Kylie Minogue’s iconic hotpants displayed in new pop culture collection

Key points

  • The Arts Centre Melbourne has announced a new permanent performing arts collection at Hamer Hall.
  • With funding from both the state government and philanthropic donations, the collection will exhibit various Australian treasures, from costumes to personal celebrity notebooks.
  • The collection highlights Australia’s cultural heritage and the importance of preservation.
  • The public will be invited to visit the space through guided tours beginning in June 2023.

Kylie Minogue’s gold hotpants, Dame Edna’s glasses, and Nick Cave’s notebooks all walk into a room. This may sound like the set-up for a subpar joke, but this new public collection at the Arts Centre isn’t playing around.

In the depths of Hamer Hall, behind a secret door camouflaged among the walls, lays a trove of national treasures. Iconic costumes, accessories, props and personal belongings – all connected to celebrities and public figures deeply embedded in Australia’s cultural landscape – will all be presented as part of the new Victorian government-backed Australian Performing Arts Collection.

Dame Edna’s various glasses.Credit:Justin McManus

“We all have a story about many of the items in this collection,” says Creative Industries Minister Steve Dimopoulos. “These are Australian stories told by Australians, and through those stories we see ourselves – how we grew up, or the stories our parents told us.”

From June next year, guided tours will lead the public through a star-studded and permanent underground exhibition that includes one of Dame Nellie Melba’s intricate bodices, the original Hey Hey It’s Saturday Ossie Ostrich puppet, and entire Minogue costumes on mannequins modelled to the pop star’s own body.

The Creative Industries Minister meets his favourite exhibit, Ossie Ostrich from Hey Hey It’s Saturday.Credit:Justin McManus

Minogue herself was involved in the collection’s planning, which includes more than 1000 objects scaling her illustrious career such as the bedazzled high-heels she helped design for her 2011 Aphrodite tour.

“I am so thankful that with the help of the expert and passionate collections team, these items can be shared with generations to come,” the singer says. “It’s so exciting that fans, music and history lovers will be able to see some of them up and close and personal.”

Still, of the 780,000-odd pieces in the collection, Minogue’s tiny lamé hotpants still manage to steal the show. Gingerly placed upon on a pillow on a metal trolley, it would be relatively easy to pass them by. But these unassuming gold shorts – worn in the music video for her 2000 hit Spinning Around and often considered instrumental in Minogue’s comeback – are rumoured to be worth around $10 million, despite having been originally bought for only 50 pence at a British flea market.

“The hotpants come with a legend,” says Arts Centre curator Margot Anderson. “Kylie had worn them, I think, to a party, and then the night before Spinning Around was filmed she found them in her drawers. The rest was history.”

Kylie Minogue’s legendary gold hotpants from the Spinning Around music video.Credit:Justin McManus

Beyond the glitz and glamour of the collection itself, visitors will also be encouraged to peek into the Arts Centre’s first-ever conservation lab and digital collection photography studio which flank the exhibition.

“Arts Centre Melbourne holds the great responsibility of caring [for], preserving, and sharing this incredible state collection, which, I believe, is of national significance and also global significance,” says Arts Centre chief executive Karen Quinlan.

Samantha Hamilton, the Arts Centre’s head of collections, says she hopes the collection becomes a “must see” in Melbourne, offering a glimpse into the work required for curation, the performing arts, and conservation.

“I love working with collections because they connect us to humanity,” Hamilton says. “They show us how we’ve developed over time. They tell us stories about our diverse identities, and our social fabric. They provide insights into our technological advances, inspire creativity, and repositories of knowledge.”

Part of the state government’s $1.7 billion Melbourne Arts Precinct project, the new permanent collection will be the first facility of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Funding totalling $2.2 million (drawn from both the state government and philanthropic donations) has gone towards the creation of the conservation lab, internal exhibition corridor, and additional storage space.

“This is a labour of love,” says Dimopoulos. “Many of us have grown up on a diet of a lot of US and UK culture, music and performance. But we’ve also had really important moments in our history of Australian culture … the Arts Centre is opening up the vault.”

The Australian Performing Arts Collection opens to the public in June 2023.

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