn’s) work interrogates British identity in a way that’s like other British designers have done; (Vivienne) Westwood and (Lee) McQueen are the most obvious. They interrogated Britishness and royalty and subcultures like the English club scene…”
Quinn picked the limeyest of Limey icons as a starting point for his own exploration; London’s iconic, ironic street market hawkers, the so-called “pearly kings and queens” who spoofed royalty and high fashion with their tailored jackets and well-posh hats, all heavily embroidered and blinged with thousands of humble buttons. “We wanted that symbolism of the pearly kings and queens of Bermondsy,” Quinn says from his London studio. “But we wanted it elevated into an almost armoured piece, like a walking statue.”
His pearly queen’s reinforced, fully-upholstered effect chimes nicely with fashion’s covid-era trend to carapace-like clothing. It’s also an aesthetic throw back to the late American artist Paul Harris’s startling sculptures of women embedded in padded lounge chairs. According to Quinn they’ve been on his mind, on and off, for five years since he graduated from London’s legendary Central Saint Martin’s college with his Masters of Fashion degree.
Quinn is renowned now for dialling up upholstery-esque florals to screamingly ostentatious levels, often swirling in operatically dramatic colour palettes.
They’re his piece de resistance, animating silhouettes so voluminous they almost swallow a woman whole, or that ruch and schloop tightly around here, then puff extravagantly into watermelon and lollypop bulges there.
“His aesthetic is always highly embellished,” Whitefield says, “Whether it’s heavily beaded and embroidered work that pushes into couture traditions or a textile print that’s heavily saturated, visual overload, but with this play between surface and structure, this certain kind of lightness that’s still very rich in decoration.”
Quinn’s Triennial queen sprang from the same exuberant genre but also sits slightly awry of it with its mono-tonal pearly gleam and royal connotations. It’s a departure from the vividly coloured oevre he’s built in five short years but, says Whitfield, not a far one. “We selected this piece (for the NGV’s permanent fashion and textiles collection) over more expected or typical works because even though he’s shown collections since 2016, he introduced this as a (new) beginning, the House of Quinn, almost as a play on concepts of royal lineage, the lineage of fashion houses and his own future legacy…..”
The piece bristles with symbols including the punkishly unsubtle “God Save the Quinn” intricately machine-embroidered into its undulating skirts. “Well, that’s obvious, obviously,” Quinn says laughing, “Because I won that award from the queen.”
Obviously. It was one kor-blimey shock for the modest young bloke, youngest of five kids raised in multi-cultural South East London, when her majesty herself popped up to present him with the inaugural Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design at his London Fashion Week show in 2018. She’d never even been to a fashion week before but slipped into the front row beside American Vogue legend Anna Wintour then did the honors after Quinn’s last model swanned off. So strange and marvellous was the moment, Quinn’s fame as a nailer of Right-nowness, quite naturally, went boom.
Since then he’s been declared a genius by iconic Italian brand Moncler. No small feat. He’s dressed social rocket-fuelling celebrities such as Dua Lipa and Amal Cooney and he’s watched, gob-smacked (“I didn’t know; then my phone went OFF…!”) as mega-star rapper/influencer Cardi B (Instagram followers: 81.4 million) swanned into Paris Fashion Week in her own floridly floral Quinn upholstery with face mask, flowery hosiery and heels built in.
Quinn’s kudos, particularly among his own generation of disrupters, according to Whitfield, is emblematic and, fingers crossed, harbinger of future fashion. “Everyone knows fashion can’t go on the way it has been,” she says. “We all know it’s time for a change. It’s already happening here with the Australian Fashion Council’s work. But, Quinn’s representative of some amazing energy coming out of London from young emerging designers who are already doing things their way, deciding how things should be designed, made, sold, marketed, consumed…They’re not interested in the usual stepping stones to head a major (fashion) house in Paris, they’re into controlling their own practice, carving their own path, changing the fashion system…”
And they’re invariably resigned to staying small. Quinn’s own deliberately limited business is on this new front line of global fashion. At his Peckham studio, he nuts out new ways to assert sustainable, ethical and zero wastage production practices into his collections. He makes to order in London to avoid freight-generated carbon emissions and excess inventory. He’s flipped fashion’s traditionally closed and frankly, mean-spirited business model into one that’s transparent, collaborative and offers emerging designers mentorship and free access to his own state-of-the-art digital print plant.
He’s extraordinary but, not unique, Whitfield says. More emergers join him every season. Quinn does, however, straddle traditional and revolutionary concepts in his own unique ways. “He looks at all those reference points (moral production, identity..), through the lense of pure craftsmanship,” she says, “Pushing into couture, working those timeconsuming hand crafts into innovative cutting techniques….he’s inventive and innovative but he also respects the history of couture..”
“I hope people will see the craft, the construction, all the amazing elements of the piece,” Quinn says of his Triennial queen. “The embroidery for example; it looks quite effortless but, it’s a lot more than you think.”
And…
In addition to Quinn’s queen, the Triennial interrogates a tangle of ideas on the fringe and outer orbit of Planet Fashion: Japanese designer Tomo Koizumi ruffled 200 metres of polyester tulle into a billowing rainbow gown (pictured above) that Whitfield says is not only “quietly political” in the realm of LGBTQI identities and sustainable fashion practices, but echoes his childhood in a Japanese funeral parlour.
Also…
Canadians Steven Raj Bhaskaran and Sarah Rose Dalton of Montreal brand Fecal Matter, (pictured above) collaborated with artist Sarah Sitkin on their “Skin Heel Boots“, confrontingly flesh-and-boney horned foot and legwear for the day “post human identity” is all the rage in fashion. The artists wear their designs in public to deliberately goad derogatory remarks which in turn, will trigger conversations around race, gender identity and the dream of a bigotry-free “post human aesthetic”.
