This article analyses Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker (2000) through performativity, postmemory and postcolonialism. The main character, Tilly Dunnage, returns to the fictional town of Dungatar in rural 1950s Australia to confront a traumatic past and take care of her mother. In doing so, she uses fashion as a means of shaping her identity, challenging the Australian outback status quo, and voicing her traumatic past. Her haute couture creations make the townspeople visible, but they do not mend the deep emotional wounds. Clothing in The Dressmaker serves both as material memory and as a theatrical element that reveals the instability of fixed identities. Ultimately, the article underlines that Tilly’s destruction of the town represents both the failure of superficial transformation and the radical potential of (un)dressing as a feminist and postcolonial act.
