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Last November, IMG announced that, after about two decades, it would no longer be backing Australian Fashion Week, putting the event in limbo for a few months. In March, the Australian Fashion Council officially announced its return under its guidance, giving brands just a few months to prep their new collections. While this resulted in a shorter week (four days instead of five) and a slightly smaller number of designers on the schedule, the shows still managed to highlight the diversity of Sydney’s fashion scene.
One thing that the week does very well is hold space for designers at different stages in their careers. On the schedule this season were two group shows that focused on new (and newish) labels: The brand-new The Frontier featured designers like Courtney Zheng (who made her on-schedule debut this year) and Amy Lawrance (showing for the second time), along with more established brands like Esse and Common Hours; while the NewGen show, which has been going on since 1996, showcased a mix of arty and commercial labels like Haluminous and Miimi Jiinda. Vogue Australia also showcased the city’s independent brands with its special Vogue Vanguard fashion show, which included seven designers who each showed two looks from their current collections. Scroll through to get a glimpse at the Australian Fashion Week scene—and catch up on the rest of the shows here.
Liandra
Liandra Gaykamangu returned to the Australian Fashion Week runways with a new resort collection inspired by corals. “This year I came across a concept called Coral of Life,” she explained backstage after her show. “Corals build off each other and lean into their ancestor DNA to grow. We do that as well in our family systems, and so I was really inspired by that metaphor.” She zeroed in on a coral color palette—along with some hand-drawn coral illustrations—and contrasted them with disco-ready glitter details. “Last year it was like the girls were trekking to the beach, and this year they’ve been at the beach all day and now they’re ready to dance into the night.”
Nicol Ford
For the latest Nicol Ford resort collection, Lilian and Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford looked to the Weimar era and the world of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded and ran the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a site of early research and advocacy for gender and sexuality that included the first transgender clinic. The glamour of the era informed a series of red carpet-ready, 1930s-inspired bias-cut gowns printed with images of butterflies and documents from Hirschfeld’s own archives, which were modeled by a cast of queer and trans models from the designers’ community.
The Frontier
The Frontier is a new group-show addition to the Australian Fashion Week calendar, centered on emerging talent from the region. Along with Amy Lawrance, Courtney Zheng, and Wynn Hamlyn, it also featured current collections from more commercial labels like Charlotte Hicks’s Esse Studios—whose leather pieces were a standout—and Paris Georgia by Paris Mitchell Temple and Georgia Cherrie, whose liquid draped dresses and studded wedge sandals look like what women want right now. A first-time inclusion on the AFW schedule was Common Hours, a made-to-measure eveningwear label by Amber Symond, who works with mills in France and Italy and offered a lineup of delicate lace and silk gowns paired with “more masculine structured jackets.” The highlight was a white asymmetrical gown hand-painted with house paint to achieve an unexpectedly textured fabric.
Haluminous
Hannah Kim’s Haluminous label was one of four that showed as part of the NewGen runway show. Kim’s work stood out from the rest with a boho gothic aesthetic that looked like it would be as easily at home amid Sydney’s beach culture as in the streets of New York City. Swingy double-layered jerseys with signature lace-up details and loose hanging beaded laces around the body created an immediately identifiable visual vocabulary. Kim founded her label in 2017, a few years after she graduated from Sydney’s famed University of Technology Sydney, and this was her debut on the official Australian Fashion Week calendar.
Harris Tapper
The New Zealand–based label Harris Tapper, founded in 2017 by best friends Sarah Harris Gould and Lauren Tapper, set up showroom appointments to present their resort collection, an artsier, more sculptural take on the contemporary minimalist aesthetic of this moment. The designers highlight texture and silhouette in their clothes, which often wrap around the body in interesting shapes. This season furry tinsel details mixed with velvet and sheer polka-dot prints—Sydney’s print and fabric of choice for resort—and were grounded by tech-inspired trousers, wrap blouses, and the softest of T-shirts. On any given day of Fashion Week, it was easy to spot the local editors wearing pieces by this duo.
