Intellectual Fashion Show

Intellectual Fashion Show 2016 is a 112 page catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name. The brief was to create a publication that conceptually related to, and expanded the conversation around the exhibition’s premise.

Throughout the 50s and 60s, artist June Black framed fashion as an armour to protect the self from the rigours of daily life, social hypocrisy and cultural expectations. Over the course of her life and writing she devised a whole wardrobe of metaphorical costumes. In March 1959, 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…”.

More than 60 years later, the exhibition curators have revisited June’s original ideas inviting 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.