Revealing Dress: Fashion as portraiture is a new exhibition that celebrates fashion as a visual language with the power to tell stories in ways words cannot.

Through the works of contemporary artists and designers, it explores the ways art and fashion harness clothing to tell stories using the shared language of drape, colour, silhouette and gesture. The exhibition features newly commissioned installations, significant loans, and runway looks direct from Australian Fashion Week.

While its themes are wide-ranging, Revealing Dress always returns to the body. Fashion is a relational art: it’s about garments animated by bodies, threads of culture and time woven together, and the act of seeing and being seen.

This is an exhibition for our current moment, a moment where we have never been more exposed. We are surveilled through social media and societal expectations. But fashion harnesses this visibility and allows the body to be a site of resistance and reinvention. It invites audiences to consider how we are seen, and what we choose to reveal about ourselves through the garments that adorns our bodies.