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Overview
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’. Lepou’s work is reflective of her heritage, beliefs and ability to work in the vā, the space in-between she inhabits; a space 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.
Eco Chic
Lindah Lepou made Eco Chic for the 2009 Cult-Couture Awards. The Cult-Couture awards, which combined fashion, music and dance, were established by the Manukau City Council in 2001 as part of the Southside Arts Festival, and ran until 2014. The awards provided a unique platform for indigenous designers and those specialising on one-off creations.
Lepou won both the 'Recycling Revolution' award and the Supreme Award with Eco Chic, which features a black drill base, embellished with rows and rows of black plastic, raffia ribbon. Lindah comments:
‘Eco Chic is part of my Asia-Pacific Cluster (including Bomber Kimono). This garment is responding to the Asian $2 dollar shops saturating the Pacific market with toxic rubbish, manufactured by cheap labour, and man-made materials that are polluting the Pacific ocean, with negative impact on our wild life.’
As a designer, Lepou has always prided herself in being able to make something out of nothing. For this gown, Lindah wanted to demonstrate how you could take a cheap material, such as plastic raffia, and through a combination of design skills and manual dexterity, transform it into a luxury garment. Under stage lights, the black raffia shimmers like silver, and its texture is akin to fur.
This ability to make something out of nothing, is a key part of Lepou’s philosophy as an artist and a teacher, and stems from her upbringing.
Acquisition History
In 2017, Lindah Lepou set out to burn a number of her works in order to let go of the past. Te Papa wanted to save this trailblazing fashion designer’s work and purchased Eco Chic and three other works.
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