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SYDNEY - It's been a turbulent week for the Australian fashion industry.
Cross-dressing, store riots, black market on-selling, misuse of alcohol... there's been no end to the madness.
It all started with a revelation that rocked the dinkum Aussie bloke to the core. That's the beer-swilling, footy-watching character in the singlet and shorts, oblivious to what those city slickers are parading around in.
Wait for it. Sydney men are buying women's jeans in their droves.
No joke. Baggy is out. The new trend was confirmed very matter-of-factly by leading fashion labels in the past week.
"We're finding lots of blokes buying and wearing our skinny, stove-pipe style as they've found it hard to find jeans that tight and that comfy on the men's racks," Sarah-Jane Clarke, of leading Australian denim label, sass & bide, told the Sunday Telegraph.
"The blokes tend to be super skinny guys who like the comfort factor, probably because there is extra lycra used in female styles."
Oh dear. You can hear it now. "Strewth, mate" as half a pint of Toohey's New goes tumbling to the floor.
Kieren Bird, of Cult, said his Bondi Junction store sold at least 20 pairs of women's jeans to men last week.
"Guys who are normally a size 30 in men's jeans are grabbing a size 10 in the women's and away they go," he said.
Apparently those fashion-conscious Italians are to blame. Leading labels say the latest trend began somewhere near Milan but insist it isn't just a fad. They reckon the style never really went out of fashion.
Fashion gurus at the Telegraph tell us the trend started with the stove-pipe pants in the 1950s, continued with Buddy Holly and the Beatles, through the decades with Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart and into the 1980s with the late Australian rock legend Michael Hutchence.
But the rush of men elbowing bemused women aside to get to the jeans racks was nothing compared to the mayhem that hit other Sydney shops this week.
Paul McCartney might have been partly responsible for this tight pants carry-on, and for causing a frenzy among Aussie girls in the 1960s, but his daughter Stella's popular fashion label whipped normally demure Australian women into a similar state on Monday.
Security guards manned the doors of fashion chain Target as things got tense. In central Sydney, shoppers flocked to form queues for some of Stella McCartney's newly imported wares, manufactured in China, that were a steal at less than $A200 ($NZ229).
As opening time neared it got nasty and fists flew as one woman jumped the queue and security guards raced into action. Others were smarter and reportedly paid people to stand in line for them.
When the doors were flung open it was akin to standing in front of the Melbourne Cup starting gates. Clothes disappeared from the racks in record time and even the mannequins cowered.
"We didn't go crazy, it was organised chaos," one shopper calmly told the ABC later, arms laden.
It soon emerged there was a method to the madness of some.
The next day Stella McCartney items flooded internet site eBay, with trench coats that sold for $A199 being bid up to $A499.
Then things just got weird thanks to the good people of far-flung Perth.
For those wanting to go 'outside the square' to make a fashion statement, Western Australian researchers announced they have grown a dress from the bacterial skin that forms on top of "off" red wine.
The cotton-like cellulose creation fits as snugly as a second skin, University of Western Australia researchers Gary Cass, Donna Franklin and Alan Mullett told AAP.
The trio grew the dress as part of a collaborative arts and science project called Micro'be, designed to use science to convert wine into a cellulose product.
Mr Cass, the team scientist, said the ultimate goal was to produce a wearable seamless garment that formed itself without a single stitch.
"A non-hazardous, non-pathogenic bacterium, five microns in size, produces this material, which is more like tissue paper than cotton," Mr Cass said.
The inspiration happened after he noticed a skin-like layer covering a vat of wine that had been contaminated with bacteria.
The trio hopes the discovery could mark the start of fabrics fermented by living microbes entering the $A229.5 billion per annum Australian fabric manufacturing industry.
How close they are to a range of skin-tight women's jeans for men was uncertain.
- NZPA
