FIRST LIGHT
As the full-force of the pandemic hit early last year, Australian designers joined the rest of the country in worrying about the future, their businesses and the fate of a whole industry. What is going to happen? What will happen when shops close? Will we survive?
Rewind hundreds of years, to the 1700s, and the shores of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. Hand-dyed textiles brought by Macassan, Indonesian fisherman, from Sulawesi arrive. Soon a new style of fabric is incorporated into important objects and worn in ceremony. Go back 40,000-plus years, and the rolling of fibres between a palm and thigh in Indigenous cultures was the progenitor of cloth. Look forward, then, to the 1960s and 70s, and the famed silk batiks of Ernabella and Utopia in Central Australia emerge to great acclaim. Soon after, graphic colour bursts from the Tiwi Islands, from pioneering artist Bede Tungutalum and Giovanni Tipungwuti’s screen prints to Bima Wear’s electric dresses, to name a few.
To reassure ourselves of the longevity and continuity of fashion design here, we need only look to our First Nations peoples. “There’s this remarkable repertoire of sophistication and fashion and style,” says Franchesca Cubillo, executive director
