MELBOURNE: Craft Victoria, the organisation dedicated to fostering creativity and professionalism in contemporary craft and design, is to launch its own festival.
While full details are yet to be revealed, it is understood the event – scheduled for August – will have an artisanal theme focusing on the conception and construction of garments.
A Craft Victoria spokesperson described the showcase as a "bigger and better evolution" of the Melbourne Scarf festival, launched by the organisation in 2002.
Meanwhile in the shorter term the themes of conception and construction would also be investigated through Craft Victoria's upcoming How You Make It exhibit, she said.
Running from March 6 to April 12, with a launch scheduled to coincide with the L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival (LMFF) from March 2 to 9, How You Make It will feature works from a broad range of contemporary labels. These include: Materialbyproduct (Susan Dimasi and Chantal McDonald), S!x (Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd), Anthea van Kopplen, Project (Kara Baker and Shelley Lasica), Ess. Laboratory (Hoshika Oshimi and Tatsuyoshi Kawabata), Formallyknownas (Toby Whittington), Paula Dunlop and Simon Cooper.
The designers would "not only create new garment forms and new ways of wearing clothes, they [would] develop new design systems," the spokesperson confirmed.
"How You Make It explores artisanal fashion design practices that draw on traditional tailoring techniques to form contemporary collections. Existing garments are deconstructed: unpicked, reconfigured and reworked, using fine tailoring and conceptual templates in order to create a new style of clothes. These conceptual Australian fashion designers open a dialogue between craft and design that places the focus back on how and why objects are made."