IN FINE FORM
Approaching a decade since he started his label, Christopher Esber has created the kind of world where women speak loudest. By Alice Birrell. Styled by Philippa Moroney. Photographed by Jake Terrey.
Approaching a decade since he started his label, Christopher Esber has created the kind of world where women speak loudest.
Christopher Esber is bemoaning the speed of technology. “I was so gobsmacked I couldn’t pull out my phone. And then my camera wasn’t being quick enough.” In an effort to capture a woman he’d seen on his way to work the morning we meet, it seems nimble smartphones don’t keep step with the creative tickings in his head. “She was wearing these satin trousers and a short, satin skirt over the top, and this weird print T-shirt,” he says, gesturing to his own chest. “I know this sounds weird but it had a crown on it. Then she had this little bag that said ‘Berlin’, and she seemed like a mum and it was just …” he trails off looking toward an upper corner of his design studio. “Sorry, what was the question?” he says, laughing. A self-described daydreamer, Esber dreams in real time. Contrary to the whimsy that will forever captivate in fashion, his mental meanderings are laser-focused on the end result. “I feel like there’s a lot of clown clothes happening right now and I don’t know what they’re about,” he says half joking, half serious, fixing his intensely dark eyes forward. “I don’t know if it’s just giving people the chance to wear clothes without having their own personality.” He’s discussing the abundant ornamentation and flounce that social media seems to favour for the obvious visual impact, the antithesis to his understated slant on femininity. “And where’s she going?” he continues, posing the question aloud. “It’s funny because you look at social media and that’s not real life. They don’t really need to speak because they have their clothes.”
Esber, nearing his ninth year of his eponymous label, is incisive and warm. Seated on a chair at the edge of the cutting table in his Redfern studio, there is a composure about him that could read as quiet and serious, but he is slyly funny. In a shortsleeved black shirt and shorts with black sneakers, he transmits a calm presence. Since the very beginnings of his label he has envisaged a kind of fashion that speaks in unison with the wearer, expressing what they want to, not explicitly what the designer has to say. He has reasoned throughout his career that women should shape fashion with their own experience.
“I like pieces that mean having a wardrobe that is a part of you. I’ve never really done a formal dress, like a moment, red carpet,” he says. Instead he is known for sophisticated everyday pieces with an Esber reduction – refined and reworked until a staple feels new to him. Everything is considered, down to hems. “For me, length is a really important adjuster of how something becomes more attainable, or easier to understand,” he observes, saying you rarely see floor-sweeping lengths, because that reads too much as ‘gown’. Incidentally, minis rarely pop up either.
With fashion critics zeroing in on designers who disregard a woman’s real life or proffer a narrow vision of how they should look carrying it out, Esber has an opportunity to build out his label bigger than before. At 31 years old, he naturally feels accomplished since his debut solo show in 2010, but not satisfied, a feeling he seems to have always had. “I remember I was so exhausted, a bit numb,” he says, recalling the moment after that initial runway. “I was almost happy, but I wasn’t. It was my first show, so I wasn’t sure if people were just being nice.”
Growing up in suburban Sydney, Esber was unusually decisive in his career choice from the beginning. He’s the youngest of three children – he has an older brother and sister with a nine-year gap between his nearest sibling – his parents having moved from Lebanon to Sydney before he was born. He knew he wanted to be a fashion designer from likely age 10 and definitely by high school. “My other two siblings are more academic, so I was kind of the black sheep. I was always drawing and watching shows,” he remembers. “Back then it was Tom Ford, Versace. All that was peaking in the late 90s, early noughties era.
“Everything revolved around clothing. It would be art class and I would turn it into fashion. That’s just what kept coming up.” His aunt, a seamstress, taught him pattern-making and cutting. It was the time of skirt suits and power dressing, which left an impact on him as he watched her unerring approach to creation.
“She cut without a paper pattern. That kind of fluidity and fearlessness to not be so pedantic influenced me in just being able to try things, and not be scared you’re cutting into this fabric that might be really expensive,” he says.
“By the time high school hit I kind of knew I wanted to have my own brand, and I was very set.” With the support of his family, he didn’t look back. He has worked hard, barely stopping for his own birthday, which happens to fall a few days before Australian fashion week.
Along the way he has collected accolades, including regional winner and finalist of the International Woolmark Prize in 2014, Vogue Italia’s Most Talented Designer Award in 2015 and consistent praise from critics. Last year he presented his autumn/winter collection in New York, with a view to target overseas markets increasingly. He is currently making four international trips a year.
Those first clothes, he can barely describe. “So horrible!” he says. “Everything didn’t have a zipper because I just couldn’t do them, so it was quite stretchy, ruching, which we still do. A lot of deconstructed T-shirt and tanks,” he says, though now knows his way around zips. He would pull apart second-hand clothing and put it back together, learning the construction and leading him to one of his most distinct calling cards: subtraction.
“There are so many clothes in the world. A shirt is a shirt. It’s all quite standard, so being able to subtract elements from those classic pieces I guess brings it new life,” he says, explaining the eye is drawn to what’s left of something when the rest of it is gone – say, the back of a blazer spliced out elegantly. Applying this principle to his spring/summer ’19 collection, knots form a figure eight on a sheath dress in soft peony and a keyhole is slashed open on the shoulder blades of a moss cotton sundress, lending a feeling of airflow. “I’ve always like things that are halffinished,” he says, mentioning Cézanne’s half-sketched portraits.
Indeed the joy of his clothes comes in the sensual tracing and revealing of the body, a hold- then-release sensibility or open-thenclosed duality. He frames, contains and sets free silhouettes in bias silk (his pants cut this way are much sought after) or a slubbed black fabric pinned to his mood board. He’s working on lace made in Switzerland with purpose-printed sequins, which he plucks from the wall and holds out. “That’s going to be in fall. It’s pretty cool.” Esber always uses colour sparingly, as with print, the latter being everywhere else when he started out in the era of McQueen’s digital images. Texture instead is the stand-in for overdone chromatics. “I think there’s something nice about a strictness to a collection, where it allows you to focus on that colour for the season.”
He’s working on shoes and hopes to introduce jewellery in coming seasons. Inspiration for the next collection came to him again in the everyday, albeit in Thailand. “I was in an area that was dedicated to fitness, the whole get-go. And there was a boxing area and I was just amazed by all these girls on the way to training or leaving, and there are braids coming out; wrapping, un-wrapping. It resonated. This idea of getting ready, doing something, and then stripping back,” he says. This time he managed to get pictures, but not without consequence. “I almost got punched!” he says with a laugh. The collection, no doubt, will have been worth it.