Openly gay and inspired by queer fashion history, Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) frequently challenged traditional ideals of beauty through disruptive designs that transformed fashion industry standards.
NGV curator Meg Slater leads a conversation with members of community working in fashion, art and beyond, to discuss McQueen’s inherently queer approach to fashion design, and his enduring legacy in and outside of the fashion world.
Moderator
Meg Slater (she/they) is Curator, International Exhibition Projects at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Since 2017, Meg has worked on a number of the NGV’s major international exhibitions, including MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the forthcoming Pierre Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi. Meg was also one of the five curators who organised QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection (2022), the most historically expansive thematic presentation of its kind ever presented by an Australian art institution. In 2021, Meg completed a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne with First Class Honours. Meg’s thesis explored the potential for large arts institutions to more meaningfully engage with marginal subjects and histories through exhibition making and programming.
Speakers
Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought-provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on stolen, unceeded Gunaikurnai land. He completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking.
Jackie Wu is a Chinese fashion designer and Creative Director, who is presenting a multidisciplinary fashion and art label titled Wackie Ju. In this form, Jackie Wu creatively communicates though various mediums such as clothing, film, performance installation, publication, and visual execution. Coming from an IT upbringing, the label is poetically millennium and uses technology to showcase its spiritual aspect. Wackie Ju creates narratives to speculate an immersive utopia and safe space by engaging in sociological conversations and philosophies. The practise delivers messages with a humorous yet sharp tone to criticise sociological issues and conventional gazes on capitalist fashion modules. Wackie Ju is the embodiment of intersectional experiences depicted through the lens of a queer trans immigrant with Chinese philosophy as the backbone.
Andrew Treloar is an artist working between contemporary art, dance and fashion design on Wurundjeri land. He completed a Masters in Fine Art by Research in 2014 at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) at The University of Melbourne studying interrelationships between training and conditioning practices in dance and sport to generate artmaking processes. He has shown performance installations at West Space, Bus Projects and Kings Artist Run, which variously included multi-venue live-streams incorporating dance elements. Choreographic works include The Venusian Slip in collaboration with Harrison Hall, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Luigi Vescio, over two seasons, and Surprise, Surprise with Harrison Hall, commissioned by Lucy Guerin Inc. and The Substation. His design work consists of commercial and research-based work in fashion. His set/costume collaborations and consults with Jo Lloyd, Dancenorth, Marrugeku, Lucy Guerin Inc., The Australian Ballet and Chunky Move have been shown in festivals across Australia and internationally.
Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil is an award-winning fashion historian who works at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He began his career researching Australian design. His first thesis, ‘Designing Women’ (1920-1940) discovered a lost world of Sydney interior design by women (some lesbian) and gay men, and he stitched their contributions into Northern hemisphere debates. Later he examined the lost queer fashion world of eighteenth century English ‘macaronis’. Most recently he has completed a project on queer dress in Darlinghurst. McNeil has written for major exhibitions around the world including Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715–2015, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Fashion Drive. Extreme Clothing in the Visual Arts, Kunsthaus Zurich and Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story, Sydney Jewish Museum. He currently advises Alpha, a USA Foundation, who are preparing the first global show on queer art before 1930, on the Australia-New Zealand contribution. McNeil was awarded a UTS Human Rights Award in 2018 for his work with LGBTQI cultural communities.
