Sarah Buckley: Why Australian fashion isn’t taken seriously

Australia is a cultural desert — as is our fashion. How did we become so deprived of originality that we resorted to catering for Paddington’s yummy mummy, asks Sarah Buckley.

Jeremy Clarkson, a British columnist for the Sunday Times, once said: “We must thank God for the South of France. He did really well there. But we mustn’t let Him forget Australia — a wide cultural desert populated by man-eating sharks, poisonous snakes, spiders and men in shorts.”

Unfortunately Jeremy, not a whole lot has changed since the early 2000s. Only now distressed double-denim has made a comeback.

We still call ourselves “bastards” and “dogs”, and there was once a brewery in Melbourne called Piss. Its slogan was ‘Taking the piss’, according to Australian journalist and critic Phillip Knightley.

Our cultural aptitude is viscerally seedy and brute. But not in a charming, boyish, British way. In a more damning way.

Knightley laid all this out in a speech to Parliament House back in 2002. Indeed, the tradition of questioning Australia’s culture – or lack of – is a tale as old as time.

Double denim is back, for better or for worse.

So much so that we have a name for it. The cultural cringe.

For a long time, said cultural cringe was fashionable. Until it wasn’t anymore. In fact, in the past decade it has become far more on trend to pour squillions into local culture and proclaim its brilliance and originality no matter what.

What is this and how do we stop it?

But here I am looking around Australia and wondering if these claims of a shallow culture pool continue to ring true.

A uniquely microscopic example of this is Australia’s fashion industry.
You’ll find column inches written about how our fashion industry has come of age with world-beating designers sending their best down the runway.

Now I’m not a fashion scholar or careerist. I’m a 20-something with a lifelong love of clothes – precisely the kind of person the industry should cater for. But I am routinely left with the feeling that Australian fashion is elitist at best — not to mention boring.

The haunted houses of Paddington's Glenmore Rd.

We’ve got Paddington’s Glenmore Rd brimming with cheap, stark white sandals, beige body con dresses, Scanlan Theodore (our best crack at groundbreaking), pseudo Eastern Suburbs Bohemian mothers canoodling at Jackie’s cafe and an entire fashion industry willing to accommodate them.

We are so depraved of originality, amid Tigerlily sarongs, Oroton bags, beige Australian Fashion Weeks and self-important influencers ready to show you their needless fur coat for a relatively even-keeled 20-degree winter in Sydney on a “street style” Instagram.

We’ve got an institution, the Powerhouse Museum, with their hand out to the government for Ultimo to “please, stay, stay, stay in the city, not Parramatta please! It’s way too far a location to throw another $130k ball on the taxpayer dime!”

And then, there are the designers themselves. All I can see is an inferno of inadequacy. It’s hard to see one single Australian designer that’s objectively up to the task of competing with luxury houses in Europe.

I do suppose Australia is the perfect breeding ground for upcoming designers: Everyone will celebrate mediocrity, any libertarian with a proclivity toward the arts will take a stab in the dark at something that looks different because we’re so deprived of originality. What’s more, the taxpayers will absolutely fund it for you, no questions asked. The dream!

If only I could create a remunerative framework where all the designers paid me to critique their collections.

At the end of it all, here’s the really sad reality: Although I think it’s terribly funny that someone in stubbies could criticise someone for pursuing a career in Australia’s fashion industry, are they all but wrong to?

Do we have a culture down under of just rewarding anything we come up with in lieu of anything that’s actually, objectively good?

Has the cultural cringe become so uncool that we now celebrate just anything?