Fashion is richly ambiguous. It’s silly yet meaningful, ordinary yet fantastical, tangible yet transcendent, and disposable yet precious. The National Gallery of Victoria’s new landmark exhibition weaves these diverse impulses into a coherent, chronological narrative of elite clothing in Australia.
200 Years of Australian Fashion immerses the viewer in settings that represent shifting industrial conditions: department store showrooms, tailors’ workrooms, glamorous salons, entrepreneurial boutiques selling avant-garde art clothes, and promotional initiatives such as the Fashion Design Council and international fashion weeks.
Some garments here previously appeared in the 2010 exhibition Australian Made: 100 Years of Fashion, which spanned the 1850s to the 1950s. This is a broader survey, reaching back to 1805 and forward to 2016, and not everyone will be satisfied with its decisions about what to include and omit. But it’s imaginative and accessible, staking the NGV’s claim to being Australia’s leading fashion and textiles museum.
The transitions between the exhibition’s 10 display rooms are enjoyably theatrical. Some tableaux are tantalisingly glimpsed through doorways before they’re encountered at closer range. The entry conjures a dreamy, uncanny mood – after passing through a diaphanous curtain, you see dresses from between 1805 and 1855 looming spectrally in separate glass cases. Meanwhile, the exit feels futuristic, even surreal; Dion Lee’s newly commissioned crystal sculpture towers above you, sprinkling beads of light from four metres above.
By contrast, the colonial gowns are staggeringly tiny. But it’s misleading to conclude that Australians have simply got taller and larger over time. More pragmatic explanations include that people preserve “special” garments from their slender salad days, and that larger-sized historical garments rarely survive in museum-worthy condition without being recut to fit smaller wearers.
The displays are sequenced to harmonise and clash, suggesting that some aesthetic ideals are refined over time, while others emerge to reject dominant values. For example, the Dressmakers and Tailors space displays early designer labels including Brisbane’s Miss Scott and Melbourne’s Mrs Eeles. This primes you for Australian couture’s mid-20th century heyday in the glamorous, dusty-pink Salon, where evening gowns twirl slowly on a rotating dais.
It’s tempting to view the mood of genteel prosperity in these early rooms as evidence of cultural cringe: that Australians preferred to take their fashion cues from far-off Europe while disparaging their own surroundings. Even Minis and Maxis, with its groovy chevron decals, carpet of strewn flowers and inevitable Jean Shrimpton reference, seems a little too proud of our very own youthquake.
The exhibition stops treating garments as historical emblems when it reaches a pink jungle riot dedicated to Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson’s Sydney boutique Flamingo Park. Instead, fashion auteur theory kicks in as the exhibition looks to independent and avant-garde designers as the wellsprings of sartorial nationalism. Flamingo Park, which opened in 1973, reappropriated tourist kitsch and feminine domestic crafts, heralding a new kind of Australian fashion marked by innovative use of materials, and the knowing manipulation of motif and silhouette.
Kee’s and Jackson’s obvious heir is the ironic Australiana of Romance Was Born (represented here by a rainbow tartan suit from their 2015 Cooee Couture collection). However, there’s a quieter deconstruction of nostalgia in Alasdair Duncan MacKinnon’s 1989 Patchwork of Society suit inspired by Depression-era “wagga” blankets made of fabric scraps, or Michelle Jank’s 2001 Federation Dress of flags, tea towels and souvenir badges. And a cabinet of accessories from multiple eras – which all employ native Australian skins, furs and feathers – reveals it’s no new thing to find inspiration in local materials.
Many viewers will notice when the exhibition “comes alive” for them because it begins to overlap with their own lived experience. For me, it was Christopher Graf’s 1994 Requiem ensemble. I remembered how the cool girls at school would flock to his cartoonish boutique on Chapel Street, Melbourne, for kicky babydoll dresses to wear to the formal.
The Fashion Weeks room, dedicated to prominent designers of the past 20 years, made me ponder how hindsight polishes our aesthetic judgment. Carla Zampatti and Akira still seem elegant to me, while Collette Dinnigan’s lace slip dress and Alannah Hill’s devoré velvet frock look achingly 90s. And I cringe to remember the fashion media’s pride that our designers were kicking goals internationally. Is this still cultural cringe?
The Contemporary Fashion room forces you to crane your neck, because the designs have literally been put on pedestals. I was struck by the gorgeously structural ways they enfold the body, from Maticevski’s precise, asymmetrical drapery to Ellery’s fluid heaviness and Alpha60’s blunt, utilitarian silhouettes. The Sydney Opera House inspired Dion Lee as it had Linda Jackson; but his Arc coat-dress (2013) abstracts Utzon’s architectural forms as swooping pleats.
Australian fashion emerges as a virtuosic craft: knitting a detailed homage to Fair Isle patterns; making a 1980s taffeta puffball skirt or an 1870s ruched bustle appear light as whipped cream; embroidering sequined graffiti on a mesh bodysuit, or hand-stitching thousands of ostrich feathers to a turquoise ballgown. 200 Years of Australian Fashion honours our makers, even as it gratifies audiences’s nostalgic impulses.
- 200 Years of Australian Fashion is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria until 31 July
