A fledgling event is preparing to bring back the “once iconic days of fashion” in Australia.
The Label Ministry event will kick off its first event tonight at Darlinghurst's niche Cell Block venue, showcasing a handful of Australia's top design talent.
The designers - selected by invitation-only - will present their most recent collections live on the runway, to an audience mix of media, industry professionals, designers, and consumers.
Included in the line-up tonight are local designers: Gabriel Lee, Aquintic by Ayaka Ichikawa, Andie Meredith, Edition by Alice Sutton, and Jonte Pike.
Event organiser Jade Odermatt said the launch tonight aims to act as a beacon for the fashion industry, which is currently struggling under the pressure of various market factors.
“The Australian fashion industry is suffering enormously due to online sales, disloyalty to our own market place and our own local designers, inability to maintain, find and pay for local production lines, and a population of women who buy overseas labels over their own,” she said.
“Label Ministry will expose our local designers and their followers to a whole other stream of design and a fashion outside of the major fashion houses. Their tastes are not homogeneous and they will no longer be obliged to look for fashion, shop and conform in this way. These emerging designers are feeling demoralised. These are people who are devoted to their careers in fashion no matter what. However, they are looking down the barrel of an industry in which their chosen art is a thankless one.”
Odermatt said Label Ministry runway shows will cycle approximately every four months to showcase, respectively, autumn/winter and spring/summer collections of designers, with the next show already in planning for March 2014.
Summing up the event's objective, Odermatt added that Label Ministry is looking long-term.
“We wish to unite the entire industry and its sub-culture, whom we believe are the glue. Fashion journalists, fashion lovers, industry professionals, fashion bloggers, designers, consumers, connoisseurs, buyers, shoppers to come together and once again create a wonderful, cohesive, profitable, exciting, buoyant, glamorous, and rewarding fashion industry that creates the momentum that we once had in Australia in the once iconic days of fashion.”