Flax Tutu

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.

Flax tutu 

Lepou studied fashion at the Bowerman School of Design in Wellingtonm in 1992, and went on to enter the Benson & Hedges Fashion Design Awards, the country's premier fashion competition with Flax Tutu. She was a place winner in the Avant Garde section. Despite its name, Lepou actually made the tutu from ready-made pandanus mats. The utilisation and transformation of inexpensive materials was to become a hall mark of her career.

The following year, the award's organisers initiated an Oceanic section to the awards in response to the increasing influence of Polynesian design on New Zealand fashion.