‘Holiday dressing in black’ – why Australian gothic is back in fashion | Australian fashion
In the eyes of emerging female designers, the future looks dark. On Tuesday, the Frontier – a group show of six up-and-coming designers at Australian fashion week – featured corsets, body armour, strange proportions and stranger textures.
When the designers stepped forward to take their bow at the end of the show, staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, they wore head-to-toe black.
This is the Frontier’s second season at Australian fashion week. Later the same day, Courtney Zheng, who featured in the showcase in 2025, held her first stand-alone show.
When determining the brand-list, stylist Tori Knowles said the Frontier team asked two questions: “Who is actually saying something? Who is willing to be uncomfortable, to push a boundary?”
Under the leadership of industry stalwarts – creative director Peter Simon Phillips and art director and editor Alison Vennes – the runway was one of three group shows on the schedule, and the only one shirking fashion week’s new location at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Over email, Simon Phillips and Vennes said the show aimed to “tap into a new wave of female energy” united around “recurring themes of romance, life, death, ghosts, otherworldliness, corseted sensuality and freedom of movement”.
In an era of creative outsourcing and an industry that relies heavily on offshore manufacturing, Simon Phillips and Vennes gave preference to designers who “create with their own hands” and are “skilled in the mechanics of well-constructed clothes that are rich with imagination”.
The lineup captured the absurd silhouettes and end-of-days dressing that has come to define gen Z style. On a schedule that often carries the same names across years, and leans heavily on Australia’s reputation for sunny summer dressing, Frontier provided something different. “The future is always exciting,” said Knowles.
A graduate of University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Hannah Kim’s label Haluminous has been a talking point in fashion circles for a while. The softly cut, futuristic jersey designs – ranging from barely there, laced-up tank tops to miniskirts with reinforced hems that float away from the body – are more likely to be seen in a nightclub than on a beach. Kim described the collection she presented at AFW as nocturnal-resort. “It’s holiday dressing in black,” she said. “Beginning light as a petal and ending with something more empowered, almost like a shining knight in armour.”
Samantha Diorio founded Ouse (rhymes with house) in 2022 while completing a master’s in fine arts at Parsons School of Design in New York. The clothes are anchored in “the transformable, inside-out nature of the clothing,” she said. Pieces are multi-faceted, made from delicate chiffons and crunchy satins, that are puffed, tucked and gathered in ways that are distinctly feminine. What could be a scrunchy turns into a bustier or a miniskirt. “Our mission is to create pieces that can morph from one function to another, to increase longevity,” she said.
“I love to walk the line between fantasy and reality,” said Suzaan Stander. One of the newest talents on the Frontier runway, she graduated from the University of Sydney with honours last year. Rather than sidestepping the high-concept clothing often associated with student collections, Stander leans in. Working with padded, sculptural boning and silhouettes so geometric they alter the body’s proportions, alongside bondage-coded corsets, the clothes are costume-like and draw on references that come from outside fashion. Her favourite tulle skirt was inspired by a Victorian lampshade: “I love … bringing inspiration from inanimate objects to life.”
Founded by designer Jackie Galleghan, Madre Natura’s AFW debut was in 2024, when the Sydney-based label sent an old collection down the runway. As the winner of the 2023 National Designer award for sustainability, that show was a statement about overproduction. Fashion week has “never been about following the expected format,” for her, she said. That past showing made Madre Natura the most established of the Frontier designers. Known for easy-wearing casual clothing and dresses made locally from natural fibres, her collection this year had a romantic edge, with corset-style darts on one denim jacket and tiered petal skirts.
Rose Guiffre wants her clothing to be seen and heard. The UTS graduate (from the same year as Stander) works with 3D-printed beads to create garments that rustle and agitate around the body. As her models walked the runway, the garments sounded like rainsticks. While they’re made of plastic, the work is animate and moves like a mechanised snakeskin, both responsive and slinky. For Guiffre, who describes her fabrications as “auditory”, the sweet spot is “bringing together something quite controlled and something more … playful”. For the Frontier runway she created a tailored black merino wool jacket that was “fully 3D-printed” with matching pants and stockings. “It’s the first time I’ve pushed my practice into more technical garment design,” she said.
A self-taught designer with a background in theatre, Paris Jade Burrows makes romantic clothes that feel slightly haunted. If it wasn’t for the sharpness of her interpretations, the structured tailoring, whimsical petticoats and dramatic gowns could have been discovered in the attic of a long-forgotten playhouse. Burrows said the work walks “the line between fashion and costume, and explores the relationship and conversation between the two”. On the Frontier runway she showed a “preview” of a larger collection she is working on, inspired by the French artist Gustave Doré.
Courtney Zheng walked down the runway of her first solo show to raring whoops and cheers. She told Guardian Australia she was in disbelief at how far her eponymous brand had come since last year. “I will never forget the Australian stockists who picked up my brand before I even had a website or an Instagram,” said Zheng. Finding buyers has given her confidence and the “freedom to be creative”. Describing her debut as “very safe”, she said this show, which included pony hair booty shorts, sheer plunging blouses and goat hair coats, was more “daring”.
“When you’re just starting out, it’s scary. I mean … It’s fashion.”
