IORDANES SPYRIDON GOGOS

Jordan Gogos from

From set designer and stylist to furniture maker and fashion-label founder, every endeavour design man-of-the-moment Jordan Gogos touches seemingly turns to critical gold. But for the 27-year-old, who grew up an only child in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, it takes a creative village to raise a great piece.

At first glance, the minimalist aesthetic of his aluminium furniture (already a fixture in the boutiques of designers such as Dion Lee and Albus Lumen) seems the polar opposite of his maximalist appliqué clothing made from a mishmash of fabrics (vinyls, silks, polyesters and denim). But to Gogos, they both subscribe to his design ethos.

“My furniture is as complex as my clothing in the way that you don’t know how to use it per se,” he says. “You don’t look at it and go ‘that’s a table’ or ‘that’s a vase’. You actually have to question its intended use, where it exists in the world. It’s very non-binary.”

Blurring the line is nothing new for Gogos, who went to New York’s Parsons School of Design to learn furniture design, added a sculpture class, then ended up studying denim. “I’m not formally trained as a patternmaker. Everything for me is about material innovation and finding ways to merge fabric in new ways.” Hence, while colour and collaboration might be his fashion signatures, Gogos calls himself a material interventionist. Case in point, in his debut AAFW21 show, called Trojan Horse, “I had 25 different collaborators ... one might stitch and paint, then another artist might undo it and rethread it, then someone else might sew on top of it. That process, no matter what we tackled, translated as uniform.”

It’s not exactly a process that lends itself to commercial production, but Gogos is philosophical. “A lot of people are deterred from design because they’re

“WE NEED INSPIRATION A LOT MORE THAN WE NEED PRODUCTION OF NEW THINGS”