Cakelaw's Travel Tales

The National Gallery of Victoria (Ian Potter Centre) is currently hosting an exhibition called 200 Years of Australian Fashion.  It features fashions through the last 200 years in Australia, from the seemingly child-sized gowns of the late 19th century (people must have been small then!) to the present day. It was interesting to see how once, Australians relied very heavily on European influences in clothing, regardless of its suitability to our climate, but over the years, have moved away to clothes than reflect our climate,  our lifestyle and our national identity. These images feature a few of my favourites pieces from the exhibition - I hope you enjoy them too.       200 Years of Australian Fashion National Gallery of Victoria (Ian Potter Centre) Federation Square Melbourne VIC 3000

Recently, I went with my friend Sandra to the Andy Warhol - Ai Weiwei Exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.  These two artists were paired because of a number of parallel factors in their lives - New York, China, cats, photography and modern art. There were plenty of familiar Warhol works to see, like Liz:   and Elvis:   vodka:  and Campbell's soup cans: I also learned that Warhol loved cats and had many of them, all of which were called Sam: From Weiwei, there were several interactive displays of balloons that were blown about by a fan as you as you walked through them: There was also a room full of photos of bunches of flowers that Weiwei over the course of two years or so had put in the basket of a bicycle outside of his Chinese apartment in protest at being monitored by the authorities: and a dazzling display of metallic bicycles: One of my favourite parts of the Exhibition was a room that was all about cats - ostensibly