TALK: Sophie Knezic - ‘Peacock Aesthetics’: Grainger’s Towel Clothes, Gender Fluid Fashion & Performative Flair
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Join us to hear from 2025 Grainger Research Resident Sophie Knezic in our final talk for 2025. The Museum will be open from 5:30pm with the talk starting at 6:00pm. This event is also the keynote lecture for the 2025 Grainger Symposium on Music and Fashion.
Bookings encouraged, drop ins welcome.
‘Peacock Aesthetics’: Grainger’s Towel Clothes, Gender Fluid Fashion & Performative Flair
Percy Grainger’s early 20th century amateur activity of making clothes from towels (in collaboration with his mother Rose and wife Ella) was a sideline to his international career as a concert pianist and composer, but in their design and materiality represent a bold experiment with dress. This paper asserts that Grainger’s Towel Clothes should be understood as not a mere eccentric pursuit but a historically significant project of sartorial dissidence that challenged conservative codes of Edwardian masculine fashion. The Towel Clothes’ flamboyant style can be situated in a lineage of dandyism, bohemianism and androgyny, anticipating both the Peacock Revolution of 1960s psychedelia as well as the gender-fluid fashion of 21st century haute couture. Through the concept of ‘Peacock Aesthetics’, this paper reframes the parameters of the Peacock Revolution (Grazier, Paoletti), investigates gender-fluidity (Karaminas & Taylor, Barry & Reilly), and draws on theories of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari) and performativity (Butler). The Towel Clothes have also been the thematic pivot for my own experimental project of conceptual fashion that dovetails beachwear from the 1930s (the decade in which most of the Towel Clothes were made) with my own take on gender-fluidity and performative becoming.
Sophie Knezic is a writer and visual artist with a broad area of expertise in contemporary art. Her research specialisms include the metaphysics of transparency and temporality, experimental film and video, sound art, humour in art and a developing interest in the history of fashion and experimental couture. Her PhD Transparency, Translucence and the Crystallisation of Time was completed in 2015. Sophie’s writing has been published in Broadsheet Journal, Memo Review, Art + Australia and Art Monthly Australasia and she is a regular contributor to Frieze and Australian Book Review. Her recent publications include chapters in The Body in Sound, Music and Performance (Routledge, 2022); Humor in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); and the inaugural Juncture Exhibition catalogue (Linden New Art, 2024). Sophie is currently Associate Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA Art, University of Melbourne and between 2018 and 2022 lectured in Art History, Theory + Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University.