The emporium’s new clothes? The New Zealand-based ‘World of Wearable Art’ as a mobile urban imaginary

Abstract

In 1987 a young artist named Susan Moncrief first organized a ‘wearable art’ show as a means of publicizing a local art gallery located in the small provincial New Zealand city of Nelson. Both the origins of the concept (clothing as art) and its practical expression were very modest, but it subsequently became an annual event, growing in size and complexity and attracting ever more elaborate and ornate contributions. It is now officially designated as WOW, the World of Wearable Art, and features on government websites, attracting corporate sponsorship, prime ministerial patronage, and extensive media coverage and contributions from a dozen countries. In this article its development and trajectory is interpreted as mediated in and through its relation to the dominant urban imaginaries and cultural aspirations of Wellington and Auckland as, respectively, New Zealand’s political and economic capitals. For in 2005, the organizers determined that it had outgrown the infrastructural capacity of the location from which it had first derived. Thus, although Nelson now has a museum dedicated to the display of some of the works that have been featured over the years, the event itself has migrated to Wellington as New Zealand’s capital city, where it attracts an audience of around 35,000. In WOW, ‘globalization from below’ thus engages with ‘globalization from above’, via an event in which conceptions of the ‘local’, the ‘national’ and the ‘global’ are perforce both understood and contested.