Preparations for the 10th annual symposium are all falling in place and we will soon call for your enthusiastic registrations. In the meantime, it is a pleasure to announce our two keynote speakers.
Our first is Georgina White
Light Fantastic - a visual feast of New Zealand life on the dance floor
Philip Matthews of The Listener described Georgina White’s book Light fantastic: dance floor courtship in New Zealand as ‘an epic of historical picture research and fond memory’. The different modes of dress, along with stories of romance and heart ache, are a captivating component of the book. For her keynote address, Georgina will elaborate on the ritual of dress for the dance floor.
Georgina currently works at the Auckland War Memorial Museum as an Exhibition Developer.
Our second is Liliana Pomazan
Keen to continue to foster our positive trans-Tasman relations, our second keynote speaker hails from Australia. Liliana Pomazan is Senior Lecturer in the Fashion Program at RMIT University Melbourne.
Her area of expertise lies in the areas of Parisian haute couture and fashion design of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries from Modernism to Postmodernism.
In her keynote address Celebrating Fashion Frontiers she asks ‘Whatever happened to the ‘cultural cringe’, the ‘antipodean apology’, the ‘fear of failure’ factor?’ and brazenly ‘Who cares about the French, the Italians, the Americans, the Japanese or the Belgians?’ Instead she celebrates the ‘individualised, exploratory and non trend- based fashion practices’ which are flourishing on both sides of the Tasman.
Georgina and Liliana will kick off two full days packed to the gunnels with a rich array of papers exploring the worlds of both dress and textiles. A list of papers and speakers will be published soon.
A big thank you to everyone who submitted abstracts.