It was only the first day of Australian Fashion Week and already the stakes had been significantly raised by the 32-year-old designer Amy Lawrance, who presented a collection of 12 romantic yet architectural dresses during the Next Gen runway presentation. (Three other labels—Emily Watson, House of Campbell, and Potirakis—also showed their collections as part of Next Gen, which supports emerging labels in the country.)
Her A-line, almost-flat silhouettes, with sensual flourishes like cutouts and pleated details that invited a closer touch, stood out among not only the Next Gen designers but also Australian Fashion Week in general. So much so that I tracked down Lawrance’s email so that I could do a studio visit. Were her clothes really made out of paper as they appeared on the runway? As it so happened, we were staying in the same place. Walking into her room, I found she’d already packed her suitcase for her flight back to Melbourne the next morning and was in the middle of watching an episode of the very excellent Party Down. I knew we’d get along.
“I’m always interested in old dressmaking and hand-sewing techniques, but this season I was also looking at mid-century sculpture,” the soft-spoken designer explained, dressed casually in a white tee and jeans, a pair of Nike Air Rift sneakers on the floor nearby. “I saw a Barbara Hepworth exhibition in Melbourne maybe a year and a half ago, and that was the impetus behind the collection before this.” Though Hepworth’s sculptures are rounded where Lawrance’s dresses are angular, several of the sculptor’s pieces featured a crisscrossing of metal wires, which can be seen reflected in the subtle angular slits that dominate the bodices of many of Lawrance’s dresses. “It’s a mid-century-meets-sci-fi kind of thing,” she added.
Up close, her garments’ extraordinary details shine through, like the hand-stitched silver embroidery thread that added a primal effect to otherwise delicate dresses or the variety of silks with which she works. A cardboard-looking dress was made from Ahimsa silk, a “quite soft” fabric that Lawrance submerged in boiling water and cornstarch for added structure. It had triangular cutouts at the hip anchored in shirred fabric detail. On another dress, she sewed the Ahimsa silk with a silk habotai on top, then cut through the layers to create a “feathery effect.” Elsewhere, a shimmery dress was made from silk abaca, which is typically used in millinery. Each model wore a hat on their head—some in a sailor style and others in a skullcap style made of fabric petals—and socks with laces sewn on top in shades of dusty pink, hunter green, ice blue, and red (the only pop of color in an otherwise monochromatic collection). She does everything by hand.
Born in a “country town” in Victoria to a teacher dad and a mom who was a hospital administrator, Lawrance describes her household as “not creative but with very encouraging parents.” She studied fashion design at RMIT in Melbourne, where she has been living for the past 12 years. Currently she works part-time as a design assistant, teaches at RMIT one day a week, and spends the rest of the week making her clothes. “It’s sort of a thing of chipping away when I have the time,” she said. “I tend to work on two or three pieces at once. When I get one to a point where I feel confident that it’s going to be a design that’ll work out well, then I work on a couple more concurrently.”
She estimates that each dress takes at least 15 hours to complete. “I’m really my own fit model,” she explained. “I start with flat pattern making, and then I put it on and make adjustments. I like being able to wear it and see how it feels and go from here. Ordinarily, if you’re making a conical-shaped skirt, you would add the value throughout the whole skirt, but this one has triangular pieces that jut out just at the sides.” Lawrance added: “I like to play with that two-dimensional [feeling] and the way the garment can fold on itself.” One of the dresses had a sailor collar that had been folded over many times like a paper fan; it happily bounced up and down as the model made her way on the runway.
Right now, Lawrance’s designs are available made-to-order through her Instagram account. “I have started to get a few orders from stores in Melbourne, but my goal is to be able to just do this full-time,” she said.
