It’s a label that is loaded with meaning, not all of it flattering. Officially “diva” denotes a celebrated (usually female, usually operatic) singer but there’s an implicit accusation of petulance and self-importance beneath the deference. Let’s just say a diva is generally not the easiest person to be around.

DIVA is also the title of an exhibition opening at Arts Centre Melbourne this month. In its third iteration, after seasons at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and the Auckland Museum, it comes to us with an additional celebration of homegrown candidates, from Dame Nellie Melba to Kylie Minogue, Olivia Newton-John to Reuben Kaye.

From the international firmament, the show celebrates the likes of Maria Callas, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Jones, Cher and Rihanna. And it’s about more than the latter’s crystal-crusted pope robes or Kylie’s Padam Padam frock. Practically every good thing that’s happened to women (and by extension, men) in 200 years is also trackable in the exhibition. The show joins dots and plumbs all the ways divas have plugged into the culture of their time, annoyed the crap out of their peers and superiors and shifted social dials. How they did it, are still doing it – scandalously, outrageously, defiantly “unladylikely” – constitute DIVA’s delicious extra sauce.

The exhibition, being staged inside the arts centre’s new Australian Museum of Performing Arts (AMPA), is a gorgeous place for learning curves: crazy-beautiful to freaky-weird-in-a-good-way costumes and cultural flotsam left and lent by 70-odd “divine creatures” to the V&A, all peppered with little fragments of Herstory that accumulate in your head in that sneaky osmotic way of lessons learnt without you being aware you’re actually learning.

The local version’s “prelude” category showcases Aussie divas selected by Margot Anderson, head of AMPA’s curatorial team, in collaboration with the V&A. The task was not only to pick them, but to nut out if a distinctly Aussie version of diva-dom exists.

“I’m not sure we got to the nub of that,” Anderson says, “but there’s definitely a warmth, maybe a sense of humour, and a sense of not taking yourself too seriously that comes up a lot.”

Judge for yourself, is her advice. The Aussies make a fascinating list, bound for controversy as much for who’s out as who’s in: Jessica Mauboy, Kylie Minogue, Reuben Kaye, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, Peter Allen, Dame Joan Sutherland, Cate Blanchett, Marcia Hines, Dame Edna Everage, Olivia Newton-John, Meow Meow, Dame Nellie Melba, Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers and a dozen or so others.

Anderson went with “a big red frock” worn by Cheetham Fraillon to stand front and centre as a welcome to the Aussie exhibition. “Big Red” is the opera singer’s affectionate nickname for the eloquent shot shantung silk gown designed by Melbourne couturier Linda Britten for the singer’s performance at the opening of a First Nations wing of the National Gallery in Canberra. A recording of the Welcome to Country Cheetham Fraillon sang that day, her own composition, is piped around the gown. It is, she says, “exactly what I wanted when I met Linda, something symbolic, something emblematic of the heart of our nation”.

Its red chimes precisely with a sweep of land in central Australia. “I was flying to Alice Springs on this cloudless day,” Cheetham Fraillon recalls, “and this red dirt, these ripples and ripples of red dirt ... so recognisable. That was it.”

DIVA is the brainchild of Kate Bailey, a senior V&A curator who twigged a few years ago that divas’ sparkly blips on history’s timeline often coincided with significant cultural shifts for women. “So we wanted to look at how the diva was challenging the status quo and pushing boundaries at the time,” she says via Zoom from London. “Also, how the diva has been adapted and adopted as an identity.”

Bailey plotted divas’ blips and women’s social shifts on spreadsheets and Venn diagrams and evolved her own kind of “diva maths” in the process.

“Four waves of feminism, on a timeline, with all the social and political contexts,” she says. “Then, all the positive and negative things that were shaping [the divas] at those times, and the pushes forward and the pushes back, the backlashes ... and even how ‘diva’ becomes negative or positive as a term.”

Divas are adored as glorious or demonised as difficult. It’s a schism singer Marcia Hines had to consider when she was told the lovely mottled silk flutter frock she wore on the cover of her 1977 album Ladies and Gentlemen was picked and headed for the exhibition.

“Well they don’t call me [diva] to my face!” says Hines, whose 2001 compilation album was called, coincidentally, Diva. “I mean, I don’t walk past every reflection of myself and kiss it! But I do think the word ‘diva’ in Australia is totally different to what it is in America, where they’re going to be called queens, or legends ... not divas.”

International cabaret performer Meow Meow muses that the switching semantics of “diva” from divine to difficult is utterly explicable. “Having a low-grade tantrum or bad behaviour or being demanding or whatever; it’s about perfectionism,” she says. “That desire divas have to be better, more magical, transcendent ...”

Diva-esque demands can also be vital tools of a diva’s craft, “so you can absolutely give it all to the audience”, Meow Meow says. “You might need to demand silence in the day, or a bath in your hotel room but it’s not just, ‘Oh, she loves a long bath’, it’s more about how my muscles are so sore after hurling myself around the stage, or I basically need to not speak during the day so I can be in this kind of cocoon, hold myself in, then ... unleash on stage.”

Bailey slipped dozens of anecdotes into DIVA that recount, often in chatty snippets, how divas have been “difficult” since the glorious era of 19th-century European opera, to theatre, film and music scenes today. “Remember these are truly extraordinary people,” Bailey says. “They’ve such a strong sense of self, of vision, of attitude ... and [are] not afraid to challenge the status quo.”

A hundred years ago, for example, when women didn’t do that sort of thing, Dame Nellie Melba was negotiating her own contracts, Josephine Baker was thumbing her nose at racists and performing her hilariously unladylike skitter-galumph dance act, movie star Marlene Dietrich was dressing up as a man and once leant down to kiss a woman full on the lips, dancer Isadora Duncan was wafting uncorseted (gasp) across Europe in a slippery slip of Fortuny silk, and sultry Hollywood actress/producer Mae West was purring: “When I’m good I’m very good, when I’m bad, I’m better.”

For their screw-you exuberance, or for simply being “divine” but not to everyone, many were excluded or demonised or worse, while still managing to kick the needle forward on women’s rights, sexual agency, race relations, social and civil liberties, LGBTQI issues, climate awareness and diversity advocacy.

Cheetham Fraillon, for example, is one diva who knows the punishment for being perceived as divine by some, not by others in this fickle age of hate and social media pile-ons. “As a First Nations woman, as a member of the LGBTQI community, my very being is politicised by others,” she says. “I don’t go out there and say, ‘This is a protest’, but on stage, every time I perform, I’m bringing all the things that have shaped me as a human being. And I do feel a responsibility to those who will come after me, to make it less traumatic for them, to use music as a medium for understanding, to change people’s understanding of what is possible.”

Across history, divas leveraged their unique symbiosis with audiences to change minds, lift spirits, tap into alternative realities. “You can’t be just shocking or brutal, that’s just lazy,” says Meow Meow. “You have to go for all levels of intoxicating, never be didactic, but I do like to sing political songs while doing the splits! I want people to feel safe, but on the edge of danger, then it’s thrilling, that gasp of joy. It’s wonderful when you feel the audience with you, sort of astounded at how shameless you can be, the roof coming off, the orchestra behind you, and you’re channelling this communal thing, this otherworldly thing.

“That’s the art of the true diva: ‘Take my hand, come with me into this otherworldly place’ ... they’re vessels for connection with something bigger than ourselves, something more truthful, more heightened.”

Like many divas, Meow Meow is also a diva devotee. She regularly tours the world, costumes brooched or trimmed with mementos from iconic divas, including her first diva-love, legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt.

Meow Meow’s own spangled va-va-voom showgirl costume is a glorious little maillot of vintage-esque sequins, corsetry and spray of feathers created by designer Isaac Lummis for a London Palladium show. Its shapely corsetry deliberately echos the costumes of legendary diva Gypsy Rose Lee.

Kate Bailey split DIVA into two roughly chronological acts and half a dozen themes to make the joy of diva-dot-joining easy. Act One does divas’ early evolution: Roman goddesses, opera singers, board-treading showgirls, Hollywood movie stars. Act Two groups Bailey’s pan-phenomenal “trailblazers” and “shapeshifters” under the theme “Reclaiming the Diva”.

Some wacky disparities make sense seen through the lenses of Bailey’s cultural Herstory links and backstories. Maria “The Divine One” Callas’ luscious blood velvet gown, for her near-saintly performance of Floria in Puccini’s Tosca at London’s Royal Opera House in 1964, is a hip-wiggle away from Marilyn Monroe’s slippery black satin figure-sucking whip-fringed frock designed by Orry-Kelly for her role as innocent sex kitten in the 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot. That in turn is a million crystals and sequins to the left of Janelle Monae’s “vulva pants” frilled with a mille-feuille of meanings and three shades of pink for her Pynk music video in 2018.

Velvet gowns, va-va-voom bombshell frocks and vulva pants: DIVA’s range of aesthetic types is mind-blowing, as simple as Ella Fitzgerald’s groovy yellow jumpsuit, as spectacular as the fully foofed powder blue ballgown Lady Gaga wore to the 2019 Golden Globes. It’s also as complex as Rihanna’s thickly crystal-crusted “pope” robe and mitre designed by John Galliano for her 2018 Met Gala carpet walk.

Bailey’s Act Two is also where men and drag queens join the definition of diva. “This was all part of our exploration of the concept at different times,” Bailey says. “Whether it’s Elton John or Freddie Mercury or Prince or Peter Allen, they’re very much part of the story today ... the diva has evolved, become ‘beyond gender’.”

For Aussie cabaret artist Reuben Kaye, inclusion simply corrects a cultural glitch. “There have always been fabulous eccentric forthright talented people of all genders who deserved the term,” he says. “And now we’re on that journey, dismantling the patriarchy, the world’s loosening its stranglehold on the binary concept of gender ... It doesn’t matter what’s between your legs, if you can reach through the spotlight into an audience’s chest, hold their heart – ‘It’s gonna be OK’ – heal them for an hour, and send them back into the world changed ... you’re a diva.”

The exhibition snuffs any doubt divas can be dudes with costumes such as Kaye’s pink tailored-tux-slash-foofed-ballgown from his 2021 show The Butch is Back, and Elton John’s 50th birthday costume designed in 1997 by Sandy Powell, a volcanic metres-long flow of silver-white crystal and marabou feathers with a poodle-sized Spanish galleon ploughing through the lush curls of a towering powdered wig on the singer’s head.

DIVA was a sellout in both previous seasons and was “a no-brainer for our first show [at AMPA],” says Arts Centre Melbourne chief executive Karen Quinlan. It is, she says, “a deeply thoughtful and exciting exploration of the concept of the diva”.

Quinlan has ambitious plans for twice-yearly major exhibitions at AMPA, which now occupies a sizeable slice of Hamer Hall. The museum includes world-class conservation and photography labs, a curatorial studio, gallery space and high-tech archive for an eye-popping permanent collection of 850,000 costumes and linked items.

DIVA is one of those rare fashion exhibitions that “fleshes out” its otherwise silent subjects, a gobsmacker in its breadth, from classical goddess drapery to lush operatic swooners, to f----the-patriarchy T-shirts; the costume exhibition you have when you’re kind-of-really having a How Women Changed the World exhibition.

DIVA is at AMPA, Arts Centre Melbourne, December 11 to April 26, 2026.

Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is at the Malthouse Theatre until December 6.