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When Alix Higgins joins our call, it’s 10.30 pm Sydney time. He’s six days out from his third Australian Fashion Week show and though it’s crunch time, he’s feeling prepared.
“I’m a very organised person,” he says. “And it’s my third fashion week, so I know what surprises to expect and how to structure my time.” He feels good: the clothes are done, the casting is done. “All the fashion stuff is more or less done.”
At 30, Higgins is a product of the internet — as are his designs. Alix Higgins pieces harken back to a childhood spent scrolling on Tumblr, typeface phrases splashed across expertly draped dresses and striped polos in a nod to blogging’s glory days. This season, Higgins continues to wrestle with the tension between physical and digital: the digitally scanned prints that traverse the silk started out as physical paintings. The polka dots? Higgins’s own fingerprints. “It has a handmade feel, which doesn’t always come through in my work,” Higgins says of his foray into finger painting. “But then, it’s in a really digital way, so it’s quite an interesting, and, I hope, strong and bizarre, impact.”
Every year, he says, the work gets better and stronger. This time around, Higgins returns to his Paris roots (he worked at Marine Serre as a print designer for a while) with an embrace of more couture techniques and draping. It’s an act of self assurance. “The first [show] I remember was like, ‘I have to prove myself.’ Now, I feel a bit more confident, like, ‘I’m doing this.’ And I’m charging in that direction.”
Still in his early days, Higgins has already begun collecting his accolades — official and not. In October 2023, he was awarded Emerging Designer of the Year at the Australian Fashion Laureate (as a second-time nominee). The brand has been reviewed by Vogue Runway since his first showcase in 2022. There’s more press coming to the show this year thanks to the label’s growing critical acclaim, he says. “I think people who were kind of like, ‘Whatever,’ are like, ‘Let’s pay him some attention and see.’” He’s got the celeb stamp of approval, too: Hunter Schafer, Rita Ora and Grimes have all been spotted in his pieces (Schafer found hers at New York boutique Café Forgot). In a few short years, he’s become one of the buzziest names on the schedule.
But confidence and brand heat doesn’t mean putting on a show gets easier.
“Every year I’m like, should I do it again or not?” Higgins says. Many brands hop on and off the Australian Fashion Week calendar, showing once and not returning because of the expense. For Higgins, though, showing up is a priority. “I really try to balance my commercial activity to be able to do something like this,” the designer says. “I really see the value in the marketing side of being able to market the dream of the brand, rather than market ‘this top’ and ‘this skirt’ through a lookbook.”
Higgins has been building up his brand world to do just that, since well before his first runway show. He launched his website in March 2021, and counts this as the beginning of the business. But really, it began on Instagram, during Covid — a true 21st-century tale.
Like many brands founded in the age of social media, Higgins’s ‘true’ start date is murky. He started posting (and selling) his designs on Instagram back in 2020. Having come up in the online world — Tumblr and YouTube are among the key precursors to his official fashion education at universities in Sydney and Paris — the designer knows how to operate digitally. He gained traction, developing a tight-knit community of brand fans. And as its following grew over the pandemic, Higgins felt a shift. “I was like, I can’t be DMing people my bank details,” he says. It was then that he launched the site, aka the “proper beginning”. Now, he’s doing bigger business, with yearly revenues climbing towards (but sitting under) AUD $200,000.
Slow and steady
When asked to recall the best piece of advice he’s received, Higgins always returns to words of wisdom from Aussie designer Michael Lo Sordo: “It takes 10 years of hard yards, then it gets easy,” (or at least, easier). “It’s not even really advice,” Higgins says after a pause. “It’s just the harsh reality.”
Little differences between prep for today’s third show and his first show progress. “In the first show the stylist would ask me, ‘Can we have another one of that skirt for that look?’ And I was just like, I don’t have $5. I can’t print another bit of fabric.” This time around, the collection is bigger, there are plenty of repeat sizes and funds for more experimentation, in the collection itself and the show production.
“I do think it will be a tough 10 years,” Higgins says. “But I’m also very risk-averse.” He credits his cautious nature to his upbringing and work prior to launching his own label. “Every step of my brand has been so slow because I can’t just borrow all this money, put it into this thing and hope it’s going to go well for me. I don’t have any backup.”
Higgins’s brand is entirely self-funded. It’s propped up by earnings from the textile design work he did until the beginning of 2023, when he quit to solely focus on his eponymous label. Before then, he worked for a textile printing company and freelanced for the likes of Coperni and Amy Crookes.
Higgins’s yearly showing cadence is also a bid to capture the attention of buyers. Industry peers have told him that buyers don’t just want to see that a designer is in business for a year or two, but that they’re here to stay – and Higgins is looking to further his wholesale growth. He’s starting small, currently stocked by boutiques like Café Forgot and Melbourne’s Error 404. He’s eyeing larger retailers because of the international market exposure they offer. “From what I’ve heard, with stockists, you get one shot. If you fuck up your order with, say, Ssense, they’re not gonna order again.”
It’s why direct-to-consumer remains a big focus: “Maintaining that proximity to my client and intimacy with them.” Higgins’s business margins are strong, so he can survive without a strong wholesale market at this point in the game.
“I don’t want to disappear,” he says. “I want to be able to keep going.”
Selling the dream
Part of why Higgins loves showing is down to the world-building that a fashion show offers. “My work is so much about the character of people; that intimate, personal feeling,” he says. “You don’t get to see that — or feel that — in a lookbook the same way.”
The clothes might be a little clearer to see, but it’s the music; the cast; the hair and makeup that conveys what the brand is all about. “It’s a nice way of communicating the identity of a brand in a really strong and singular way,” Higgins says.
He’s known to cast friends in his shows, leaning into the brand’s tight-knit community focus. Today, Higgins took this one step further with an animation projected onto the back of the runway, bringing Higgins’s exploration into the role of image in a digital world to the fore.
But a brand world doesn’t arise solely from the runway.
Last year, Higgins hosted his first pop-up to test the waters. Held during Sydney Art Fair (by fluke), it was a hit, drawing lots of new, high-spending clients. People bought more at the physical pop-ups than they do online, he says. Off the back of its success, Higgins hosted another pop-up for the launch of his latest — and first — pre-collection in January. Another experiment, Higgins wanted to play with what a collection launch might look like outside of a show.
“It went really well. I want to do pop-ups with each collection as my own kind of retail experience of the brand world again, in a really tangible way.” This physicality is important — it distinguishes “crap-quality” Instagram brands from high-quality offerings, he notes.
This comes to light this season with Higgins’s draped pieces that graced the runway. “It’s a real love of mine that I haven’t had much time to do, because the first few seasons have been so hand to mouth, such a shoestring of pulling them together.” This season, he hoped the elegance would offer an element of surprise.
“It’s a big evolution,” Higgins says. “It also feels very true and personal to me.”
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