I just personally like anybody who makes it effort.
I'm just so sick of track suits and so sick of the Aussie dressing down scared to be noticed.
I'm just so bored and fat Aussie physiques and fat blue two-tone blue polyester tops.
I just think how they're the ones that should have a look at themselves.
It seems a very interesting area because it went through ideas quickly and ruthlessly.
We organised meetings and we had a couple of hundred people come along to the seating
boardroom to discuss what we should do and the idea was that we form a council and Peter
Corrigan who is a Melbourne architect said well you know don't don't play don't play it safe you
know go to the top and call yourself the fashion design council of Australia you know really show
those really show those smug old bastards what can happen who says fashion sucks
I came back at the end of 72 and Whitlam had got in and I stayed because Whitlam was interested
in the arts and one could there was just a feeling in the air people were hungry people were you
know it creativity was exploding I'd I've lived in the most creative place in the world for seven
years and I wanted to be part of that change well so in the late 70s you had a really important
blurring of the boundaries between what was fashion what was art and what was craft and a lot of
people came out of the visual arts background and were putting that into fashion so I think it was
very important from that point of view that that was a really a renaissance time for things in
Australia as far as creative input was concerned so I decided I'd do an exhibition about this and
it was the first sort of major exhibition in a public art gallery on dress and a few people
were bewildered by the fact that they were frocks other curators referred to it as the
James Fox show but it had tremendous impact
and I see really what happened in Melbourne in 1983 as a direct result of people like Jenny
Bannister and the influence of Peter Tully going back to Melbourne and really causing a
major explosion ten years later this exhibition had made clothes a serious proposition in Australia
the major costume and decorative arts collections in Australia had all come to at the purchase of
their collections and had given us all names and it spurred me on I know to go even further to
push the boundaries right out it started out as a fairly grungy period with you know like the
obvious sort of figures of Nick Cave and and boys next door people that were getting very much
into the punk aesthetic which I you know sort of came from London rather than anywhere else but
developed into a sort of St. Kilda push or a Clifton Hill push the same thing was happening in
art where people like Philip Rofy and Maria Kozik and folk like that were at the Clifton Hill
Music Center producing videos and performances and strange things there were a gallery called
Art Projects in Melbourne which produced some grunge art all of this was produced without a
commercial sort of sensibility more and a sense of energy and feeling that okay the mainstream is
not interested so we'll do it anyway
city have this band we're going to see the band and up on stage they're all dressed in black
they're all drunk and they were singing these boots are made for walking and I remember sort of
standing there and kind of post hippie clothes because that's sort of what we'd picked up on
realizing that there was this whole thing out there so we adopted it while they were doing the
music we adopted it in a fashion sense we're all out trying to buy fishnip tops and plastic
trousers and put in a safety kit through our ears so in a sense we weren't making a statement so
much about anarchy or anything like that it was like wow here's this fantastic fashion book and
how easy it is to create and you could go out and get all the lock shops things
the fact that it was possible to make your own choruses and it was possible to also make your
own music meant that you could create a large part of your own lifestyle in your own living
room and that gave people an enormous sense of control of their lives it was it was possible
to step outside of what was being offered by status quo organizations and create your own
culture the two major parades that preceded the fashion design council's establishment were
really fashion 82 and fashion 83 and they were organized by a group called party architecture
Jillian Burt and Julie Purvis and as the name implies the events or the parades were really
more about having fun they weren't really serious fashion events and Julie and Jillian had a
program on triple arc or bitches and pieces and they recruited Robert Pierce who was a graphic
designer at the time to put together a look for the show and give a big round of applause to the
most exciting and diverse presentation of fashion ever seen in Australia and it happens to be in
Melbourne that's right as party architecture presents fashion 1983
who says fashion fashion fashion fashion sucks who says fashion sucks
and so in a way you had people at that stage moving into fashion design like you had people
moving into music a lot of the people involved came to art school and I got them to lift the
girls and carry them around as though they were just you know manhandling a few bits of sculpture
and I was very very pleased with the whole idea you know I'd really made a statement it wasn't
a fashion parade this was an art happening and the whole parade was like that and I had it was
an amazing influence on it because I saw clothes that I'd never sort of seen before it was more
like sort of it wasn't fashion it was the bike art that I felt really in touch with and this is
something that I found really exciting I think that Robert Pierce particularly understood how
important it was to make a public spectrum out of this work as a way of giving it a cultural
profile because then as now most of this work was completely ignored by the mainstream press
if you're at all interested in fads of fashion and who isn't these days then check out on mass on
mass is news views and interviews with Australia's own glamorous life plus the ID magazine report
hot from London and I think of Australians and I have that they punch open and want to pass
unnoticed they all wear brown all wear blue all wear grey and they would rather you know look at
them but I think that's unnatural really the FDC was set up in 1983 with a small grant from the
Victorian Ministry for the Arts in Melbourne and the grant was three thousand dollars which enabled
us to set up a office of sorts and in early 1984 we held a number of small shows and then at the
end of 1984 we held our first big parade fashion 84 feel of fashion 84 was incredible I mean we
didn't really in some aspects we didn't really know what it was all going to be like you had an
enormous number of people all drawn together all making clothes the backstage with genetic
we'll make up artists everywhere there were dresses everywhere there were hairdressers I mean
everyone was going mad everything was going wrong everything was going right and then the
lights came on the model started coming out and the moment I was able to get a break and have a
look what it looked like from the front and it just looked incredible and I was all young and secure
and hadn't come across anything like this in my life and I felt like I had a little family and that
was made and wanted and and there was an excuse because I was so dressed up and I was having an
excuse you know to be dressed up you could get away with it because there was a big parade on
and you were sort of who accepted you more they did a similar sort of thing in London it was never
on the scale that it was in Melbourne it was never to the ones overseas never included people that
perhaps made things up in their back room you know someone like Peter Zagouras
