Clare was in Auckland today checking out the Intellectual Fashion Show 2016 at Gus Fisher Gallery - Such beautiful and creative responses to the Metaphorical costumes of June Black. Thank you New Zealand Fashion Museum for putting together such a unique exhibition and for including us.
About the Intellectual Fashion Show
Open 8 October - 5 November 2016, Saturdays 12-4pm, Tuesday to Friday 10am-5pm
At the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland, Free entry
In March 1959, artist June Black explored ideas of 'the self' in an exhibition titled, Intellectual Fashion Show. Bringing together her paintings, ceramic wall sculptures and a provocative commentary she presented the concept of an 'intellectual fashion house'. The aim of its imagined director, M. Henri Folli, was "to dress the mind away from commonplace associations…".
June framed fashion as an armour to protect the self from the rigours of daily life, social hypocrisy and cultural expectations. And over the course of her life and writing she devised a whole wardrobe of metaphorical costumes.
More than 60 years later, the New Zealand Fashion Museum and Blikfang Gallery are revisiting June’s original ideas with an exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland. The aim of the Intellectual Fashion Show 2016 is to further advance M. Henri Folli's most worthy cause, offering participants a platform to experiment with the expressive potential of what we wear to fashion the body and the mind and to explore the rich complexity of the real-self.
The exhibition curators have invited more than 50 fashion designers, milliners, jewellers, visual artists, poets, ceramic artists and other creatives - including established names Liz Findlay, WORLD, Margo Barton, Fran Allison, Peter Madden, Louise Rive, Karen Inderbitzen Waller - to select one of June’s metaphorical costumes and explore the idea of the transformative power of dress.
To imagine what a 'costume to be worn over a heavy heart' might look like? Or a 'hat for elevated thoughts'? And what makes for a 'costume in which to invite undiluted pleasure'? Or consider these:
- Costume to get onto one’s high horse
- Costume to face the world of the commonplace
- Costume to be worn over a heavy heart
- Costume to flaunt tedious advice and swing off into bright danger
- Costume to joyfully accept the success of others without a sigh
- Costume to extend exalted moments
- Costume to face the ultimate discomfit of the guillotine, the gallows or the dentist
