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 Katie Pye: Clothes for Modern Lovers
Myer Fashion and Textiles Gallery, Lvl 2
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square
(Until 13 January)
Stepping into the Myer Fashion and Textiles Gallery at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) is like entering a time warp. In glass cabinets, loud and colourful jackets, dresses and shirts embody the excesses of the 80s and 90s.
On one wall projections of models wearing outrageous fashion hover over you; on another, video clips featuring Pseudo Echo conjure up memories of Countdown.
We are entering the world of Australian artist, fashion designer and stylist Katie Pye.
Clothes for Modern Lovers charts her work from the late 1970s until 1990. For Pye, clothing is art-based. Her garments are literally wearable art, with many items collaborations between herself and other artists such as Susan Norrie, who also features in many of the fashion photographs in the exhibition. She is as striking as the asymmetrical, multicoloured, reversible, east-meets-west jacket she wears on the exhibition brochure.
There’s something distinctly theatrical about the Pye’s work. Her clothes literally became statements reflecting what was going on around her. An outfit named The Party says it all. Covered in drawings and paintings of explicit sexual scenes, The Party illustrates a night out for the exhibitionist, complete with an undisguised lust for sex.
This need for an alternative, individual and experimental form of clothing signalled the emergence of a radical fashion culture in Australia.
Art commentator Paul Taylor wrote in the 80s about Australian New Wave, which was based on the subjective, coded relationship between artist and spectator. This relationship between garment and wearer was one of the things that drew Pye into the creation of art clothes, inspiring a new visual and conceptual language in Australian fashion. Another distinct aspect of the New Wave was what fashion historian Jane Mulvagh has called ‘satirical rebellion through flamboyant aestheticism’.
There are over 25 outfits on display here, each reflecting Pye’s rule-breaking art-wear. Gender politics informed her early pieces; played out in The Mistress through an investigation of dominance and submission. Other works investigate volume and structure, playing with exaggerated proportions, asymmetry and gender blurring; while Junk Jacket references Chinese sailing boats, and the Kabuki Outfit combines Japanese feudal costume combined with an ultra-modern look.
Art clothes: it’s all about the expression of art in fashion.
Photo: Katie Pye, fashion artist, born Australia 1952, Brancusi (c.1981). Lent by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Gift of Penelope Tree, 1995.
Photographer Geoff Kleem. Image courtesy of Katie Pye.
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