Image credit: courtesy of Emily Watson
There’s a reason Melbourne is known as a creative hub. Take a walk around the Victorian city and it’s hard coded in its own art and energy. The city doesn’t just run on its own, it’s backed by a community of creative minds driving the city’s artistic scene with passion and new thought. From fashion to music and art, up-and-coming Melburnian creatives have been using their craft and vision to tell personal stories and create unique aesthetics. For creatives in this generation, the focus is on honest expression and experimentation.
For some creatives, inspiration comes from representing their heritage. Translating this into fashion is Jackie Wu who uses his delicate and daring designs to create safe spaces for queer and migrant communities, identifying as a trans migrant from China himself. For Perina Drummond, her work in running Australia’s first all-indigenous agency, Jira Models, supports emerging First Nations models—a commitment towards supporting culturally inclusive industries.
For others, it’s all about creating a genuine love letter to the art form itself. Having pure enjoyment for creating art out of nothing, Phoebe Go, translates this romance through her unique indie-pop songwriting. Using music as a time capsule for her emotions, Pania finds her Indian and Maori background and experiences growing up in West Melbourne unlocked in her R&B based music. Expressing his fascination for subversion, human and non-human, Zhu Ohmu speaks through his distinctive ceramics.
Below, in line with Melbourne Fashion Week, we break down all the Melburnian creatives you should be excited about.
Image credit: Myles Pedlar
Kritikon Khamsawat
Fashion often helps us inhabit a fantasy world but some designers find fuel for that magic in the everyday. Enter Melbourne designer and RMIT graduate Kritikon Khamsawat, 25, whose pieces incorporate pedestrian items into wearable art; take the use of an umbrella to imitate the shape of a crinoline skirt, or the boning of a tent forming a dress in another. Khamsawat’s vision formed by necessity. “As a young child migrating from a small village in northern Thailand, I struggled with English. The only way I was able to communicate was through drawing,” he says. “I developed a confused sense of self, but watching my mother’s interactions with dressing, I was able to understand the transformative power of garments and identity through clothes.”
Image credit: Jess Brohier
Meg McConville
It might appear seamless and refined, but there’s nothing simple about Meg McConville’s approach to beauty. The Australian talent specialises in make-up that brings fantasy to life, referencing historic sculptures to create newness. “Thanks to the work of artists like Walt Cassidy and photographers like Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe and [nightlife photographer] Derek Ridgers, I’ve been able to understand make-up not solely as a means of achieving beauty and perfection but rather, as a means of total expression,” she says. Last month McConville worked as make-up director for emerging brand Wackie Ju at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week, and accentuated the label’s risqué, emboldened pieces that celebrate inclusiveness—the kind of no-holds-barred expression McConville hopes will find its way to the celebrated beauty world.
Image credit: courtesy of Nabilah Nordin
Nabilah Nordin
For Singaporean-Australian sculptor Nabilah Nordin, a regular week in the studio might involve pouring resin on baguettes, encasing a sculpture in deflated balloons and melting kilos of beeswax. From contorted shapes sprouting tufts of silky white hair to epoxy-clad armatures, Nordin’s work is ambitious yet playful, and no material is too unconventional. “I don’t believe in material hierarchies. Construction materials like timber, metal, concrete and adhesives are just as appealing to me as wax, bread, wigs, walnuts and feathers,” says the artist. “Whatever the material may be, I am always intrigued by its capacity to invoke seduction or repulsion in the viewer.”
Image credit: Hector Clark
Michelle Li
What Michelle Li’s work lacks in colour—her output is rooted in soberly elegant blacks and charcoals—it makes up for in textural richness, which stems from a deeply considered design approach. Li’s garments, honed through a fashion master’s degree at RMIT, take core wardrobe items and turn them into objects of sculptural beauty. Trench coats are fashioned from felt and made structural through sharp, pointed shoulders and sleep boning. Others feature reversed hems or an absence of sleeves, and bumster-style skirts that float off the waist. Her unique approach won her the Australian Fashion Foundation’s 2021 scholarship and continues to add new meaning to well-trodden wardrobe staples.
Image credit: Jordan Munns
Elle Shimada
When she was 15, two life-changing things happened to the multidisciplinary DJ, producer and curator Elle Shimada: she moved to Melbourne from her native Tokyo, and she fell in love with music. “I didn’t speak English, so music became my language”, she shared. “I spent most of my teenage era playing violin, learning music production and jamming with people. Nothing changed since, really.”
Image credit: Arvin Prem Kumar
Nathan McGuire
“Mob in Fashion is reminding everyone that First Nations people are not just the subjects of stories, but we are the original storytellers and we belong in every part of the fashion system.” So voices the founder of the First Nations-led organisation, Whadjuk-Noongar model Nathan McGuire. Asked to be a cultural consultant for Melbourne Fashion Festival in 2022, it solidified for McGuire a gap he’d been noticing behind the camera and set out, with the empathy and awareness he brings to his own work, to create opportunities in styling, photography, hair and make-up and more for emerging Indigenous talent. “As someone who has almost 10 years in fashion as a model and usually being the only First Nations person on set for so many years, it feels amazing to open the door further,” he says.
Image credit: Mia Rankin
Emily Watson
It was a case of 16,000-kilometres of distance during a New York winter, that Melbourne-based designer Emily Watson realised her fondness for Australian summers, ultimately deciding the direction of her four-year-old label. “I was homesick,” she says of a semester abroad while completing a fashion degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 2019. Tapping swimwear, something that instantly evoked home, she began subverting and reconstructing its codes. “It’s funny the people who know me, as I’m not much of a beachgoer,” she says of what now forms her brand’s DNA. That hasn’t stopped her splicing and lopping her way to asymmetrical separates, leotards and swim dense with ruffles, ties and panels—some individual pieces have 50-plus pieces—in pool-toy brights. Details, Watson says, she won’t compromise on as the label grows. “It’s not just about the cut,” Watson says, “but the way it moves when you move.”
Image credit: Instagram.com/rahneebliss
Chela
Since cementing her arrival on the Australian music scene with the 2013 song “Romanticise”, Chela has honed a unique brand of honest, queer-friendly pop, with earnest lyrics that often juxtapose her upbeat sound. Her newest song “Cool 2B Queer”—which she aptly performed at the Sydney WorldPride opening concert—sees her tackle the topic of performance allyship, addressing romantic partners who’ve been uncomfortable with pursuing an openly queer relationship. Growing up in Western Australia, Chela credits Grace Jones and Janet Jackson, as well as “rock chicks” Poly Stryene and Debbie Harry, with helping her hone her insouciant approach.
Image credit: Charlie Hardy
Phoebe Go
“I just love the art of making something out of nothing,’ says Phoebe Go. “Rearranging things you know and feel into some brand new kind of truth, and doing it with total honesty and freedom.” “Go” by name and nature—the pseudonym is symbolic of being lifted up, and pressing “go” on something new—on her experienced into verses that are capable of haunting you with their beauty and sincerity. And people are listening. She opened for American indie-pop band Muna in March, while the fashion set—she’s a favourite of Chanel—is captivated by her coolness, and the way she walks in the beat of her own dream.
Image credit: Michelle Li
Jackie Wu
The work of Jackie Wu, enigmatic founding designer of Wackie Ju, is equal parts delicate and daring. Wu makes the decision to go without showing their face and there’s a considered reason why. “I wish to use [my brand] to make a safe space for the under-represented queer and migrant communities,” Wu, a trans migrant from China, says. Nonetheless, their own eccentricity shines through in the pieces, which swing from flowing ruffled gowns to risqué G-strings linked by their signature floral motif. In their words, “I consider my work as the extension of me, which has adopted my humour, my passion, my struggles and my belief.” Wu’s fashion week show will feature a mostly queer cast, offering solidarity to trans and gender non-identifying people in the face of adversity. Their admiration for Alexander McQueen is visible in provocative, textured glamour, but Wu is undoubtedly driven by their own unique journey, passions and dreams.
Image credit: Michelle Grace Hunder
Forest Claudette
With a voice like silk and the ability to turn prosaic movements into evocative lyrics, Forest Claudette might only be one year into his musical career, but he’s hitting all the right notes. The solo alias of Melbourne-based artist Kobe Hamilton-Reeves, Forest Claudette has been capturing hearts all over Australia since dropping his first single last July, a sultry meditation of self doubt titled “Creaming Soda”. Before his solo project, the 23-year-old found a fan base on TikTok. Now, Claudette has transitioned from online cover artist to emerging solo star, having released his first EP in October. Titled The End of February, it’s a journey through the highs and lows of modern love that leaves listeners wanting more.
Image credit: Getty Images
Perina Drummond
Pinning down Perina Drummond, stylist and founder of Australia’s first all-Indigenous agency Jira Models, can be hard. That’s because her work often takes her to remote communities supporting emerging First Nations models around the country, connecting them to stylists and photographers, or running modelling workshops. At Jira, not only is the all-First Nations roster of model talent sought after, but also the knowledge of Naarm-based Drummond. The 36-year-old is able to educate an increasingly inclusive industry on culturally safe work environments, vital to a more diverse modelling landscape. Six years in, she’s planning moves into film and TV representation, and is already seeing the impact of her talent.
Image credit: Instagram.com/claw__boy
Travis Loo
The intricate nail art by Travis Loo—known as @claw__boy on Instagram—becomes more impressive when you realise he’s self taught. “I’d been complaining for a while about feeling uninspired creatively,” the artist says of working at a desk job during Melbourne’s lockdowns. The London-based cult-favourite label Kiko Kostadinov, designed by Australian twins Laura and Deanna Fanning, has tapped his manicurist talents, and his bold designs have accumulated a growing fan base. In the spirit of other young beauty creatives, he’s excited to see the rise of new names finding their way into our algorithms. “The younger generations have more access to knowledge and inspiration at an earlier age, and feel less bound by the societal pressures and constructs that my friends and I experienced growing up.”
Image credit: courtesy of Kaydee-Kyle Taylor
Kaydee-Kyle Taylor
Growing up, Kaydee-Kyle Taylor saw painting on canvas as art, and doing make-up as a hobby. Now, the Melbourne/Naarm-based artist has been able to bridge the two, using her skill in the former and creating a career out of the latter. Evolving from a desire to express herself, Kyle-Taylor’s work now supports others doing the same though she quickly realised she needed additional training to work with women of all skin tones. “We spent two hours in a whole year’s worth of study dedicated to BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of colour] skin tone and hair styling,” she recalls. It was the experience that made her realise how lacking the beauty industry was. As she builds a career, she hopes to flip the standards she came up against in beauty school, from Australia being seen as predominantly white, “when in actual fact, we are one of the most diverse continents in the world”.
Image credit: Instagram.com/_s__ostudio
Zhu Ohmu
Droopy, bulging, lopsided and wonky, Zhu Ohmu’s imperfectly perfect forms are human-like in their demeanour. Yet her distinctive artistic style emerged as a subversive strategy to explore the possibility of emulating the mechanical process of 3D printing sculptures by hand. Born in Taipei, Ohmu’s family immigrated to New Zealand when she was seven. Four years later, they moved to Shanghai, then back to Auckland, where the budding artist found a mentor in her high school art teacher. An exploration of the entangled relationships between machines, human and non-human ecologies, her oeuvre demonstrates the strength, intricacy and intimacy that comes with making by hand. Being part of a new generation of Australian artists who are “alert and educated about issues of social justice and environmental sustainability” excites her.
Image credit: Stephanie Cammarano
Minhee Jo
“When I was younger, I used to buy second-hand pieces and alter them to reimagine the silhouette and mood,” remembers Melbourne-based designer and founder of Aaizél, Minhee Jo. A box-pleat mini, spliced with a V-shaped waistline, liquid column dresses with diagonal incursions of block colour and deconstructed shirting, cropped, split and refashioned are typical of her experimental spirit that blends fluid and strict. “I love juxtaposing contrasting elements to create harmony,” she observes. Jo’s starting point is material, and a personal preoccupation with sustainable practice means she favours deadstock and natural fibres, and local workshops, something that saw her championed by Net-A-Porter’s sustainability platform. “I need to see and feel the fabrics I may potentially be working with,” she notes. All this is to say there’s nothing pedestrian about her pieces; a base of biscuits, black and creams are electrified each season by a well-chosen suite of high-saturation colours.
Image credit: courtesy of Pania
Pania
Pania’s music serves as a time capsule for the passionate feelings that punctuate your 20s. Hailing from an Indian and Maori background and growing up in West Melbourne, the singer’s work documents the ins and outs of young love, from toxic partners to losing feelings of attraction—and occasionally, rediscovering them. Her new EP, burnt ur clothes & changed the addy, is a seven-track dedication to love and list that’s set to velvety backgrounds and beats. A smaller population and cultural differences are reasons for Australia’s less prominent R&B scene compared to the US, but Pania is blazing a trail. In January, she was the opening act for one of her heroes, Grammy-nominated singer and
songwriter Kehlani.
Credit: https://www.vogue.com.au