This story was also published in Your Weekend magazine

Lindah Lepou has a stately grace about her. It’s hard-won grace for sure, earned from carving out a creative career for herself as fa’afafine at a time when mainstream society was significantly less amenable to the gender diverse than it is today. 

We meet in Gisborne, her home these days. Why Gisborne? It’s certainly beautiful. I was only curious as to why someone of her calibre had made the recent decision to step back from a more metropolitan pace of life – in my maybe pretentious opinion, the natural environment of most queer creative pursuits. 

“I came here for transformation,” says Lepou, glamorous with her smooth head and lusciously long eyelashes. And from my own bag-eyed exhaustion with city-living, I have to admit; I get it. As we look across the water from The Blackhouse, a luxury lodge right on the coast, I can’t think of anywhere better to find respite and perspective on one’s personal milestones. Especially when those milestones are as trailblazing as Lepou’s. 

Lepou is the first recipient of the Arts Foundation Toi Kō Iriiri Award for an outstanding queer artist. She is most known for her work in fashion, specifically Pacific couture, but that is just the tip of the iceberg for an artist whose vibrant impact on New Zealand’s queer and Pacific cultures is something of an underground legacy. 

Lepou’s conscious effort to transform, also reflected in her fashion-couture work’s focus on manipulating natural materials, ties in nicely with the award’s name given by Green MP and rainbow academic Dr Elizabeth Kerekere. Toi Kō Iriiri relates to art that transforms, art that forces a shifting through discomfort towards greater synthesis - perhaps in acknowledgement of a diverse community nonetheless unified in a shared history of marginalisation and erasure. 

The Arts Foundation established the $30,000 prize, which comes with development incentives, and will be awarded annually to one lucky artist annually. Christchurch philanthropist Hall Cannon has committed to supporting it for the next 10 years.  The Toi Kō Iriiri award arrives not just as a national first, but maybe even a global one. 

“One of the things that excites me most about this award is the knowledge that there is no arts foundation globally that is funding an award specifically for queer artists,” says Cannon. “You see awards within queer spaces for queer artists, things like Glaad (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) in the US is doing that, but as part of our due diligence we didn’t see any national arts organisation providing recognition or awards for queer artists. It’s a real chance for New Zealand to lead the way here.”

Humble Beginnings

Lepou was born in New Zealand to a Samoan mother and Pākehā father. Soon after she went back to Samoa where she spent her youth - with a Hawaiian interlude on scholarship - circuitously ending up in Aotearoa again when she won a fa'afafine beauty pageant, which nabbed her a one way ticket at age 18. The fa'afafine artist makes allusions to difficulties growing up - things to do with family and religion, which she breezily disregards as in the past – and it’s obvious these difficulties have since paled in comparison to a life hellbent on establishing community and resources where there were, initially, none. It’s a throughline for Lepou, presumably common among queer and POC artists and the systemic disadvantage this entails. 

“I’m from very humble beginnings”, says Lepou, “which forced me to adapt and make the most of what we had.”

Arriving in Wellington in 1992 Lepou brought with her an interest in fashion, which she pursued by studying at Bowerman School of Design. She went on to polytech (now Massey) but withdrew after a few months, realising she was still in survival mode, and that academic pursuits were at odds with the moves she needed to make for her own resilience. 

“At the time there was a complete lack of support in the institutional and health sense. But underground in terms of a fa’afafine community, we all knew each other and we all looked out for each other. Keep in mind this was pre-internet.”

For perspective, LGBTQI+ are harrowingly over-represented in statistics around mental health - and that’s by today’s standards. 

If she was going to pursue anything Lepou realised she’d need a kinship system, which New Zealand at that time just wasn’t offering in any legitimate way. Thankfully, she decided to build her own support system, and Pure Funk was born. 

While prefacing itself as a collective of performers, and at their national peak coming to be known popularly as an R’n’B group, Pure Funk was first and foremost a sisterhood of fa’afafine queer and takatāpui individuals lifting each other up through a shared interest in music, fashion, and their unique and Pasifika take on drag. 

The rise of Pure Funk

Heading for Auckland, it was here Lepou and company doubled down on their unapologetic presence. The result was a notoriety, which has gone down in a lesser known history as perhaps New Zealand’s only gender diverse act - outside of the Topp Twins - to gain popular recognition at that time (even culminating in an appearance alongside The Exponents on a Coca Cola ad circa 1993). As Pure Funk there was of course the drag circuit at local gay bars, most notably Auckland’s Staircase, but Lepou is quick to point out the group had a fluid movement between straight and gay venues.

“In Samoa there was one night club and everyone went there, which is the epitome of what Samoan culture is to me, just really broad and inclusive. No-one really gives a shit about that other stuff my Western sisters and communities just get hung up on. So when I came back to New Zealand I already had an expectation that I belonged wherever I f…ing go.”

On the group’s groundswell popularity Lepou says: “Pure Funk was also distinct because some of us were original singer-songwriters. The performance of the group was broader than the traditional drag act, which was pretty much confined to lip syncing. Drag at that time was very Kylie Minogue dominant, whereas my group was more Janet Jackson and Salt-n-Pepa. The performance we introduced was a combination of our natural femininity and masculinity. We weren’t exclusive to gay clubs, we were also performing at hip-hop clubs.

"We were so unusual and mysterious a group, and the LGBT community at the time was just in awe of us because we had this freshness that our Pasifika and Māori sisters were resonating with, but also we had this sexy fashion element as opposed to drag-cabaret-costume look. We were significant because all of the incredible performers around us at that time were Pākehā-drag dominant, drawing from traditional white cabaret drag, and we weren’t.”

Generating buzz

Throughout Pure Funk’s existence, fashion remained a key component and Lepou found herself busy between performing and costume designing, which was necessarily freelance - necessary because the prejudices of the time made standard employment all but impossible for her. 

“When someone like me went into a recruitment office, someone who couldn’t blend, they more than likely wouldn’t get the employment because you didn’t look the part or you were dressing like a woman and wouldn’t conform to those codes. You ended up getting used to the rejection.”

Despite this she was able to independently generate buzz around herself by putting on fashion shows that were Pure Funk adjacent, building a craft, which she has refined all the way up until today. Outside of this and freelance costume design Lepou’s waxing talents manifested in several big wins in Style Pasifika (1993-2011) and Cult Couture (2001-2014), both fashion-focused competitions with an eye to platforming young and emerging Pasifika talent in the arts, as well as several of her couture pieces being included in an international WoW (World of Wearable Art) exhibit.

Lepou still holds the creative period of Pure Funk as massively formative though, giving her room to independently construct a visual vocabulary. It’s a practice that has since given the artist a litany of residencies and other successes, pointedly on her own terms - not the least of which is having several pieces of her couture work archived in our national museum, Te Papa. 

These archived works include an early runner-up entry from a Benson & Hedges fashion competition in 1994. Though coming in second, the piece is responsible for a new Pacific category, which judges deemed necessary after Lepou’s work exploded their limited assessment standards - a feat in itself. 

And all of this despite her mainstream detractors.  

“The fashion industry didn’t get me,” says Lepou. “They thought my only clientele would be LGBT and it was difficult for them to see me as a designer with a mainstream customer base. It was frustrating. So I had to adapt to those barriers along the way, not just as a performing artist but as a designer. During that process, as painful as it was, it was also very critical, because that was where my visual vocabulary was developed.”

Finding stability

Beyond this Lepou mentions the importance of basing everything she does in aitu and gafa. These are Samoan concepts of ancestor and whakapapa, respectively, and are crucial to the artist. She describes how she won’t even get out of bed sometimes (maybe hyperbolically) if the conditions aren’t right within this nexus. And for an artist whose front-facing identity of being both Samoan and fa’afafine has meant years of agile code-switching, the notion of anchoring her practice in a non-physical world has understandably been one about gaining firm ground amidst a historical indifference to queer lives. Finding stability in a world reluctant to give it. 

“My hope for this award,” says Cannon, “is that in 10 years we will have New Zealand’s 10 visionary leading queer laureates, and I hope that becomes both a sense of commonality between those people and a way to celebrate each other and lift each other up.”

Lepou admits feeling very emotional about this award, perhaps for significant acknowledgement of her achievements being such a long time coming. “It’s an honour to be the first to receive this award, in bringing that fa'afafine element,” says Lepou. “It really makes me think about where I sit in the community.”

This is perhaps telling, that for all our recent mainstreaming of queer and trans related issues the cultural difference of being fa’afafine is yet to gain respective ground in New Zealand society. The assumption of a cohesive rainbow community then is one that’s clearly still in development. Towards grounding difference in community then, Toi Kō Iriiri arrives just in time.