The World’s Most Over-the-top Runway Happens to Be in New Zealand
Part Cirque du Soleil, part Broadway play, and part avant-garde couture show, New Zealand’s annual World of WearableArt Show (WOW) is, in a word, mesmerizing.
photography by Marissa Findlay.
Every year New Zealand hosts the World of WearableArt (WOW) Fashion/Art Exhibition, where designers from all over the world create intricately designed garments for the chance to win the Supreme WOW Award at the exhibition’s extravagant Awards Night ceremony.
This year WOW celebrated 30 years of “taking art off the wall and onto the human form” and in celebration of 30 years, I made it down to Wellington to catch the Awards Night ceremony and watch the eccentrically awesome display. I then worked with the WOW team to select and shoot some of my favorite pieces from the show.
The amount of time and work put into each garment, to me, was reminiscent of the attention and detail put in by the famous ateliers of Paris and Milan to couture garments. So, I wanted to shoot these pieces as such, bold, avant-garde, and bare––a true welding of the worlds of art and fashion.
Echoplex - Goddess of Reverb by Natalie Hutton (Melbourne, Australia) // Winner: Avant-garde Section
Spirit Bone by Guo Xiao Tong (Beijing, China) // Winner: Weta Workshop Emerging Designer Award
Ernst Haeckel’s Bride by Nika Danielska (Wroclaw, Poland) // Runner Up: Supreme WOW Award // Winner: Under the Microscope Section
Chinese Opera by Chan Wai Tung (Hong Kong, China)
