L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program 2011

The L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival has become the VIW (Very Important Week) for local fashionistas, filled with the usual suspects – runways, gift bags, celebrities and powder rooms. But a happy by-product of the festival is its month-long cultural program, which encourages the sexy and stylish to look beyond the runway and to the artistic expression of fashion and design.

Kicking off the cultural program was the Penthouse Mouse launch party, held in the suitably edgy and immense Shed 4 at Docklands. The space allows emerging designers and artists to show off their creations and market them; it acts as a pop-up store, albeit a rather large one. For such an enormous space, Shed 4 was buzzing with creativity and camaraderie at the launch party. Among the art installations were super-scale, hair-adorned peace emblems and large clouds that resembled fairy floss. They’re a young, inspired crowd at Penthouse Mouse, which is a reassuring sign of what’s in store from local up-and-comers.

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Greer Taylor, Fragile Surface, 2011.

As part of the exhibition stream of the cultural program, two particular installations provided fascinating viewing. Greer Taylor’s String Theory exhibition at [MARS] Gallery explored infinity and repetition, looking at string as a textile as well as the scientific string theory. The latter is a quantum theory that suggests the universe is made up of vibrating strings considered to be the elemental force of existence, something that has intrigued Taylor throughout her career. The hero piece, Fragile Surface, is a piece of fine-knitted wire that hangs vertically between the two walls of the gallery. The knitted surface, which took Taylor four months to hand weave, is then tensioned towards each wall using approximately 200 nylon strings. Fishing hooks are tied to each string and hooked onto the wire, creating a topography on all three surfaces. It’s an absorbing structure that Taylor likens to our planet, the connecting surfaces being akin to different aspects of our existence.

At Craft Victoria, Martha McDonald’s The Weeping Dress was a haunting twenty-minute performance about Victorian mourning culture and fashion. Standing atop a wooden platform wearing a black Victorian dress crafted from crepe paper, McDonald sang a grief-filled folk song as water dripped on her from above. As the water poured harder and harder, the dyes used in the dress ran, creating blue stains over her hands. The stained water dripped to the platform below her, forming a large black pool of water with a stunning reflection. A highlight of the cultural program, The Weeping Dress expressed the way loss literally marks us.

The cultural program’s in-store installations invited art into the fashion world, with retail boutiques opening their doors to stage mini exhibitions. At the LIFEwithBIRD store in Melbourne’s GPO, Roh Singh’s Inaudible Sounds exhibition took centre stage on the shop floor, with racks of designer jeans and dresses providing an unlikely backdrop. Singh’s 3D sculptures, created from layered acrylic, included birds, bottles and hammers. Viewed from a particular angle, the sculptures’ shapes reflected the contours of sound waves, amplifying Singh’s subjects and the dissimilar sounds they produce.

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O.T.T. by Lia Tabrah, Reptilica collection featured in Glamazon Octogenarian, 2010.

Image: Chase Manhattan

At jewellery store Glitzern, the slithering seductiveness of reptiles was on display with jewellery designer Lia Tabrah’s Reptilica collection. Focusing on the snake and the crocodile, Tabrah’s collection involved moulding segments of these reptiles and finishing them in high-polished copper and nickel. The collection includes seven statement pieces, neckpieces, earrings and a ring. Tabrah says one of her favourite places to visit is the Northern Territory. “I love being a typical tourist and going out on cruises and watching the reptiles and handling them. I find these fierce creatures to be very glamorous,” she says.

There’s a diverse range on offer in the cultural program, and Mikala Tai, cultural program manager of the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival, believes it’s an important event for Melbourne. “The people that go to the actual fashion festival at Docklands are always going to go,” she says. “But for other people, the main interaction they have with the fashion festival will be through the cultural program. The way you can access fashion through the cultural program is really important and I think it adds a lot to the city being a cultural and fashionable place.”

The festival ran 14–20 March 2011.