WOW
From an American pair winning the Supreme WOW Award to Lincoln’s Cushla O’Connell taking out the Wētā Workshop Award for Outstanding Design and Aotearoa section, the 2025 World of WearableArt show in Wellington was everything weird, wild and wonderful.
Competing for a prize pool of over $200,000 across 25 awards, the finalist entries this year showed an “extraordinary level of creativity and technical skills” according to WOW Head of Competition Sarah Nathan.
“Up close, the intricacy and beauty is off-the-scale. You can feel the thought, the labour, and the heart behind every detail. There’s been exceptionally diverse storytelling across all entries,” Sarah says.
Supreme WOW Award winners Dawn Mostow and Ben Gould received the accolade for Tsukumogami, a tribute in latex to Japanese classical ceramics and the mythology of objects. Runner-up to the Supreme WOW Award was 30-time WOW finalist Wellingtonian Fifi Colston with her garment Meine Erste Liebe. Fifi says this will be her last WOW entry. Her creations have been a constant feature of the show since 1990. Judges described her garment as “a work that takes your breath away. A living archive of hundreds of years of artistic technique and a divinely composed ode to love, loss and art.”
Outstanding Design: Worn Landscape, Cushla O’Connell, Christchurch, New Zealand.
The Wētā Workshop Award for Outstanding Design, judged by Wētā Workshop founder and CEO Sir Richard Taylor was won by Cantabrian Cushla O’Connell, for her garment Worn Landscape that features a landscape image made from over 6000 up-cycled buttons. Cushla’s garment also placed first in the Aotearoa section.
