- POPSUGAR Australia
- Fashion
- These 3 Emerging Australian Fashion Designers Make Us Excited About the Future of Fashion
These 3 Emerging Australian Fashion Designers Make Us Excited About the Future of Fashion
Getty Images
Fashion is all about expression. It can be inspiring, startling and thought-provoking to see such expressions of emotions walk down the runway in clothing form.
Melbourne Fashion Festival‘s National Graduate Showcase always promises creativity unleashed. The show features the top, up-and-coming designers, hand-picked from the country’s leading fashion design institutions as part of a nationwide selection process.
This year, the 2023 National Graduate Showcase was rich in cultural diversity and design processes, with a focus on storytelling and sustainability.
Below are three of our favourite designers from the showcase. They’re each emerging into the world of Australian fashion design with something beautifully unique and interesting to say.
Amy Cottrell
A recent graduate of the Whitehouse Institute of Design, Amy Cottrell is a Melbourne-based designer, who creates unforgettable masterpieces with recycled materials.
She focuses on innovative construction merged with traditional artisanal techniques. The result is delicate and fierce silhouettes that basically scream wearable art, leaving the wearer feeling inspired and transformed.
“Many of my pieces are quite feminine but have a cool edge to them,” Cottrell tells POPSUGAR Australia. “Although many of my garments are quite impractical and unusual, many people can still relate to the style and picture themselves wearing the pieces, which makes them relatable to an audience.”
Her collection “Plasticity” was shown during Melbourne Fashion Festival’s National Graduate Showcase.
“This collection explores our relationship with plastic — a man-made substance that was once strongly associated with progress and is now held responsible for major environmental damage,” she explains.
Using recycled plastics and bioplastics that are completely harmless and biodegradable, Cottrell’s designs portray elements of our natural environment in a sculptural way, exploring the idea that nature can be man-made in a conscious and careful way.
“It’s essential that we learn to adjust to new conditions in order to survive,” she says. “The way we use plastics is a big part of that change, as we adapt and move forward.”
Kritikon Qatar Khamsawat
Kritikon Qatar Khamsawat is originally from a small village in Sakon Nakon, Thailand, but now lives in Melbourne. She has a deep belief in clothing’s transforming power, especially when it comes to personal identity and self-expression.
As some of the most eye-catching looks from Melbourne Fashion Festival’s National Graduate Showcase, Khamsawat’s collection drew inspiration from surrealism and the political cliche social of dressing.
Their clever re-purposing of everyday and niche items — such as umbrellas, tents and ballet pointe shoes — in broken-down and re-constructed high-fashion ways, created a thought-provoking conversation around class, status and what fashion really is, anyway.
Overall, Khamsawat creates performative and complex garments with an avant-garde, demi-couture and surrealist perspective. It’s essentially wearable art. And it’s pretty genius.
Qinxuan Wu
Qinxuan Wu is passionate about creating more opportunities for multidisciplinary collaborations, which is clear through her use of new technologies. She effectively eliminates the line that separates fashion from other art forms.
Creating a constant connection to her cultural background, Wu believes that fashion is a language, and she hopes to communicate her own personal experiences so that others feel seen.
“I’m sensitive to most things and I always want to speak the truth about how I feel, no matter how difficult that can be,” Wu tells POPSUGAR Australia.
“I have personally experienced so many sexist and racist things, and when I was I was struggling, my voice was ignored intentionally. I think art is a universal language that has no boundaries. Particularly with fashion design, people can see, feel, touch and even listen to it. It’s a way for me to communicate how I feel, to be heard and to hopefully teach others.”
Her graduate collection, shown as a part of Melbourne Fashion Festival’s National Graduate Showcase, was based on her experiences around body autonomy.
“I started by reflecting on the traditional clothes for women, which was designed to restrict their behaviour,” she explains. “I used a character from “The Dream of the Red Chamber” as my muse, as a character who breaks free from these bounds and has the courage to express the rebellious side of womanhood.”
Wu claims that she is still exploring her design style, and is still very early on in her design career. Though, with her fierce opinions and a message to get across, paired with a fearlessness for boundary-breaking design, we reckon we’ll soon be hearing much more from her.
“Irreplaceable life experiences and sufferings are so beautiful and interesting. I feel like I see everything, and I want to share it through art. Contradicting personalities — being positive and negative at the same time, being romantic and realistic at the same time, being crazy and rational at the same time, being sensitive and insensitive at the same time.
“It’s art, and then it can be fashion.”
