Melbourne has an exhibition built entirely around Kylie's gold hot pants, and it's peak Australian pop culture

Melbourne now has an exhibition where Kylie Minogue's gold hot pants share a room with Helen Reddy's Grammy and a puppet named Ossie Ostrich, and it is the most Australian sentence anyone will write this year.

ENCORE! opens 16 September 2026 at the Australian Museum of Performing Arts, housed inside Hamer Hall at Arts Centre Melbourne, and runs all the way through to 9 May 2027. It marks 50 years of the Australian Performing Arts Collection, which holds more than 850,000 objects, and the show pulls together 50 of the best for one very shareable exhibition.

The hot pants, worn by Kylie in the "Spinning Around" video clip, are the headline act for obvious reasons. But the rest of the lineup is stacked. There's the dress Judith Durham wore performing with The Seekers at the 1967 Sidney Myer Music Bowl concert, still the biggest audience Melbourne has ever drawn. Helen Reddy's Grammy for "I Am Woman" is there. So is a personal visual journal kept by Nick Cave in 1987, a custom vest worn by Archie Roach, and the pointe shoes belonging to Ella Havelka, the Australian Ballet's first First Nations dancer.

Comedy gets its own moment too, with Dame Edna Everage's over the top Broadway dress and Denise Scott's nude suit sitting alongside costumes worn by Hugh Jackman and Olivia Newton-John. Circus history features a clown bike from the Holden Bros Circus and a 500 page Wirth's Circus scrapbook so heavy it reportedly takes two people to lift.

Arts Centre Melbourne CEO Karen Quinlan AM says the exhibition is "an invitation for visitors to relive those history-making moments that are keenly remembered, as well as a chance to discover remarkable Australian stories that until now were lost to time."

It's the kind of show built for a slow wander and a phone full of photos before you've even left the first room. With an eight month run, there's no excuse to miss it, but the hot pants alone are worth turning up for on day one.