Poet Tayi Tibble and mental health advocate Sir John Kirwan are among 12 distinctive New Zealanders displaying their personal style in the upcoming portrait exhibition To Fashion: Dressing Aotearoa.
From 10 to 27 March, people moving through Auckland's Britomart precinct can check out a collection of vibrant life-size portraits by award-winning photographer Edith Amituanai.
The exhibition illustrates that fashion is not a "thing" in itself, but something we all do every day of our lives, says curator Doris de Pont, who is the founder and director of the NZ Fashion Museum.
"From the moment we're born we're wrapped in cloth and every day after that we do the same thing ... we get up, we dress ourselves, we fashion our identity with our clothes," she says.
Doris de Pont Photo: Supplied
Fashion is not just about designer clothing or trendy clothing, it's about our individual relationship to clothing and culture and also reflects how we want to be seen, de Pont says.
"We do it deliberately to show who we are."
In his portrait, Sir John Kirwan wears an Italian cloth jacket tailored by Barkers, with a linen shirt given to him by a friend.
Tapa cloth artist Sulieti Fieme'a Burrows wears a traditional Tongan necklace known adorned with clay flowers and J'adore perfume by Dior "because it makes her smile".
"The value of their clothing is not what they paid for it but who has gifted it to him, how it's been handed down… their relationship to the garment itself. Very little of it has to do with what it cost", says de Pont.
To Fashion: Dressing Aotearoa will be on display until 27 March as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.
Each photo subject talks about their relationship to clothing in a series of videos available on the NZ Fashion Museum website from 10 March.
