Disrupting Fashion-as-Usual in the Southern Hemisphere

The exhibition Fashion FWD: Disruption through Design at Tūhura Otago Museum in 2021 was a catalyst for ongoing research in the Costume and Textiles collection.

It showcased fashion from the iD Dunedin International Emerging Designer Awards, alongside historical dress from Tūhura Otago Museum's substantial costume collection. The aim was to show that fashion designers and makers have long thought about social, cultural, and environmental issues, and beautifully broken fashion's own moulds and rules.

Identified themes included designers' long-standing interest in representations of gender, how to dress for physical and psychological health, imagined or escapist realities, disguising or emphasising aspects of the body, reinterpretations of past traditions, a myriad of responses to shape and outline, and varied expressions of re-use and transformation.

It was clear that both emerging and earlier designers were using their personal cultural capital to change what they do, how and why they do it, and even the vocabulary they use to discuss it.

Garments from the Museum collection included a 19th century top hat and a pair of c. 1960 stiletto heeled shoes that both created illusions of height; a dress originally worn by Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan, New Zealand's first Māori woman cabinet minister, in which ngutu kākā or kāka beak plant designs from kōwhaiwhai rafter patterns were reinterpreted in eye-catching embroidery; and a recently identified tea-gown c. 1880s, made from a woollen paisley shawl, that highlighted women's attempts to free themselves from corsets.

Published Research

Jane Malthus, Moira White and Margo Barton, Disrupting Fashion-as-Usual in the Southern Hemisphere. Chapter 3 in Annick Schramme, Nathalie Verboven, (eds.) Sustainability and the Fashion Industry: Can fashion save the world? London: Routledge, 2024, pp36-55.

The exhibition catalogue: Fashion Fwd >> Disruption through Design. Dunedin: Otago Museum Trust Board and Otago Polytechnic, 2021.

Further reading: