Celeste Barber is well-versed in style, but she has a “love-hate connection” with her attire and the fashion world. The comic actor who gained notoriety for mocking high fashion shoots has since begun appearing in them ( she is no less of a Tom Ford muse ) and this outsider-to-insider trajectory makes her the ideal host for the three-part documentary series The Way We Wore about Australia’s fashion history.
The Method We Wore examines clothes as a sort of material biography, allowing for the tracking of both personal and national character. Modern fashion is dealing with numerous crises, including social, environmental, and economic ones.
Through a wealth of archival footage, including 1930s fashion parades in Sydney department stores and male-gaze-heavy lingerie advertisements, director Nel Minchin vividly brings this to life. Barber’s reactions are ( decidedly mixed ).
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The first season, which is the only one made available to Guardian Australia, is a history of Australia’s magazine industry and includes commentary from those who contributed to its development, such as Edwina McCann, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Australia who later became editorial director at News Prestige, Catherine Martin, an Oscar-winning costume designer, Akira Isogawa, and the founder of Cleo editor Ita Buttrose. The event follows the development of American fashion press over the following 90 years, starting with the 1933 debut of the Australian Women’s Weekly.
It never seems as though the assembled group of industry figures are singing to their own choir about how fantastic ( or terrible ) the sector can be. Barber pays close attention to how journal image-making has influenced Australian ‘ perceptions of themselves and, she emphasizes, whether they even see themselves. The ladies Barber encounters between the websites of glossy magazines have tended to be thin, light, rich, and frequently no Australian, ranging from Twiggy in the 1960s to Kate Moss during the 1990s.
According to McCann in the episode,” I believe Indigenous storytelling is unquestionably an area where [Vogue ] did fall down for a very long period.” ” Everywhere we looked, there were the most extraordinary talents, and we just had n’t asked or looked.”
Elaine George, the first Indigenous include star of American Vogue, is likewise questioned. George acknowledges that despite the fact that her career was launched in September 1993, the glitz swiftly faded:” In the industry, there were no Indian designers.” I believe I might have stayed around to help if there had been one or two.
One of American art’s greatest mistakes, the 1988 Woolmark rally at the Sydney Opera House, was also caused by a lack of variety and uniqueness. Six American manufacturers, including Claude Montana, Gianni Versace, Oscar de la Renta, and Donna Karan, were featured in the airport show along with nine other global manufacturers. In the show, journalist Adam Worling describes it as a “very adventurous, great task.”
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Worling describes the theater discussion that followed, with foreign designers accusing Australians of copying their aesthetic. Despite the fact that some American developers have since been accused of following global runways a little too closely, Barber sees this time as the turning point after which American artists began to establish their personal identities.
The fall of Australia’s textile industry and its function in the global supply chain, as well as the trend inventors from Australia who have influenced what we wear now, will all be covered in upcoming shows.
Barber hopes that the television set will serve as a primer on an Australian economy she thinks is underappreciated. Even for those who are familiar with clothing, it is wonderful to see that Australia has always had a sense of style, yet before fashion evolved into the ferocious beast we know it to be today.