Most everyone knows about New York, London, Milan and Paris Fashion Week, but there's now a new fashion week event looking to make a name for itself in the industry.
Bringing together Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with the country's formal fashion industry, the inaugural Australian Indigenous Fashion Week kicked off last week, and its organizers are already planning to expand.
'In terms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, the mediums have been visual - hieroglyphics and landscapes, sculptures and canvas,' Krystal Perkins, AIFW founder told Business of Fashion.
'The international community knows that aesthetic, the style of our paintings and art. What we're doing is trying to nurture the next level, which is textile design, fashion design and the manufacturing of fashion and wearable accessories.'
This season's AIFW might have been a small-scale and short-lived production, but Jarrad Clarke, vice-president and global creative director of IMG, announced that beginning in 2015, the event will be part of the official schedule for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia.
'Our doors have opened for [AIFW] to be part of our on-site schedule next year. It's a training wheel experience, and we're all really looking forward to seeing how this can grow. Not just for the local indigenous community, but the Australian fashion industry,' Clarke said.
Leading up to the launch of AIFW, participating designers spent about a year and a half being tutored by former designer Sophie Nixon as part of a program at Sydney's Whitehouse School of Design. During this program, designers worked to create the collection they showed at AIFW.
'[AIFW] is something we all need to get behind and support, because there is incredible talent here. But it's hidden talent. These guys have never had the platform to showcase their work. And it's very important. It will give the indigenous community other outlets and other avenues so that they can see a pathway,' Sydney-born visual and casting director Kannon Rajah told Business of Fashion.
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