At Australian Fashion Week, a surprising collaboration highlighting the power of shared knowledge and identity politics places concept-driven fashion design back on the agenda.
It’s easy to paint an entire nation with a single stroke of a sartorial stereotype. In New Zealand’s case, that stereotype is black. Yes, we have
When it comes to defining the concept of Australian style today, we’ve seen several iterations over the years.
It’s the sophisticated elegance of the late fashion doyenne Carla Zampatti and the thigh-grazing hemlines and cut-out glamour of Christopher Esber and Alex Perry. It’s the bohemian spirit of Sass & Bide’s Heidi Middleton and Sarah-Jane Clarke. It’s the progressive designs of Josh Goot, Kym Ellery and Dion Lee — promising, bright young things who’ve flown the flag for Australian fashion internationally with varying degrees of success. It’s the expressively vivid handiwork of Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales from Romance Was Born, Jenny Kee and Lisa Gorman.
Sometimes you’ll find the best interpretations of Australian fashion are born and bred outside the nation’s own borders. At Australian Fashion Week this week, two New Zealand labels on the official schedule — Maggie Marilyn and Wynn Hamlyn — have found the sweet spot in a notoriously cliquey town.
Both brands have cornered the Sydney market by including things in their collections like saturated colour, breezy prints and body-con dresses, which fit nicely within the Sydney set’s general wardrobe formula of a centre-part bun, oversized blazer and a pair of jeans and heels — a sharply minimalist, ‘clean girl’ aesthetic that speaks to the nation’s generally sunny disposition and obsession with wellness.
According to an Australian journalist at the opening ceremony Welcome To Country on Monday, the Wynn Hamlyn show was being touted in industry circles as one of the week’s top tickets, a testament to how designer Wynn Crawshaw has managed to expertly create a perfectly seamless trans-Tasman look that appeals to both markets. Launched in 2015, the brand has evolved from its early days as an endearing, off-kilter label into one that feels closer now to Australian than New Zealand aesthetics.
Looking around at the show’s attendees, the brand has (perhaps inadvertently) shifted its attention squarely to the gaggle of mostly hot 20-something Sydney creatives who congregated at the brand’s irreverent show at the Hyper Carting Carpark Arena in Moore Park’s Entertainment Quarter. Despite the severity of the styling, what emerged was a New Zealander’s romantic, crafty take on contemporary fashion for an upwardly mobile Australian market.
Besides these two New Zealand perspectives, the schedule also included a range of designers who create garments that infuse the stories of migrant creativity in Australia, including the brilliant Assyrian heritage of designer Nathaniel Youkhana and Saudi Arabian-born designer Yousef Akbar.
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Another stunning convergence of cultural and artistic minds came via the highly anticipated collaborative effort between 27-year-old multidisciplinary designer Iodanes Spyridon Gogos aka Jordan Gogos and one of Australia’s revered fashion designers, Akira Isogawa.
While the week’s schedule was scant on established names, Isogawa’s inclusion was a welcome return for the 59-year-old Japanese-Australian, this time sharing the headline limelight with Gogos and his other 60 collaborators in a show and collection that offered a new way of considering what it means to be a working fashion designer in Australia today.
“My collaboration with Akira built over time and trust,” says Gogos. “The idea was never to do a show but to learn, understand, discover and connect. Because of his years of experience and iconic fashion history, I wanted to meet and truly understand him and his skills. After months of going through his archive, books and stories, it just organically evolved into a collection underpinned by his more than 30 years of experience and fashion looks.”
The Powerhouse creative resident has become something of a drawcard since his debut show at Australian Fashion Week in 2021, merging the craft of furniture design with fashion and art for an entirely new language that speaks directly to the type of conceptual-driven fashion an overly commercialised, transactional fashion industry is desperate for right now.
“In the beginning, you have a very complex relationship with yourself as an artist because you have an idea of where you want to see your work go or how you imagined it,” says Gogos.
“When working with someone who is so established, there is always that kind of factor of realising who you’re working with after the fact. I think it’s important to put their accomplishments to the side in the process of creativity because you don’t want it to affect the end result. I focus on a personal perspective of just being someone’s friend in that creative process.
“However, in saying that, I also want to be aware of their accomplishments because I do believe it is important to understand where your collaborator (in this case, Akira) comes from; his wins and his rich story, because fashion reflects time. When you bring something from an archive to present day, you can’t duplicate it.”
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It’s a Warholian approach to design that offers an alternative option for designers to merge sustainability with art and fashion, with Gogos using his compressing technique to deliver a new way of recontextualising fabric.
“I think we continue to evolve and explore our individualistic point of view. It would be tremendous to see other designers embrace sustainability as well,” says Isogawa, who was named by the Australian Fashion Industry Awards as a Designer of the Year and Womenswear Designer of the Year in 1999.
“Aside from Jordan’s fantastic creativity,” adds Isogawa, “I respect the sustainable practices he employs in producing textiles from remnants and recycled and discarded fabrics. My last collection, ‘Fragmented ‘21′, was inspired by sustainability. I’ve continued designing garments using upcycled, reworked and embellished pieces and textile remnants.”
“The wasteful practices in the fashion industry are simply unsustainable. We have to employ new practices to upcycle remnants, fabrics and garments that would otherwise end up in landfill. Through creativity, more designers are now giving new life to wasteful materials by transforming them into textiles and garments. This trend will only accelerate.”
Gogos agrees that the concept of sustainability is a constant work in progress, and one he has embedded into how he contextualises his designs. His collaboration with Isogawa is another example of how the fashion industry can actively work together to combine resources and ideas: working with Isogawa’s fabrics to fashion a new layer of identity while paying respect to Isogawa’s recognisable craft techniques, including beading and origami practices.
“I think the main thing about sustainability is that rather than being literal, it is always a work in progress. There are universities and degrees where you can study sustainable practices, and while academia can push something so far, there are a lot of areas of study that require you to physically make in order to run into real problems — and then create solutions for them,” Gogos says.
“For example, when using my domestic compressing machine, people would say it could only take a certain amount of fabric, but everything they told me I couldn’t do, I did. I guess pushing against these ideas actually contributes to the aesthetic of work and more sustainable outcomes, which I thought was really cool. Sustainability, for me, is also very much driven by trainability. I’ve always tried to produce work that is not just about the one piece and the effect of that one piece but also how it affects others on a larger [scale].”
But it’s also Gogos’ openness to learning from those that came before him that has helped shape a much-needed conversation between established and emerging names. Aside from his union with Isogawa, Gogos previously collaborated with another like-minded Australian fashion hero, Jenny Kee, known for her vibrant Australiana knits and her creative partnership with fellow designer Linda Jackson. With an inclusive approach to creating, Gogos is singlehandedly reframing the future of Australian fashion in the process.
“One thing about collaboration is that it makes me equally excited as it does anxious,” says Gogos. “Collaboration, to me, is this 50/50 thing in physical form and through dialogue. I think informal dialogue is more important than physical making because producing something in the real world does not have the same meaningful impact as dialogue. I am constantly thinking about how I can formally collaborate but also have those organic moments of dialogue that are so special. It also references this kind of emotional tactility that is quite personable, which, again, comes back to my desire for connection on a personal level.”
“Collaboration can manifest in multiple ways,” continues Gogos, “like my ongoing partnership with Glenfiddich, where I collaborated with Ross [Blainey, creative collaborations lead for Glenfiddich] to create a bespoke textile for the show and their latest campaign. This year, my show also had the presence of some fantastic collaborators like Jo Morton, whose knitting skills were displayed on the runway using pre-existing yarn; fashion and multidisciplinary artist Clair Helen showcasing their one-of-a-kind lightweight sheer fabric, which was brought to life with large-scale metallic paints; artist Brittany Wyper, who illustrated two unique prints; emerging designer Amy Baran, with two digitally printed garments and screen-printed accessories; and artist Nell, who created 50 bespoke buttons, utilising my brand’s Trojan Horse as inspiration.”
With so many international perspectives lending their ideas and voices to what constitutes Australian fashion today, the other integral part of unpacking this inquiry is ensuring First Nations voices are finally prioritised. Embarrassingly, this year is the first time in its 27-year run that Australian Fashion Week has had an official standalone fashion show from a First Nations designer, Wiradjuri designer Denni Francisco of Ngali, who showcased on Wednesday morning.
“I mean, being an Australian fashion designer is to be a designer with no borders. It is also hard because I don’t really understand and don’t think I’ll ever understand what an ‘Australian perspective’ really is,” says Gogos. “I’m not an Indigenous Australian, and I’ll never have the connection to the country the way they do. From my own migrant experience, it is really about making up your own meaning as to what being an Australian designer means from a personal perspective.
“Being Greek-Australian, my connection to the country is still foreign and kind of zaps in and out like an electrical charge. There are moments with my family and dialogue where I feel so connected to my Greek heritage, and other times I’m still trying to make sense of it. And I think that is a common experience if you are a migrant. I also believe I sometimes withhold from showing my heritage in my clothes because I don’t even know how to articulate it well. I am still so inspired by it, though, with many artifacts in my pa-pous and ya-ya’s home recognisable in my pieces for this year’s collection. All these pieces exist in an Australian home.”
It’s these familiar and highly personal points of reference that are helping designers — both Australian and New Zealand — reevaluate their design ethos and how they can contribute to a sense of national identity that acknowledges our multicultural place in the world. As an inclusive designer, these values were reflected on the runway by the diversity of bodies, ethnicities and genders on the runway modelling the collaborative collection, with cameo appearances from trailblazers including model Cindy Rostron, writer Benjamin Law, drag artist Amyl and consent activist Chanel Contos.
“When people see [the clothes], they don’t really understand that that is Australian design,” says Gogos. “People in Australia have these things in their households because we are so multicultural, and those are the kinds of moments I try to connect to.”
