Designers Play Fast And Loose With Oz Theme
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday February 1, 1988
The set was a spectacle, the music production terrific, Elle (The Body)MacPherson et al who stalked the catwalk were fabulous. The choreography was inspired, the audience more glamourous than French Vogue. But did the designers miss the point?
The show Michael Parkinson introduced as "Australian fashions most exciting event in 200 years" finally took place last night at the Opera House.
Certainly the most publicised fashion show, the Bicentennial Wool Collection provided wool growers, fashion industry heavies, local and overseas press, local dignitaries and the royal couple with everything organisers had promised. Well, nearly everything.
The theme, we had been told over and over, was to be "inspiration Australia", but most designers' interpretation was very loose. Introduced via video ahead of their segments, designers pinpointed which particular aspects of the Australian landscape, flora, fauna or culture they had chosen to interpret.
Of the nine international designers, the British contingent's Bruce Oldfield's and Jean Muir's were the most valiant attempts at interpreting anything remotely associated with Australia.
Oldfield's embroidered Aboriginal figures on several body-hugging cocktail frocks justified his Aboriginal theme, but the fire engine red and canary yellow heavily-fringed, off-the-shoulder dresses and suits suggested more of a cowboy theme.
Jean Muir's tropical fish theme worked beautifully with a collection of near 60s op art designs in coral reef colours and bright knits with colourful fish worked into sweaters.
The Missoni collection captured the colours of the inland Australian landscape but the layered knits in dusky greys, maroons and earth tonings would certainly not be foreign in Northern Europe.
Kenzo took the colours of sea and sand and created a young "down by the seaside" look with loose stripey pants, floral mu-mus and wrap sarongs. It was a fresh, easy and fun collection, but again would be as much at home on the Mediterranean as on the Tasman.
Claude Montana's segment was the most dramatic and theatrical. The models looked like sophisticated wayward nuns in very sculptured black and white clothes. Montana showed black wool crepe, skirts and pants with high stiffened asymmetrical waistbands, dresses without the familiar Montana shoulder-padding but emphasising shoulders with stiffened extended necklines.
Oscar de la Renta's collection was true "drop dead" material. His New York suits and evening gowns were the ultimate expression of glamour.
But if de la Renta took the Australian theme seriously he must have thought Australia was somewhere south of the border. The flamenco music, Spanish ruffles and even lace mantillas suggested nothing of his stated theme - the Australian tropics - which he must have seen photographed in black and white.
On the whole it was the Australian designers who had most fun with the theme - Adele Palmer sending her models on stage looking like first settlement soldiers, and Stuart Membery recalling the Anzacs with a collection of khaki serge military looks.
What was shown on the catwalk last night was a cross-section of directional fashions from some of the world's leading designers, and while a Montana client would require as much courage as cash to wear some of the originals, on the whole the collection showed wearable fashion that will be reported world-wide from an Australian setting.
Local designers are fighting an uphill battle in taking their names to overseas markets, but in bringing the international fashion press here en masse the Australian Wool Corporation has probably advanced the cause by a decade.
Had the world witnessed Donna Karan indulge in fantasy costume to satisfy a theme rather than showing what she does best - very wearable racy New York-style clothes - the visiting critics might have deemed Australia a fashion centre not worth returning to.
PAGE 8: The precarious life of a model.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald