For all the spectacle of WoW, Alex Casey couldn’t tear her eyes off Christopher Luxon in the front row.
The best thing about the World of Wearable Art is that the show begins long before you walk through the doors of TSB arena. Even hours before the opening night gala, we made a fun game of spotting WoW enthusiasts among the already audaciously-dressed people of Wellington. Glimmers of the spectacle to come were teased in flamboyant matching luggage sets, spiky purple hair and the endless sequin chiffon of Augustine by Kelly Coe.
When we arrived at the venue later that night, chrome beekeepers were sweeping giant nets through the bustling crowd. Groups of women lined up to have their photograph taken with an Eyes Wide Shut, Mad Hatter type fellow, and someone thrust a flier for a “phenomenal” Taylor Swift Eras Tour raffle into my hand. A man in a studded blazer over a T-shirt emblazoned with a giant gold set of teeth, looked pensively across the room at a bra made of diggers.
In the glowing violet light of the VIP pre-drinks, complete with lanyards and tiny salmon-topped morsels, I learned an important linguistic lesson from the WoW multiverse. After asking a WoW representative how they manage to transport all the costumes without them getting munted, she gently corrected my choice of language. The dancers, singers and acrobats performing in the show wear the costumes – what the models are wearing are the garments.
The costume/garment distinction sent us into a frenzy almost immediately, creating a fun new sorting system not unlike thunder/lightning or man about town/helluva town guy. The dichotomy would stay with us for the entire weekend in Wellington. Night ‘n Day strawberry jelly? Costume. Night ‘n Day strawberry mousse? Garment. Cuba Street pigeon? Costume. Zealandia Takahē? Garment. Bowen House? Costume. Beehive? Undeniably garment.
Speaking of Beehive, as we were filing into TSB, a woman in a faux-fur stole bowled past me and knocked my drink down my dress. Costume behaviour for sure, but the collision slowed us down just enough to pass the side entrance right as Christopher Luxon was ushered in by Secret Service, flanked by wife Amanda and daughter Olivia. Luxon moved at pace, not stopping to pick up a blank piece of paper to write his dreams on, nor a holographic rabbit mask.
We were seated in a block behind the VIP tables, among such glittering celebrity guests as Gerry Brownlee and Nick Smith. Metres in front of us, I watched Christopher Luxon take his seat at the table positioned right at the tip of the arrow-shaped stage. Two giant anthropomorphic furry chairs with enormous bottoms wandered among the VIPs. The chrome beekeepers were using their nets to collect people’s dreams and delivering them into a suitcase on stage.
“Dream catchers,” the man behind me clarified as I commentated aloud. “I thought they were beekeepers too at first.”
A man dressed in a bold cloud-patterned suit and matching bowler hat took his seat at the end of our row. At this stage, it was truly impossible to tell who was garment, who was costume, and who was just a plainclothes civilian letting their freak flag fly. But after the lights began to dim and the suitcase containing all our dreams (not Luxon’s) started to dramatically smoke, the man arose from his chair and started to sing – we had a cast member among us.
As the show began with performers flying through the air and the jaw-dropping garments working the runway, I felt daunted by the task of reviewing what I witnessing. Perhaps we do not yet have the language, as a species, to properly communicate the sheer scale, proud extravagance and stratospheric creativity of WoW. “Creativity is the birthright of all people, and the lifeblood of every place,” CEO Meg Williams would later say on stage. “Ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”
Here are just a few choice no-context phrases from my notebook below:
Met Gala coffee filter
Octo-chook is gyrating
Lady Gaga Glade plug-in
The sparkliest thing I ever seen
Wheelchair in the sky!!!
With each shining creation to take the stage, our gaze always returned to the back of Christopher Luxon’s shining head to try and gauge his reaction. Given his willingness to “defer” on the arts and music in schools, I wondered how he might cope with a night spent watching a stylized blowfly strut the runway to ‘Watermelon Sugar’, or a ballet dancer in bondage twirling around an undulating piece of filo pastry on legs, or a simple steampunk saxophonist playing the blues.
As a dancing caterpillar with an anus for a face did a jovial jig to enormous whoops and applause from the VIP section, Luxon remained stock still. “He doesn’t give a shit,” whispered my plus one. The atmosphere at WoW encourages lots of cheering, gasping and clapping, to the point that it is almost an impressive feat to remain totally motionless. To his credit, I didn’t see him look at his phone once. Nor did he appear to sip a single drop of water. Always one to embrace viral trends, Luxon was very much raw-dogging WoW.
During the Aotearoa section, things got more interesting. A roopu comprised of students from Wellington East Girls and St Patricks performed songs in te reo Māori, including a local pop anthem that caused many pennies to drop across the mighty TSB. “Is this… Lorde’s song,” muttered one woman behind us. “This is Royals… in Māori,” her friend replied. “It’s nice.” Luxon, fresh from cutting $30 million in te reo teacher training, appeared to be playing statues again.
His position at the tip of the arrow-shaped stage felt particularly pointy as the entry ‘Hinetekaputi’ approached. A dress made entirely from recycled teabags in 1840s colonial style, the piece de resistance of the garment was the long train, revealed to have the Treaty of Waitangi emblazoned on the underside. As the model hoisted it proudly into the air like a sail to a smattering of applause, the roopu sang “we will fight forever to be free.” Meanwhile, Luxon was giving Weekend at Bernie’s realness.
Signs of life returned when a fake Fred Dagg came into the spotlight and cracked a jape that the stage was “a bit of a step up from the A&P show.” Luxon relaxed his shoulders a bit, and even delivered something like a smile as ‘Slice of Heaven’ (English version) reverberated through the arena. Back on track indeed.
The trippiness escalated as we moved through the sections. The Crazy Curiosities of the Creature Carnival and Avante-Garde categories boasted everything from long sleeves dripping with eyeballs in ‘Murderer’, to haute couture road cones in ‘Curves Ahead’, to a tentacled exotic dancer known only as ‘Gigi the Wyrm of Spinelesque’. With 400 people involved in the entire production, there’s no doubt that WoW is the single most dazzling event of the calendar year.
Somewhere in the middle of the creature carnival, amid the dangling chandeliers and “imagination kitchen” circus tent visuals on screen, Luxon and his lackeys disappeared into the darkness. A while later, during the awards ceremony hosted by radiant friend of The Spinoff Noelle McCarthy, he reappeared on stage to a quiet boo from someone in our row. His fingers seemed completely glued together across his front, unsticking only to hand out the Supreme Award to ‘Curves Ahead’ creator Grace DuVal.
Later that night, he would post a photo from the stage to his Instagram. ‘Curves Ahead’ fills the right hand side of the frame, an imposing and feminine God of Rebirth meticulously crafted from bright orange vinyl signs, road cones and plastic barrier fencing. The figure, a testament to unbridled weirdness and creativity, towers over Luxon. He is wearing a dull dark blue suit and sadly appears to have glued his hands together again. No prizes at all for guessing who is garment and who is costume in that scenario.