Smoke signals
This transformative year saw fashion engage with hot-button issues to great effect – like New York-based label PH5, which, with Indigenous practitioners of cultural burning in Australia, took on climate change. By Alice Birrell.
the idea she put forward for her first collection as the new creative director of label PH5 was a risk. “It felt a bit like, ‘Oh, I’m starting new at your company. And I’d like to give some of the money away’,” she recounts with a laugh. She asked Wei Lin, founder of the New York-based knitwear label if she could give 100 per cent of profits from a calendar of its spring/summer ’20/’21
ZOE CHAMPION KNEW
collection to Firesticks Alliance, the Indigenous-led network fostering a knowledge of traditional land management via cultural burning.
It was January 2020, a hell of a time to begin a new endeavour, and the currently Sydney-based creative was, like all of us, distracted by the devastation wrought during a disastrous Australian fire season. “It was just such a huge part of my life in that moment and I couldn’t really think about anything else,” she says. “It felt like the right thing to do.”
Lin, who is based between New York and China where her family’s knitwear factory is located and everything is made, was sold. “I thought that would be a dream,” she recounts. Together they handed over their platform to women working in the alliance, who nurture knowledge of Country, and threaded their stories, quite literally, into the collection.
The personal aspect was in step with the label’s quest to delve deeper. “This season started off being very personal to Zoe, but that’s what people like about us and other small independent brands. Yes, the inspiration was about the 2019-20 Australian bushfires, but there have been bushfires happening on an unprecedented scale and frequency all over the world,” she says.