Wild Victorian

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 which 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.

Lindah Lepou created Wild Victorian for the Bridal section of Style Pasifika in 2005. The dress won its category, and her second entry, Cocomono which is also in Te Papa’s collection, took the Supreme Award.

Following the competition, Wild Victorian was worn by two Miss New Zealands to the Miss Universe and Miss World competitions in 2005 and 2006, as their national costume.

A play on the primness of Victorian fashion, the dress skims the wearer’s nipples, flouts Victorian norms, and is worn without shaping petticoats for a wild look.

While utilising woven pandanus mats to make Wild Victorian, Lindah sees the garment as representing her `more introverted, contained Pākeha side, which she can only trace back to the Victorian period. Lindah has woven black flax woven into the bodice in a grid pattern, to symbolise the notion of being boxed in. As her condition reveals, however, she is unravelling.

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. As Helen Clark stated in 2004 when she opened the event as the then Prime Minister:

‘In the 11 years since Style Pasifika first began it has become a uniquely New Zealand fashion, cultural and arts event. It draws together all the influences and elements which make up our community and presents them in an immensely entertaining and accessible way. It has done an enormous amount to promote young designers, artists, musicians and dancers and their work, which has grown in strength and confidence and originality each year. When you go to a Style Pasifika show you know you couldn't be anywhere else in the world but New Zealand.’ (1)

References

1. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0409/S00022.htm