World of Wearable Art facts for kids

TSB Arena WOW - front entrance 2022

Susan Holmes creates amazing wearable art pieces. She has won 19 awards from WOW competitions!

The World of WearableArt (WOW) is a super cool competition where artists from all over the world create amazing clothes you can wear! It's an international design competition that gets entries from more than 40 countries each year.

Judges look at how strong the art is, if it's safe and comfy for people to wear, and how awesome it looks on stage. About 60,000 people come to watch the show in Wellington, New Zealand, over three weeks. The main show in 2020 had to be cancelled because of COVID-19, but there was a special exhibit instead. The big show came back in 2022.

The History of WOW

WOW started in Nelson, New Zealand in 1987. It was created by a person named Suzie Moncrieff. The very first show was small, with only 200 people watching at the William Higgins Gallery.

In 1990, the show moved to a bigger place called Trafalgar Centre. By 2005, the competition had grown so much that it was too big for Nelson! So, it moved to Wellington, where it is held today. Suzie Moncrieff's sister, Heather Palmer, helped run the competition for many years. In 2022, Suzie and Heather sold WOW to Hideaki Fukutake.

What Was on Display

For many years, there was a special place called the World of WearableArt and Classic Cars Collection. It showed off some of the amazing outfits from the WOW Awards Show. It also had a collection of about 140 classic cars!

This exhibition first opened in Nelson, New Zealand in October 2001. Sadly, it closed in May 2020 because of problems from COVID-19. The car part of the collection stayed open on the same site. It reopened in August 2020 as the Nelson Classic Car Museum.

Images for kids

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  A classic 1936 Pierce Arrow car.

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  A classic 1964 Gordon Keeble car.