Meet The Next Gen Fashion Disruptors

Can the next generation change the way the fashion industry operates for the better? We’re thinking yes. The future looks bright. On Tuesday night in Sydney, the UTS Fashion class of 2017 showed their graduate collections, before an audience that included Akira Isogawa, award-winning ex-student Kacey Devlin and fashion business insiders.
                                             

Sustainability, redefining gender and challenging the meaning of luxury were all on the menu.

Backstage Gina Snodgrass explained of her stand-out ‘Dandy Boys’ collection: “I don’t feel restricted by traditional masculine or feminine forms of dress. I looked at how those gendered dress codes have been created over time, and how they’ve changed. Historically if you look at court portraiture for example the men are always very elaborately dressed.” So she decked out her boys in smocked and beaded shirting and fine wool tailoring bonded with metallic lace. Today the old codes being dismantled, and Snodgrass, having been sponsored by the Australian Wool Education Trust (AWET), is well placed to build new ones in cloth.

Jessica Guzman also looked to the historical with a fresh eye. Her ‘Moral Panic’ collection was inspired by British class tensions. She was thinking about “status change [and] fashion as a tool of empowerment” - fake it till you make it. It was a smart idea, and she explored it with confidence using strong colour and witty print. There was a real feeling for the Zeitgeist here, especially in the sportswear referencing. “I think she hit the nail on the head of what people are really responding to right now” says Chant.

Backstage Lisa Liu explained that she began by looking at “the strong masculine culture of military uniforms and how I could subvert that.” She did so through pop colour and exuberant volume. Think sugar pink! In a tiered puffer coat with emerald green lining cinched with a neon orange tactical vest.

Disposable will be a dirty word at first Eco Fashion Week

A Perth woman who is one of vegan actress Pamela Anderson’s favourite designers will host the country’s first-ever eco fashion festival in November.
Disposable will be a dirty word at the festival showcasing durable, small-run clothing designed and made in Australia.
                                                 

Brigadoon designer Zuhal Kuvan-Mills’ Green Embassy label has garnered a global following but the interest in sustainable fashion in her adopted hometown is slight, to say the least.

“I made a little top and I sent it to her and she said she would wear that top during one of her magazine shoots alongside Vivienne Westwood,” Ms Kuvan-Mills said.
Eco Fashion Week is supported by the Australian Made campaign, which will provide a prize worth up to $20,000 to the winner of Best New Australian-Made Design. It will run from November 23-27 in Fremantle.

In the interim, you can pop a choc top at the latest instalment of Kingsman: The Golden Circle which has just arrived in cinemas. Since the first Kingsman film opened in 2015, also directed by Matthew Vaughn, the fashion brand collaboration has continued with Mr Porter, one of the most finely tuned fashion-film partnerships attempted (simply synching film and fashion production timelines makes the mind boggle). The brand has continued in the interim. The sixth collection is its most successful to date, so something’s clearly working. The seventh collection coincides with the new film, and as such brings a new slant alongside the traditional Savile Row style (pictured), namely more casual US styles, as seen on the characters from Statesman (the Kingsman spy ring’s US counterpart). This includes leather bomber jackets from San Francisco brand Golden Bear, which has created these since the 1940s, and felt hats from stetson.

Sarina store celebrates vintage fashion

VICTORIAN styling combined with steam power- era clothing best describes the fashion that has swept over the Mackay region in recent months, a genre being called steampunk.
                                               

A new store dedicated entirely to the theme has also popped up in Sarina, selling everything from steampunk to rockabilly and vintage style clothing and furniture.

SteamPunk Time was opened by owners Barbara and Rick Davis, who were looking to fill a vacant retail space on Broad St and decided they wanted to bring something unique to town.

They've now been in business for over a year and have managed to generated quite a following of new SteamPunk and rockabilly lovers from across the region.

Sales attendant and son to the couple, Frazer Davis, said the store offers a total mix of mis-matched and unique items, including lots of leather, black, crazy patterns, goggles, top hats and more.

"It started when my mum Barbara visited England and purchased a leather Around the World in 80 Days-style top hat. She was like 'wow, I love that' and from there learned all about what steampunk was.

SANDIE has left the building and Gypsy Lane owner Leanne Pomering said she was not coming back following the recent change of name and revamp of the popular Normanby Street shop in Yeppoon.

Leanne said the rebranding of the shop was a natural progression and fitting for the direction her business had taken.

Leanne said the shop was looking fabulous with new lighting that was much more environmentally friendly and there was accessibility for everyone, including mobility aides and prams.

Leanne's greatest pride in Gypsy Lane is that her daughter now assists her with merchandising.

Remembering fashion's lowest moment: low-slung jeans

Hit the road Paris Hilton then, now and always. With the amount of time I spent being inundated with images of your hip flexors throughout uni I could have graduated as a doctor of physiotherapy instead of just scraping through with an arts degree.
                                             

Get into the sea Bella Hadid with your new Off White low-slung denim trousers that cost more than a new Corolla (with non-faulty airbags).

I came of age in the early 2000s. An era of Lara Bingle beauty, The Hills and Anna Nicole Smith endorsed diet pills. Blonde and waif-ish was "hot" and low-riders were everywhere - in clubs, in shopping centres and in my chiropractor's waiting room. I was such a slave to the fashion of the time that I'm pretty sure I developed scoliosis while simultaneously trying to contain my dignity and peach emoji-esque derriere while wearing  trousers that had a rise the size of a Tic Tac.

This was around the time Hilton's fame (and infamy) was peaking. She was an oversized sunglasses wearing, low-rider jean advocating queen. A statuesque, monosyllabic monarch of the zeitgeist. Her Ladies in Waiting, like Nicole Richie and Kim Kardashian, were always shorter, size 10ish brunettes who, at the time, resembled what women looked like in reality instead of reality TV.

With the amount of money I, a broad with legs my grandmother once proclaimed at Christmas as "thick", wasted at Forever New  trying to emulate women like Hilton, I could now be living large in a Bondi penthouse, having my smashed avo and eating it too. My legs comfortably ensconced in activewear, because it is 2017 and leggings are pants.

Indie brands create products that leave minimal waste in their making

As fast fashion -manufacturing of garments quickly, by large retail brands -leads to increasing wastage of fabric and resources, smaller indie brands and designers in Bengaluru are working in their own little way to create products that are not only responsibly sourced but also leave minimal waste in their making.
                                     

Akin to slow-cooking, the process is time consuming, involves a high degree of human intervention and is expensive.But then, that is the price one would have to pay for the drawbacks of assembly-line production, they argue.

What's more, the fabric used in the collection is hand woven.“The easiest way to think about sustainability is being mindful of raw materials, using sustainable textiles, limiting wastage, preserving skills and providing employment,“ says Narayanan, 36, the creative director of Brass Tacks, which opened in the city recently.

Ierene Francis, who runs Corvus, an online store that sells hand-made cotton bags has a similar thought. Worried about the impact of plastic on the environment, Francis decided to experiment with cotton to start her small enterprise. “I am glad that I run a business that is not adding plastic in the oceans,“ she says. Francis does not allow plastic packaging of her products even on ecommerce sites. She, in fact had to reason with ecommerce platform Amazon for sustainable packaging. “I am amazed how ecommerce is unaffected by the plastic ban,“ she says.

JD Institute of Fashion Technology last month conducted its annual design awards titled Future Origins. The theme was innovative, ethical and sustainable fashion. Designers and students Krithika PB and Jaisel Jain who won best contemporary design collection, worked a firstof-a-kind fabric called Nettle, which is neither dyed nor bleached. “The fabric is manufactured from a weed that can grow in any kind of soil and does not need pesticide or extra water, unlike other fibers. It is also an all-weather fabric,“ say the 20-year-old fashion innovators of the brand The Closet Queen.