Philip Boon: Kara, how did you feel about moving from your creative, design background to [working for a major department store]? Was it a major culture shock for you, the product development process?
Kara Baker: “I remember one particular moment where I was taking two young buyers to LA. We were in a little boutique somewhere near Fred Segal in a back street in LA, and the buyers were going through the racks saying 'Oh this will be great...’ I was trying to hush them down. Then the designer walked out from the back and she was furious. 'You can't rip me off! What are you doing? Get out of my shop!' We went back to the hotel and [the buyers] didn't get it. They were indignant. Why was [the designer] treating them like that? That's when I realised there was a huge gulf between the buyers, who were developing product, and the young designer in her own small boutique.”
Philip Boon: “Perhaps they weren't aware of how much work goes into design itself?”
Kara Baker: “A lot of the buyers were very anti-design and they really dissed designers. But then they'd all go and buy clothes that I knew were designed by teams of St Martins graduates. Prada was just emerging then, it was huge, and they all had their Prada little backpack. They'd aspire to certain labels but they had no consciousness that these labels were designed by really creative people, often very young and not very well paid, but who had the jobs of their dreams in a big design team in Milan. I'm not blaming them, I just think they just didn't know that side of the fashion system.”
Philip Boon: “Sarah, can you explain what you think is the difference between what we're calling 'knock-offs' and 'product development'?”
Sarah Gale: “'Knock-off' for me is a complete copy. You pick something up, fit it, spec it and you put it in a parcel and it goes off to China and then basically do the same thing. Product development... we would always trend first and have a look at what we felt from the runways was going to translate into the northern hemisphere first, and then decide what trends we would adapt into the southern hemisphere. We'd go to the northern hemisphere and have a look at who's adapted from the runways into high street stores and how they'd done it. Then all the stores would be shopped and you'd pick out key pieces.
Philip Boon: “And with the key pieces you would....”
Sarah Gale: You wouldn’t pick out a piece to say ‘I’m going to knock this off’ because one of the problems with doing that, apart from the fact that I do think morally to just straight copy something to me doesn’t fit, but one of the problems you have is it’s easy to find five other stores in Australia doing it at lots of different price points, so you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot. So it’s really about having a look at how they do it then taking maybe a trim off here, a colour pallette off there. It might be the length of something there, it could be that pattern inside. Product development to me is more being inspired by the pieces and then creating your own.”
Philip Boon: “What kind of percentage in Australia are knock-offs compared to product development?”
Sarah Gale: “I would have said these days you're probably looking at about 70 per cent product development to that 30 per cent knock-off. People can do knock-offs but if you completely knock it off you run the risk of other people doing just that. You're creating the competition before you even start.”
Philip Boon: “Sarah, why is it in your opinion that Australia is so known for reproducing overseas fashion design?”
Sarah Gale: “Look, I think some of this comes down to [in the 1970s] a lot more was made in Australia. A lot of retailers [today] don't actually have pattern makers, they don't have sample machinists. They have to send something off to China. I think that's where you start to get that development which gets closer to your original sample.”
Kara Baker: “I think we have to acknowledge that when Jenny and I were young, when we were making very individual clothes, it was a complete other world. We had a post-punk ethos. If [Melbourne designers] were influenced by anything, it was The Face magazines. We live in another century. There's no comparison.”
Philip Boon: “The major department stores it seems want all their fashion designs and products to look the same. Is this what the fashion buying public want?”
Sarah Gale: “You're making a huge assumption that that's what they do. I would say that as any other industry, they know they're going to make money by following trends. I think a lot of them do look the same, but I don't think that's the intention. They'll look what sold in the past few seasons. Then they'll look at the trends going forward and say, 'How do we adapt those trends into a similar sort of look so that our customer will go for that?' They're nuts actually if they don't follow the trends. They're in a very commercial market with a lot riding on it. At the same time, what they don't do very well, most of them, is really know their customer properly. If they knew their customer properly, they could then reinvent their ranges so they didn't look like everyone else's. That's the major issue with a lot of the retailers in Australia at the moment, is that they're too broad on their customer bases and they haven't honed in. If they hone in, we'll get more of an individual tone from each retailer.”
Philip Boon: “Kara, what's your take on all this?”
Kara Baker: “I don't believe women follow a particular look. They might look like they do because they don't have any choice. But women are much more complex and much more interesting than wanting just to wear the latest sexy dress. I used to look at trends but I barely buy fashion magazines or look at Style.com any more. I've become a lot more broad in my inspiration. I think a lot about what I want to make then I pretty much go straight to pattern. I toile and I look at it on me and I fiddle and often a mistake gives you a great idea. Often an idea will sit in my head for a couple of years because it's so easy to be too far ahead as it is to be behind.”
Jenny Bannister: “Kara's designing with flattering the female form in mind. I find a lot of on-trend stuff out there is not flattering. If I see one more fat teenage girl walking down the street in a polyester bag ... they're not flattering! This season it's all about the digital print. How many digital prints can we have?”
Philip Boon: “There's a lack of inspiration out there. I style shoots all the time and I try and put things in and constantly come up against editors who will say, that's not our market, it's too exclusive, it's too whatever.”
Sarah Gale: “Anyone who understands fashion is not the normal consumer. The majority of people out there are lost. They're looking for safety. If they have no confidence they say 'if I saw it here, here and here' and 'if I saw this girl and this girl and this girl wearing it, then it's safe, I'm on trend, I belong to something'. “I think the thing that's interesting in business at the moment is that one of the trends is individualism. Customers have started to be able to put together their own look. If you have a look at some of the entry price point retailers, you'll find a lot of them are struggling because people aren't looking for basics. There isn't a business that can rest on their laurels now on core basics. Customers want something a little bit special.”
Philip Boon: How is original Australian design really meant to compete with what's being developed for the international runways?
Kara Baker: “You've really got two choices now: you're niche and you have a very specific business, or you have a mainstream market. If you want to design for a very small market you've obviously got freedom to be a much more individual designer and make something more approaching avant-garde. But you're going to have to want pretty much a limited market. I still think we don't have enough confidence in Australian design.”
Sarah Gale: “When you say we don't have confidence in it, are you talking as a consumer base?”
Kara Baker: “I would say more the mass market labels maybe don't have the confidence to employ a great designer and really let them go for it. They still put that designer on a plane and send them to shop and then they'll adapt those designs. Our distance at the bottom of the other hemisphere and the fact that our season follows, it means that it's just too easy.”
Philip Boon: “I remember coming to Melbourne for the first time in 1999 and I found the general public were really supportive of young Melbourne designers. I think in the last 20 years now that's been whittled away and it's not so much about supporting the locals as getting the most fashionable thing you can. I think maybe the internet's had something to do with that.”
Jenny Bannister: “People cry when they go to Chapel Street now.”
Sarah Gale: “We're sitting in this room pretending that we should all be leaders and we shouldn't be because that's not how our society works!”
Jenny Bannister: “Then how did Chapel Street sustain itself for so long in the old days with all these funky different shops? I was trying to get my first shop on Chapel Street in 1997 and it was so hard. In the end I had this joke amongst my friends: 'which real estate agent will I have to sleep with?' 'They don't want you Jenny, they want the chain stores'. That brings me to another point: now all roads lead to Chadstone, and Doncaster. They've all got the same things. One time I was on a trip to see what it was like and I was starting to forget which shop I was in. I thought 'I'm on another planet'.”
Sarah Gale: “But you are on a different planet to the mass consumer. We all are in this industry. We'd love it to be different but we live in the real world and they're commercial companies.”
Philip Boon: “Jenny, can you tell us about how you went about your design process?”
Jenny Bannister: “I was listening to all the retailers I sold to around Australia and I was listening to the international trends as well. I was looking at what was flattering, I was looking at customers in my shops, I was listening to my retailers. They'd say, 'Oh, that new dress is fabulous, I can get a really big bum into that' or 'That's great because it's really easy to take up if they're short. Maybe more of those.' It became a product thing. It wasn't a happy way of working. It was a way of making money.”
Kara Baker: “I think the flip side is this extraordinary mass market, fast fashion, trend-driven saturation of fashion has created a niche for people like myself. I'm over 50: who's going to give me a job as a designer? I'm going to have to create a career for myself if I want to work until I'm 70-something, which I do. I have to be an artisan, I have to offer something you can't get anywhere else which is a personal experience. I have to offer made-to-measure because you can't buy that anywhere unless you come and stand with me in front of my mirror. It's the antithesis but also an antidote to what is the reality of where we are today.”
Sarah Gale: “I think that we'll see it turn around. It will. It has to. If you think about designers … they became very reachable. So those have become achievable, mass market's become so big... what's that gap? We want something bespoke. People won't be talking about 'is that Kara?' They'll be sitting around the dinner table going, 'who's your designer?' They will have personal designers to go everywhere with them and make all of their clothes so they can't be copied.”
KARA BAKER: “When you say ‘do you rip off the trends’, a true designer is the trend. I used to buy huge amounts of vintage clothes. I didn’t know why I was attracted to them, so I kept them in the wardrobe for long enough – one year, two years, sometimes four years – then ‘Oh, I can wear this now and no one will laugh at me because suddenly it’s the trend’. That’s my gift. I can see it, instinctively. I have literally been doing that since I started op shopping when I was 13 years old.
That’s my little antennae going ‘Oh, that’s the opposite of what’s around, that’s what I’m excited about. I’ll just sit on that and I’ll wait’.”