ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Labels: Fashion and Identity

·1 hr 22 min·5 clips

Marsha P. Johnson was jailed for clothes that did not match her gender assigned at birth.

ACCA sets the room before the argument starts. Sophie Prince opens with thanks, institutional context, and an acknowledgement of Wurundjeri Woiwurrung land, with respect extended to neighbouring language groups and First Nations people in the room. The tone is careful, public, and a little formal in the way panel talks often are. Fashion is treated as more than surface, though nobody tries to sand off the difficulty. It becomes a way to talk about transformation inside an art space. Tourmaline Transcendent sits close by as the prompt. The event is part of the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival independent program, but the centre of gravity is the panellists' thinking, not festival gloss. One guest talks through two cultural collections. Summer Fate turns on dissonance between societies in a post-modern world. Savior moves into savior complex, hypocrisy, and the way contemporary media chooses its pictures. The history is meant to sit badly. The guest connects the work to colonization, British troops and the French colony, a royal garden, deserters leaving a palace, and heroes who do not feel heroic. The clothes take on that contradiction. Nightgown-like sheerness and fragile forms sit beside hybrid references, architecture, burning, looting, and stripped-back brutalist silhouettes. Materials get slippery too. Expensive silk can look severe and plain, while five dollar plastic mesh can hold detail that scrambles easy ideas about value. Hypocrisy becomes more than a theme. The guest ties propaganda and selective image-making to older colonial tactics, with media still painting its subjects in certain ways. Waki Drew is described as spirit, not body. That opens the talk toward identity, authorship, and what a label can hold. Near the end, the focus turns to characters and icons: Eyes, Alien Kiss, Marpie, Mischa's graphic work, collaboration, and world building.

As heard by us

Fashion is treated as a language for identity, collaboration, and recurring figures.

ACCA's discussion stays centered on labels, fashion, and identity, with Sophie Prince tying the conversation to the ACCA program and to Tourmaline Transcendent.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for an ACCA fashion panel on labels, identity, and the world-building around recurring images.

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