With the most important event on the fashion calendar – aka the Met Ball – fast approaching, camp is in the air in New York. And what could be more camp than a Wizard of Oz-themed, fashion-fuelled, karaoke-a-thon, as thrown by conceptual NY collective Vaquera?
Taking place at the city’s MoMa PS1 this Sunday, the label presented a wildly original event which sat somewhere between an abstract play and a concert, which aimed to dismantle and explore the relationship between fashion and performance, and ultimately blur the line between the two.
The collective are renowned for creating unique narratives throughout each of their NYFW runway shows – just take their AW19 presentation, in which they imagined the life of a bougie, well-connected woman gazing out of her Central Park apartment, and turned Regency-inspired furniture into high fashion looks for example.
This time around, the label drew inspiration from cult 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, as well as hit Broadway musical Wicked. Each character, including Dorothy, Toto, and the Cowardly Lion was given a Vaquera twist, with the label creating unique, conceptual looks – as styled by Dazed’s Emma Wyman – for each.
But while the protagonists might have been familiar, the overarching theme was totally new: given the whole performance centred around karaoke and the kind of booth we’ve all found ourselves screeching in at 3am at some point or another. The reason for this? “Karaoke is the ultimate evolution of the amateur dramatic society, the subterranean booth a stand-in for the village town hall, screaming into the mic the modern soliloquy.”
Check out the gallery above.
