POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Notes

Designed and made by Lydia Pearson and Pamela Easton for the Powerhouse Museum's 'Sourcing the Muse' exhibition in 2002. PROJECT OVERVIEW-Sourcing the Muse Exhibition presented at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 12 April - 21 July 2002 The origins of the Sourcing the Muse exhibition lie in the Powerhouse Museum's rich dress and textile collection and the emergence in the mid 1990s of a new generation of Australian fashion designers whose original and distinct signature styles drew accolades both locally and internationally. The exhibition showcased the Museum's extraordinary collection not through the curator's eyes but through the hearts, minds and vision of some of Australia's foremost fashion designers. In the process, we endeavoured to provide the Museum's audience with an insight to the often elusive and seemingly enigmatic world of creative process. Where do designers seek inspiration and what is the process that takes them from inspiration through design and manufacture to the creation of a new work? Eight Australian fashion designers were invited to look through the Museum's textile and dress collection and select one or more items to use as a source of inspiration for a new work they would create. The designers selected were: Akira by Akira Isogawa Easton Pearson by Lydia Pearson and Pamela Easton Gwendolynne by Gwendolynne Burkin Michelle Jank Nicola Finetti S!X by Peter Boyd and Denise Sprynskyj Tea Rose by Rosemary Armstrong Vixen by Georgia Chapman and Maureen Sohn These designers were selected because their work is marked by a knowledge of and passion for fashion and dress history. Their collections reflect their ability to source fashion and dress ideas from across time and cultures while reconsidering it in an original, often unconventional, and very contemporary manner. Rather than being trend-driven, their work lies outside the changing 'looks' of mainstream fashion; it has a timeless quality with each collection evolving from the last in an ongoing exploration of images, ideas and techniques. Having the designers select and create the objects that appeared in the exhibition also highlighted the broader purpose of museum collections; they are not only a resource for curators' research and exhibitions but importantly function as a source of inspiration and information for designers, scholars, students and general researchers. In the words of the late Richard Martin, former curator at The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art 'one is aware that ours is no mere echelon of objects but a museum's extraordinary capacity to offer history for potential contribution to a creative future'.* The designers were encouraged to view the Museum's collection as a creative space where they could 'meet their Muse' and draw inspiration. For most of them their initial visit was overwhelming, as the Museum holds one of the most extensive and diverse collections of historical and contemporary fashion, textiles and dress in Australia. Its first acquisitions of clothing were made in the early 1880s and it now holds more than 30,000 items of men's, women's and children's clothing and accessories, textiles from nearly every continent, fashion plates, photographs, swatch books, designer archives and fashion magazines. The exhibition itself featured the item or items each designer selected as a source of inspiration from the Museum's collection, a 'creative process box' into which they placed design drawings, fabric experiments, production photos, inspirational images and a mannequin displaying the new outfit they created based on these 'muses'. Each designer was also asked to work with their own team of stylist, make-up artist and photographer to create a 'fashion image' which was placed alongside the new garment they created. This gave them the opportunity to complete their vision for the garment and express how they imagined it being worn, without the constraints of commercial considerations. Easton Pearson outfit: Pamela Easton and Lydia Pearson selected three items from the Powerhouse Museum collection to use as their source of inspiration for this outfit: H6177: A woman's sleeveless red cotton brocade padded jacket trimmed with black velvet, ricrac braid and beads, made in Europe about 1900. D3740: Cockade fan made of spelt fibres in Italy about 1890. 85/474: Lavender fan, constructed from woven reeds with muslin panel painted with lavender sprigs. Lydia Pearson and Pamela Easton described the creative process from inspiration to production: Fan skirt - 'We were attracted by the shape, colour, and texture of the fan (D6177). We have been working with raffia embroidery on calico for a few seasons and could picture an extension of the work we had done. 'The flare of the skirt is referential to the shape of the fan. The raffia colour and texture mirrors the straw of the fan. The looping at the hip line was transferred from the pom-pom on the fan. We had used that looping previously on the hem of a raffia skirt. We bound the edge of the skirt with reddish pink raffia over stitch, as in the rigid oval fan (85/474). The length and shape of the skirt makes it look rather like a traditional dancing skirt from Asia or the Pacific Islands. Striped calico bodice with hand tacking - 'We have been looking at the inside construction of old garments for many years and love the obvious hand stitching that often appears on the lining. Indeed the linings themselves often hold more appeal than the more ornate outer layer. We have done a lot of work with hand stitching on calico in the past and it was easy to extract the essence of this garment and marry it with our current themes. 'We loved the shape of the little Balkan tunic (H6177): it fits with a silhouette that we have been working on for 2002. As there was no chance of finding a beautiful striped calico similar to the lining, we devised the idea of running machine stitch rows in two colours on the base cloth before we commenced the hand tacking. 'Taking both the naive patterns that appear on the lining as a result of the braid being attached to the outer layer in patterns, and also the hand tacked rows that hold the two layers together, we configured the hand tacked pattern on to our own tunic shape. The garment needed some reference to the more ornate outer layer and so we used some metal katori sequins (one of our very constant materials) at random, loosely attached by the tacking. This gave the garment an air of dilapidated grandeur whilst still retaining the naivety of the original tunic lining.' - Pamela Easton and Lydia Pearson.