Fashion Forward

At campuses around Australia the annual fashion graduate shows present some of the most exciting and innovative emerging talent before a select group of media, industry talent spotters, buyers and proud family and friends. Invited to attend many of these shows, in 1993 Powerhouse curators were so impressed by the creative expression of the next generation of Australian designers they proposed an annual exhibition. It was initially titled Student Fashion (1993–2020) and renamed Future Fashion in 2021.

Launched on 15 December 1993 by Australian design icon Jenny Kee, the exhibition initially featured garments by fashion graduates from tertiary courses all around Australia as well as winning garments from industry-sponsored student fashion awards, including the Smirnoff International Awards, the Grand Marnier/Swarovski eveningwear award, The Young Italo-Australians fashion scholarship, the Liz Davenport Dux Award and the King Gee Design Award. By 2002, as more state and regional opportunities were available for students to show their work, and the number of industry sponsored awards diminished, Powerhouse refocussed the Future Fashion exhibition to showcase graduates from four public and independent Sydney-based institutions.

The inaugural exhibition required a unique exhibition design framework to support the students’ creativity and so Powerhouse commissioned Stephen Varady, an emerging talent in Australian architecture at the time. Varady is now a leading Sydney-based architect, educator, consultant and architecture advocate. His brief was to design plinths that would be innovative and sustainable, as they would need to be dismantled, packed up and re-used over many years, which they certainly were, as parts of the design were still in use seven years later. Seeking to challenge traditional museum display architecture, and drawing on his love of surfing, Varady came up with a design featuring large wave-like plinths. Made from lightweight fibreglass, their translucency allowed for the play of light and shadow through the gallery. His memorable design presentation included a maquette complete with a 1970s action figure standing in for the mannequin.