I have finally made it to the front row of a catwalk show! Just like Anna Wintour, but not.
It only took four hours and is miraculous considering I’m wearing my five-year-old Witchery top that has a tear in the armpit. But here I am on my phone, checking my likes on Instagram, looking serious, just like all the other people in the front row with their free gigantic bottles of mineral water.
It’s easy to look so serious when you are getting as sunburnt as we are. I can’t speak for my “fellow fashionistas” but I feel we are all contemplating skin cancer as we sit in the bottom of a drained swimming pool in Bondi’s midday sun, quietly frying as we wait for the models to appear. A drone hovering above the edge of the Iceberg’s pool adds to the sense of dread.
I feel an intense nostalgia for the time shortly before we sat in the bottom of the pool. There were men in white tuxedos who gave us their hands as we stepped in the pool (just like when you get off a yacht), women with strong arms who held up umbrellas so we didn’t get burnt and photographers saying things like “Kelly, over here”, “Suki – how about a photo?”. There were, of course, free bottles of mineral water.
The models appear, unsmiling and wearing loose nautical-looking clothes (yet somehow this combination appeared devastatingly desirable).
I look up around the swimming pool bleachers. Everyone is Gattaca beautiful and many are wearing white. I realise this moment is special. After 14 years on and off in this town, I have arrived at Peak Sydney.
I feel a surge of love for those around me – my new tribe! My people! The Fashion People, who despite not having talked to me, I feel have accepted me despite my torn Witchery shirt and my greed for free mineral water.
I love Fashion Week!
But as Coldplay urged in The Scientist – let’s take it back to the start.
8am: Carriageworks
“OMG, I recognise you from your sleeve!” At Carriageworks in Redfern, one of the fashion people is greeting the person in the sleeve (it is large and was sticking out from behind a pylon) while also hugging and kissing her in a way that doesn’t crush the sleeve. It involves standing like you are A-frame house and tilting forward in a way that allows facial contact but doesn’t crease or crush the other’s clothes.
I register and get three lanyards and then get a coffee (full fat milk is available, surprisingly). I was nervous before arriving. It’s my first fashion show and I was really worried people would mistake me for a model and try to sign me up (actually it’s the opposite – like a lot of non-fashion people, attending a fashion show without wearing fashionable clothes unleashes a deep sense of imposter syndrome and a feeling of being judged).
But the vibe is actually like more akin to one of the rich evangelical churches out in the Hills district. There are clipboards and efficient women in headsets, but everyone is mega-friendly and keeps telling you to have a “great day!” and “enjoy the show”. Even the workers in the high-vis vests who will flag taxis for you ask you where you got your bracelet from (“it looks like the one from Neverending Story”).
8.30am: Carriageworks
There is a fashion seminar on (a discussion on “the essential relationship between the creative and the commercial”). A trio of friends who look like they have rummaged through their childhood dress-up boxes go in. I admire what they are wearing: a pink satin nightdress over skinny jeans, with massive pink FLUFFY earrings, a tunic that looks like a school uniform that’s been run through a combine harvester, a grey ballgown skirt that’s made of terry-towelling. (I am describing three separate people, not one person wearing all these clothes).
Fashion should be like this – fun, a laugh, an expression of your personality, beautiful and weird.
9am: Art Gallery of NSW
Sydney label, Romance Was Born, is “THE SHOW”, so I’m told. I take a taxi to the gallery. Several hundred people attend the other shows but this guest-list is tight, limited to around 100 people from the top fashion magazines. One fashion friend tells me that there were tantrums with people trying to get in – but those who made the cut are the old fashion crowd. They are in comfortable clothes, a bit older and less likely to selfie Instagram from the show.
My pal points out Marion Hume, ex-Vogue editor and probably the best fashion writer in Australia. Hume is wearing a shirt and pants, and non-crazy shoes. There are also a group of conservatively dressed women in their 60s, who I also admire for their resistance to fashion. But it turns out they are actually going to see something at the gallery.
The most interestingly dressed guy hanging out the front is a stylist called Joeline who has an orange man-bun and is wearing a grey jumpsuit. “Can I take your photo?” I ask him.
“I don’t really like having my photo taken.”
I meet a glamorous woman dressed in mostly white with a cool orange handbag called Eva Galambos (that’s the name of the woman, not the handbag). She has a shop called Parlour X and has been coming to Fashion Week since it began in 1996.
This is the strongest year yet, she says. “I loved Ellery. It was a showstopper ... I want to be that woman, I want to emulate that style. That to me is the secret of a collection’s success.”
I am seated next to someone who later compliments me for being a “fast Instagrammer” and another woman who looks passive-aggressively angry when I drop my pen on the ground, underneath her seat. We are sitting around a configuration which I presume is the catwalk, but we are in a room of early (white) Australian art. There is birdsong and a lute playing from … somewhere.
The clothes are crazy beautiful. It’s like legendary Australian designer Jenny Kee has had a technicolour baby with Norman Lindsay, and there is this wild, very Australian collection that takes in everything from swags, to wattle, to gum nuts, to Akubras, to Ned Kelly’s mask (which initially I thought was a hijab, and could well be a hijab). It turns out Jenny Kee’s former label partner, the texile designer Linda Jackson has collaborated with Romance Was Born on this collection.
People seem to love it. I love it! The passive aggressive lady murmured to herself “very clever” and my fashion pal outside said “wow, it’s very strong.”
10am: Carriageworks
I go into the media centre. “The journalists haven’t touched any of these muffins!” I think, putting some into my handbag. I look around. I’m baffled by the presence of so many skinny, beautiful young journalists, looking fatigued, lying on the couches. Where are their laptops?
Realising that I’ve entered the model’s lounge by mistake, I then find the media centre, which has no food, but free mineral water. Each news organisation has a “desk” with the masthead’s name on it.
11am: Carriageworks
It’s the Kirrily Johnston show, collaborating with Cooper St clothing. I don’t have a seat at this one, so stand in the press pack. The people who have a seat in the first few rows get a goody-bag but I like being among this pack with no presents. There’s no hierarchy. You stand, you get your shot, take your notes, you go to the next show. Near us is a group of girls, all big hair, high shoes and attitude – talking to security, trying to get a better seat further up the front.
The pregnant photographer next to me is talking about shoes, the ones that are the most comfortable, that you can wear all day and not get tired feet. Then the lights go down. A pianist has been playing the Nirvana and the Pixies and it sounds slow, and romantic – like something you might waltz to. The first model (braids and in orange) comes out. Everything is illuminated with the glow of hundreds of camera phones.
Midday: Backstage at Carriageworks
Models are having their hair and makeup done. They are young and beautiful with cheekbones that could carve granite and all that – but they are also wearing those weird plastic black hairdressers capes that no one looks good in, so in a way it’s not an inner-sanctum of glamour and beauty but rather like the pit where those formula one cars go to repair. All mystique is stripped away. The magic is on the catwalk – it’s the clothes that maketh the models.
There is a bus that is apparently going to Icebergs for the Ten Pieces show. But no one can find it.
I stand out in the sun with some kids wearing massive trucker caps. I seem to be the only person at Fashion Week wearing my lanyards. I take them off. This is like going to a new school or something – and not knowing what the cool thing is to wear. I tell the trucker cap kids that if we have missed the bus to Bondi we can all, like, share a cab.
I take a call and when I turn around the trucker caps kids have gone. It’s just me and the Instagrammers who work as a pack, and have proper camera gear and accents that range from California to Tokyo.
1pm: Bondi Icebergs
“This situation is RIDIC”, says someone lining up for the show. Or maybe they wanted to swim at Icebergs but found that the pool drained, or maybe it’s just someone like me who has enjoyed a refreshing cocktail and is looking down at the empty pool and the perfect Sydney day and the lovely clothes and is saying ‘This situation is RIDIC’ in a kind of awe at Bondi and all its swagger. Behind me, some girls arrive wearing knitted Adidas jumpers with three-quarter-length sleeves. Photographers photograph them but the Adidas girls don’t even smile, don’t even take their sunglasses off.
After the show – up on the rise outside Icebergs towards Campbell Parade – the Instagrammers are congregated, hunched so as to better photograph the shoes. A woman who looks like a model is walking up alongside me. She sees the photographers snapping her. She turns around and walks back up the road – slower this time, so they can get a better angle. Fashion Week, all the city’s a catwalk baby.
