Emily Watson
It was a case of 16,000-kilometres of distance, during a New York winter, that Melbourne-based designer Emily Watson realised her fondness for Australian summers, ultimately deciding the direction of her four-year-old label. “I was homesick,” she says of a semester abroad while completing a fashion degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 2019.
Tapping swimwear, something that instantly evoked home, she began subverting and reconstructing its codes. “It's funny to the people who know me, as I'm not much of a beachgoer,” she says of what now forms her brand's DNA.
That hasn't stopped her splicing and lopping her way to asymmetrical separates, leotards and swim dense with ruffles, ties and panels – some individual pieces have 50-plus
