Why’d you pick that frock, that style of jeans, those shoes? A rare Melbourne Museum exhibition, “Fashion Redux” opens the 2019 Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival (March 1 – 10) and, with the help of nine local fashion visionaries, takes a stab at answering: why do you dress like that y’all???
Words: Janice Breen Burns Photos: Eddie Jim and Ben Healley (This story first appeared in The Saturday Age Spectrum and Sydney Morning Herald)
Photo: Eddie Jim
Melbourne Museum curator Michael Reason has a pink tutu for anyone who claims they don’t care about fashion. “You know the ones; ‘I don’t care what I wear’, ‘I can’t be bothered with fashion’ …” Reason suggests they hypothetically pop on a hypothetical pink tutu and see how they hypothetically feel about fashion then.
“They quickly realise that of course they care,” he says. “Everyone makes choices about clothes every day, about how they want to present themselves to the world. Everyone is involved in fashion in one way or another.”
Melbourne Museum’s Charlotte Walker (front). Photo: Ben Healley
For Reason, nay-sayers are particularly exasperating because he is aware of the depths of meaning that can be plumbed, “about times, about cultures, about what was going on in people’s heads”, from a single frock or suit or pair of shoes. His work is often thrilling. “History’s woven into clothes,” he says, “Real people’s histories, because we’re a museum, not a gallery focused on high fashion pristine Diors or Chanels. Our collection is more about real, individual narratives and it’s amazing what they can reveal; how we’re all linked to the past, to each other. How we all fit together.”
Ntombi Moyo plumbs the Museum archive for inspiration. Photo: Ben Healley
For Fashion Redux, the exhibition on which Reason collaborated to open the 23rd Melbourne Fashion Festival next week, he wanted to split open the museum’s vast collection of historic clothing and adornments in ways that would inspire conversations about the past, and now. “We wanted to expose parts of the museum normally hidden,” he says. “We have tens of thousands of pieces so we wanted those tens of thousands of narratives to be out there, accessible.”
But how to do that without a static forest of costumed mannequins and explanatory plaques was a puzzle. In an ingenious twist, Fashion Redux‘s installations are composed with a mix of modern and historic pieces by nine disparate visionaries from Melbourne’s fashion community: designers Nixi Killick, Kristy Dickinson of Haus of Dizzy and ALPHA60s’ Alex and Georgie Cleary, stylists Kate Gaskin and Ntombi Moyo, milliner Melissa Jackson, costumier Marion Boyce, couturiers Antony Pittorino and Jacob Luppino of J’Aton and social media entrepreneurs Jess and Steph Dadon of How Two Live.
Kate Gaskin decides. Photo: Ben Healley
Nixi Killick for example, found Reason’s rare invitation to pull on gloves and fossick in the museum’s archive utterly beguiling. “It’s just the most phenomenal space,” she says of the climate-controlled Moreland store where regal robes and possum cloaks are catalogued with whale skeletons, taxidermied polar bears and ancient trams. “A rabbit warren of port holes to the past,” she crows, “A constellation of things that tell a story, a constellation of stories.”
Nixi Killick and Michael Reason Photo: Ben Healley
When Killick re-surfaced, the artist renowned for her cerebral, often wildly coloured clothes and for having Lady Gaga among her clients had picked a heavily embroidered purple velvet Israeli ceremonial robe – “Such a powerful garment” – and a skirt knitted with Sydney Opera House motif by famous Australian designer Jenny Kee to form the core of her installation. “They’ll be juxtaposed with my hybrid collection of laser-cut perspex and acrylic harnesses,” she says, “Based on some powerful stories of Valkyja and Vikings that have inspired me and other women in my family.”
Killick intends this tangle of narratives (including her Danish heritage and a mash of teasers around her recent experiments with advanced technology and intricate craftsmanship) will trip a thousand conversations about expression.
“Every iteration of humanity in every culture ever has placed a hell of a lot of importance on that idea of identifying yourself, your uniqueness, through decoration and all kinds of wearables like jewellery, piercings, body markings, armour, headdresses,” she says. “They’re the unique meanings we lay over our bare skin.”
(Left) Charlotte Walker, Objects Conservator, Museums Victoria and Hannah Perkins, Humanities Collection Manager, Museums Victoria. Photo: Ben Healley
On their surface Fashion Redux‘s installations might appear odd to some but their principle task, like art, is to stir and trigger. Jess and Steph Dadon’s installation, for example, features a central vintage gold evening gown by Prue Acton, a lovely thing in itself and, according to the twins, a precious nod to past craftsmanship. “You can see the care that’s gone into making it,” says Jess Dadon, “Sadly, it’s care you don’t see as much in fashion these days.”
Photo: Ben Healey
The twins composed their installation to comment on Melbourne’s rich fashion legacy and the fast/cheap, post-feminist, #MeToo world in which we compose our wardrobes now. “We added 2019 sneakers to the gown,” says Steph Dadon, “A statement about female empowerment and how far we’ve come since the terribly uncomfortable (high) heels that would have been worn with it originally.”
Jackson also approached the complex, intuitive art of accessorising with a strange and disparate set of objects: military lace boots, Balenciaga hat and others including a mane and tail brush, leather whip and canvas saddle cover once used in the daily toilette of Phar Lap. “It is the only form of fashion these days unique for its ‘top-to-toe’ styling,” she says of racewear.
Wiradjuri jewellery designer and self-described “Queen of Bling”, Kristy Dickinson, on the other hand, designed an installation around fashion’s hot-button contemporary issues: “Female empowerment, pride in Indigenous heritage, politics,” she ticks them off, “Queer, environmental and feminist issues …”
For Georgie Cleary of Melbourne brand ALPHA60, it was a century-old hot button issue that skewed hers and brother Alex Cleary’s hunt in the archive. They looked for a historic parallel of sorts to ALPHA60’s modern minimalist aesthetic when museum staff directed them to a category that might offer an edgy option. “Heavy canvas jackets with the arms restricted, and suits with the legs sewn together,” Cleary recalls. “They were from mental institutions around 1900.”
Georgie and Alex Cleary of ALPHA60 Photo: Ben Healley
