Cocomono

Lindah Lepou is an award-winning artist, of Samoan and New Zealand descent, who works across music, film, costume design and fashion.

Over the last 25 years she has forged a reputation for her conceptually driven, one off garments, in which she combines Samoan and European influences, including her identity as fa'afafine. She has termed her style ‘Pacific Couture’.  Lindah Lepou’s work is reflective of her heritage and working in the vā, the space in-between that she inhabits; in-between genders, cultures, ideologies and worlds.

In 2022 she received the inaugural Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi “Toi Kō Iriiri” queer arts award in celebration of an outstanding artist or group of artists whose practice has a meaningful impact on the queer community.

Cocomono

Lepou won the Westfield Style Pasifika Supreme Award in 2005 with Cocomono. Celebrated for its hybridity, Cocomono is made primarily from coconut shell, and conceptually draws on the Japanese kimono.

Style Pasifika

Style Pasifika was founded by Stan Wolfgram of Drum Productions in Auckland in 1993. His aim was to provide Pasifika people with ‘a valued voice in their own backyard’. It ran until 2011. Style Pasifika played an important role in providing artists and designers, particularly indigenous designers and those who work outside the constraints of commercial fashion, with a unique platform to showcase their work.

Acquisition History

In 2017, Lindah Lepou set out to burn a collection of her work in order to let go of the past. Te Papa wanted to save this trailblazing fashion designer’s work and purchased Cocomono and three other works.