Fashion Fwd - Disruption through Design

Iconic designs from iD Emerging Designer Awards finalists exhibited alongside pieces from Otago Museum’s extensive textile collection. Experience couture that crashes through the convention.

Fashion is, at its best, a creative fist raised and railing. It is a critique of society, a protest of inequality and injustice, and, for those the world mutes, a means to take thoughts and whispers to a wild and fabulous shout. It is an agent of change; our beliefs, our identity, and our hopes for the shape of the world described in tulle, and silk, and wool.

iD Dunedin International Emerging Designer Awards was established to promote and connect the work of recent fashion design graduates worldwide: the next generation of disruptors.

In Fashion Fwd >> Disruption through Design, Otago Museum’s collections sit alongside the iD finalists’ designs, expanding conversations; themes threading between the past and the present.

All these fashions disrupt through design. They crash through stale tradition and bristle against prejudice, intent on forging a better humanity. They tell our stories, exult in self-expression, and delight in shattering old ideas that restrict, restrain, and reduce us; refusing to submit to an imperfect world.

Join us on a walk through seven themes of global significance in fashion thinking and practice – escapism, gender, illusion, reinterpretation, sculptural, transformation, and wellbeing.

Exhibition continues after the Fringe Festival until October 17, 2021.