La Bombe dress

This dramatic dress was successful in terms of both fashion and anti-nuclear protest. Lisa McEwan created La Bombe for the Benson & Hedges Fashion Design Awards in 1988, where it was highly commended in the After Five section. The Benson & Hedges and Smokefree Fashion Design Awards were New Zealand’s premier fashion design event, running from 1964 to 1998.

McEwan effectively channelled contemporary political and environmental concerns through a show-stopping and memorable garment. She combined the fashionable female silhouette of the late 1980s with an evocation of the terrible seductive beauty of a mushroom cloud sweeping up the body with acid rain diamantes falling down the tulle cape. McEwan recalls: ‘My garment, La Bombe, came out as the finale piece for the 1988 B&H Awards. The silhouette was of an atomic cloud, with black veiling used to give an air of mourning and foreboding, while diamantes signified acid rain (it was the 80s!). It was extremely well received by the audience... However, true to what I had been told, it was too extreme to win at the B&H’ (McEwan, 2017).

La Bombe channelled the anger many felt after the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985. It also celebrated New Zealand’s passing of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act in 1987.

McEwan recalls: ‘I had always been politically aware, being very involved in the Springbok Tour protests and other human-rights campaigns of that era. By the time of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985, I was a young parent, deeply concerned about the nuclear threat and incensed that a foreign power could inflict this act of terrorism in New Zealand waters. Many artists got behind the anti-nuclear movement in the following years, but I remember the Topp Twins being challenged as to whether singing a protest song could actually do anything to facilitate change. They simply replied that writing songs and performing was what they did, so they were going to use those skills and that platform to add weight to the campaign.'