The Stage Where Craft Becomes Cosmos

Each year, Wellington’s World of WearableArt (WOW) transforms fabric, resin, and latex into something closer to theater than clothing. In 2025, the competition once again blurred the fragile line between costume and sculpture, myth and machinery. Eighty-five finalists from 17 countries competed for over $200,000 NZD in prizes, but the real currency here is astonishment.

WOW is no mere runway. It is a cathedral of spectacle where designers conjure entire worlds—cultural, spiritual, ecological—and then let them walk, shimmer, and breathe before an audience.

The Supreme Award: Spirits in Latex

This year’s WOW Supreme Award went to U.S.-based duo Dawn Mostow and Ben Gould for Tsukumogami, a vision that feels equal parts myth and monument. Inspired by Japanese folklore, where everyday objects acquire spirits after a century of use, the work reimagines the human body as a sacred vessel.

Two performers, lacquered in blue-and-white latex, resemble towering porcelain vases. Their heads sprout ikebana arrangements, flowers reaching outward as though carrying whispers from another realm. The piece fuses Japanese craft traditions with the sculptural rigor of contemporary design, turning latex into something that vibrates with history.

Mostow, who lived in Japan, channels lived experience rather than surface exoticism. Tsukumogami is not costume-as-decoration—it is costume-as-invocation, a spirit conjured on stage.

The Runner-Up: A Medusa of the Deep

Second place went to Fifi Colston for Meine Erste Liebe (“My First Love”), a marine phantasm where the body dissolves into jellyfish forms. The performer becomes an aquatic Medusa, with a globular headdress and a bell-like skirt glowing with delicate tendrils.

The piece is equal parts menace and tenderness, a reminder that the ocean’s creatures, luminous and strange, are both beautiful and perilous. Colston’s work reads as a love letter to the sea and a warning of its fragility—ornament and omen entwined.

A Global Tapestry of Narratives

Beyond the top prizes, WOW 2025 staged a planetary dialogue. Designers drew from folklore, climate anxieties, and the pulse of contemporary craft. The show demonstrated how wearable art has become a language of its own: garments as essays, silhouettes as poetry.

Here, fashion is not seasonal but eternal. It pulls equally from myth, biology, and technology, daring to ask what it means for a body to be both human and more-than-human.

Why WOW Still Matters

In a cultural moment oversaturated with “content,” WOW reaffirms the power of embodied spectacle. It proves that costume is not trivial but radical—an alchemy of material and imagination that can resurrect forgotten myths and invent new ones.

The 2025 edition reminds us that wearable art is not about adornment. It is about transformation. To wear these creations is to inhabit another world, if only for a moment—to live inside a metaphor that has taken on flesh and breath.