HOME ADVANTAGE As MercedesBenz Fashion Week Australia takes place this month, Vogue looks at designers inspired by an Australian point of difference.
As Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia takes place this month, Alice Birrell looks at designers inspired by an Australian point of difference.
There is an exuberant spread published in Vogue Italia in 1977 called “Australian Graffiti” that would have made Italian eyes pop. Edited by the late anomalous Anna Piaggi, it shows Australian designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson dressed up as a wattle and eucalyptus tree respectively. Arms akimbo, the two creatives in unapologetically dazzling get-ups beam from the page. With green and gold knitted wattle jumper sleeves flopping past her hands, Kee is captioned: “Fashion arrives from another hemisphere”. Piaggi may as well have written “from another planet”.
What was to Piaggi totally original, unseen in European spheres, was what garnered Kee a loyal and cool class of customers, among them Manolo Blahnik and David Bowie who, in 1984, fronted up to her Strand Arcade store in Sydney to buy a koala jumper. Seeing this editorial today, fashion-kind might feel a twinge of post-cultural squeamishness, but why should we? It’s spot on now.
In recent years, credible commentators visiting our shores have observed an inclination to emulate what goes on in the big four cities rather than look inwardly. Imran Amed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, says he’s seen rising momentum locally threatened by a desire to be like the others. “I felt like there was a lot of copying of ideas that came from collections in the main fashion capitals,” he says of recent visits. What works for Australian labels, Amed observes, is singularity. “In order to have an impact, you have to have something unique to say.”
Sun-drenched and spacious, Australia and its lifestyle is capable of inducing envy in the most hardened of fashion types. Those
with smarts capitalise on the fact this can’t be found elsewhere; buying Australian labels is buying a slice of our endless, dreamy beach stupor. Zimmermann has done it, and before them Robin Garland, whose swimwear was branded by The Age in 1975 as literally “inimitable”, owing to the complex pattern-cutting she created via locals-only knowledge of our amphibious lifestyles.
And there is a whole cadre of labels that cash in on our singular living conditions. Maurice Terzini’s Ten Pieces here deserves a mention for its creation of a favourite fashion term, a “moment”, in an empty Icebergs pool. Everything about it read Bondi; a loose, low-slung cotton collection of post-surf, post-swim, backyard drinks-ready basics. It was the attitude that spoke the loudest. The no-nonsense Australian mien is something that permeates the work of Josh Goot and, in a manner, Kym Ellery. Both cerebral designers, but both who have an effortlessness breezing through their collections season after season; Goot, his brass-tacks tailoring and essentials, and Ellery, fluttering hems and fluid gestural silhouettes.
But that very thing of being so far removed geographically from the fashion industry at large has made our designers focused. “Being away from the hub means we can be less influenced by it creatively,” says Tessa Macgraw, of the new label Macgraw. “We design best when we drive up the coast to our beach house with dodgy internet service and peace and quiet,” says Tessa’s sister and Macgraw co-founder Beth Macgraw. When designers resist subscribing to existing hierarchies adopted overseas, egalitarianism reigns. “Australia is a particularly forgiving culture. For instance, if I were to have stayed in Tokyo, I would
“THE INDUSTRY SEEMS TO BE A MAGNET FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE KIND OF QUIRKY AND CREATIVE”
expect to have trained as an apprentice not just for a year or two, but for a decade,” says Japanese-born Akira Isogawa. “I think Australians accept you for you, for what they see. You could be straight from college and you happen to have a great talent, and they can see it.”
Our designers are also curious and funny. Jenny Bannister drew on what at the time was far-away, exotic punk to infuse her singular creations with rebellion in the 1970s and 80s. In 2001, the witty Ksubi, then Tsubi, famously sent 169 rats down the runway to stir up the front row and spark talk about streetwear. Fashion is a channel like no other for our brightest creatives. “The industry seems to be a magnet for people who are kind of quirky, creative, nonmainstream individuals who are in places that are so far removed from the cultural capitals,” says Amed. In other words, our quirks can remain un-blunted by international trends.
2016 will be the first year MercedesBenz Fashion Week Australia has moved from April to May. It’s a timing that aligns with the international resort season and will show just prior to our overseas counterparts, capitalising on our ample inventory and reputation for good resort wear. “The opportunity for Australia to own the resort sector of fashion internationally can solidify Australia’s position as a fashion destination,” says former Vogue Australia editor-in-chief Nancy Pilcher.
What worked for Kee still applies. “There were those who followed the trends from overseas, but the core of Australian design came from the designers who had a unique approach,” explains Pilcher. “They are the designers who are still representative of Australia. It’s a specific market and allows buyers to figure it into their show schedules.” The new calendar date has the potential to lift our profile to another level. What we expect to see is us at our best: vivacious, funny, optimistic, open-minded, and not like the rest.