LCC MEDIA RELEASE: Revealing Dress exhibition bares all

LCC MEDIA RELEASE: Revealing Dress exhibition bares all at Liverpool Powerhouse

This summer, Liverpool Powerhouse presents Revealing Dress: Fashion as Portraiture, a major new exhibition that explores fashion not just as style, but as story.

Revealing Dress brings together over 20 leading and emerging artists and designers to show how what we wear expresses who we are, revealing not our skin, but our inner lives.

Through every choice, whether deliberate or instinctive, clothing exposes our personal truths, cultural histories and emotional landscapes.

From runway garments fresh off Australian Fashion Week to new commissions by Australia’s most exciting designers and artists, the exhibition traces how what we wear reflects who we are and what we stand for.

Highlights include:

Fashion designers Grace Lillian Lee, fresh from Paris Couture Fashion Week, Alix Higgins, Jordan Gogos and Nicol & Ford
A playful, immersive Kids & Families Gallery, featuring “emotional cloaks” that invite all ages to explore feeling through costume, sound and play
Additional new commissions by Benjamin Akuila, Lily Golightly, Megan Hanson, Patrick McDavitt and Jacquie Meng
Key themes spanning heritage, surveillance, identity, and emotional transformation.
Liverpool Mayor Ned Mannoun didn’t miss the chance to embrace the exhibition’s flair:

“Revealing Dress is a bold reflection of where Liverpool Powerhouse is headed. As we reimagine the centre as a home for the creative industries, it shows how fashion and design can tell powerful stories that resonate across generations,” he said.

“Fashion is storytelling, identity, power, humour, and sometimes pure spectacle. This exhibition embraces all of that. With works direct from Australian Fashion Week and installations that let you quite literally step into your feelings, Revealing Dress confirms Liverpool as the place where Australia’s next great creative chapter is being written — and worn.

Our expanded Kids & Families Gallery is another game-changer. Now stretching across the east and west sides of the Level 1 galleries, the newly commissioned installation invites intergenerational engagement. It invites the whole family to immerse themselves in cloaks that explore different emotions through sensory and creative activities, sparking conversations about how we feel and how we express it.”

This exhibition is a declaration; Liverpool is the place where creativity doesn’t hold back. If fashion is a language, Revealing Dress is speaking loud, proud and perfectly tailored to our moment.”

Media Contact:
Alan Gale communications@liverpool.nsw.gov.au 0429 892 639

Fast Facts

Dates: On show until 19 April 2026

Location: Liverpool Powerhouse

Artist List:
Benjamin Akuila, Atong Atem, Cigdem Aydemir, Hannah Gartside, Jordan Gogos, Lily Golightly, Megan Hanson, Alix Higgins (in collaboration with Joan Banoit, Dan Harden and Gian Manik), Wackie Ju, Grace Lillian Lee, Patrick McDavitt, Jacquie Meng, Mia Middleton, Claudia Nicholson, Nicol & Ford, Nik Pantazopoulos, Alex Seton.

Highlights:
Runway garments from Australian Fashion Week with serious wow-factor

An immersive Kids & Families Gallery spanning both wings of Level 1

This new commission by Lily Golightly transforms the space into an immersive installation of sculptural cloaks, each representing a different emotion. Children and adults are invited to step inside these cloaks to explore emotions through costume, sound and play.

The installation will grow over the first months of the exhibition through a series of poetry and craft workshops, ensuring it is shaped by the creativity and expression of its participants, and becoming a portrait of community connection.

Key Exhibition Themes:

Heritage in Motion: Fashion as a living archive and tool for reshaping cultural narratives
Being Seen Through a Mask: Visibility, concealment, and self-styling in the age of surveillance
Muses and Slow Craft: Celebrating relationships, memory, and the labour of making
Redressing Power: Clothing as resistance, reclamation, and reimagined history
Emotional Enchantments: The magic of transformation and the moods we wear