In Oh this archival Dior hat? at MARS Gallery, Scotty So builds a photographic series around a collection of vintage Dior hats dating from the 1950s and 1960s.

The project began during lockdown in 2020, when the artist started collecting the pieces online. As a child growing up in Hong Kong, hats had once functioned as a kind of shield — something to hide behind. Returning to them as an adult, So became interested in their opposite effect: how such objects transform the body into a stage for display.

Photographed in a studio setting reminiscent of mid-century fashion editorials, the works feature friends and collaborators wearing the hats without clothing, allowing the object itself to dominate the composition. The resulting portraits carry a strange historical ambiguity — somewhere between fashion photography and the compositional clarity of Renaissance portraiture. The hats sit high on elongated necks, almost like crowns.

Running through the series is the cultural theatre of the Melbourne Cup. Before moving to Melbourne, So knew the event largely through tabloid images of elaborately dressed racegoers — fascinators, cocktail dresses, high heels — gradually giving way to scenes of intoxication and collapse. Glamour tipping into disarray.

For the artist, those images are less scandalous than oddly celebratory. The moment when the carefully styled body gives way to gravity — heels in hand, dress crumpled in the grass — reveals a different kind of honesty.

Re-staged through drag and self-portraiture, the vintage Dior hats move between past and present, costume and artefact. They carry traces of another era’s ideals of elegance while becoming props for contemporary queer performance. In So’s photographs, the symbol of the upper-class woman is gently re-scripted — worn by new bodies, new identities, and new fantasies.