Australian fashion will be under the spotlight at a free public lecture organised by The University of Queensland's Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies on Thursday, May 18.
Dr Margaret Maynard of the University's Art History Department will discuss The Dress that Saved Sydney: Australian Fashion and the Global Arena at the lecture in Mayne Hall foyer, St Lucia at 5.30pm.
Dr Maynard said that journalist Marion Hume's rapturous pronouncement about Akira Isogawa's success at the 1999 Mercedes Fashion Week marked a supposed turn in the fortunes of Australia's fashion industry.
"Apparently all it took was 17 minutes on the catwalk, a few lengths of Australian cotton, some printing done in Sydney, some Melbourne zigzag machine embroidery and a few glass beads," she said.
Dr Maynard's talk will focus on what it takes to be a successful Australian fashion designer today. It will centre on recent style tactics in Australian fashion.
She claims these shifts as evidence of important changes in the nature of consumption, and are ways our culture is positioning itself to accommodate the global marketplace.
"Formerly predicated on self-conscious appropriation of vernacular and indigenous motifs, style pluralism has now replaced ?inspiration'," she said.
"International ?similarity' has displaced identity. My lecture explores some of the dramatic turns of fortune in Australian fashion and shows why style makers these days decline to assert their unmistakable Australianness!"
Dr Maynard, a senior lecturer in Art History at UQ, has written widely on fashion, most recently an article on the quest for "authenticity" in Australian dress in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture and an essay on fashion and its link with Aboriginal art, rethinking bounded notions of style in the Journal of Design History (UK). Following Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia, her latest book Out of Line: Australian Women and Style will shortly be published by UNSW Press.
The lecture, chaired by Professor Graeme Turner, is part of a lecture program supported by The University of Queensland Alumni Association.
Media: For further information Dr Margaret Maynard, telephone 07 3365 2960 Katie Connolly (07) 3365 7182, or Jan King at UQ Communications 0413 601 248.
Enquiries can also be directed to communications@mailbox.uq.edu.au
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