Going goth: It’s ‘Wednesday’ at Fashion Week

Something wicked this way comes from the blue skies of Brisbane in clouds of black fabric to the Australian Fashion Week runway at Carriageworks in Sydney. Designer Gail Sorronda is the living, hubble bubbling antidote to Brisbane’s Barbiecore fashion aesthetic and is here to ride the gothcore revival, no broom required.

Fashion designer Gail Sorronda with Liana Lottie in an outfit from her In Dreams collection for Australian Fashion Week, photographed at Oxford House.Credit: Steven Siewert

“I’m a dark romantic,” Sorronda says. “But I’m just following the path of light.”

“It has been eight years since my last Australian Fashion Week and I just felt this phoenix energy to create and remind people that I’m still around.”

Sorronda has delved into the dark arts of design for 18 years, cultivating a following in Milan, Tokyo and in the sunglass-covered eyes of Karl Lagerfeld who described her “as one to watch.” Now with fashion’s dark side gaining greater exposure through the success of the Netflix series Wednesday, she is casting her spell closer to home.

In Sorronda’s Resort 2024 collection In Dreams showing at Australian Fashion Week on Wednesday, darkness dominates with bleak black pinafores, strict shirting and romantic gowns for women who refuse to grow out of their Twilight phase.

The goth approach is not a marketing ploy, although the bowerbird designer has seen the hype surrounding Wednesday. At Australian Fashion Week in 2005 Sorronda’s first collection, An Angel At My Table, established her moody signature, setting Sorronda apart from Brisbane’s colourful creators Easton Pearson, Paul Hunt and Keri Craig.

“That collection was inspired by my sleep paralysis,” she says. “This is freaky but when I closed my eyes I would see shadows and lights. I alway believe that I lived between the realms.”

Designer Michael Lo Sordo dabbles with the dark side at the closing show of day one at Australian Fashion Week.Credit: Getty

“It sounds a bit ‘hocus pocus’ but I was drawn to something that was important that I couldn’t quite understand and wanted to. By expressing it through fashion it helped me.”

A glimpse of goth on the Anna Quan runway at The Ace Hotel on Tuesday.Credit: Getty

With gothcore having made its presence felt at the autumn 2023 collections in New York at Rodarte and already rearing its head at Australian Fashion Week in Michael Lo Sordo’s boxy Balenciaga trenches, trailing Morticia Addams lace gowns and swooping silk satin dresses, Sorronda’s competition is growing. Having built a strong business, operating a store on Brisbane’s fashionable James Street for 11 years, she is unfazed by other designers’ flirtation with the dark side.

“I have clients that have walked the path of the label,” she says. “I have the daughter, the granddaughter, the mother. It is an exchange of energy.”

At times Sorronda has felt the attraction of Europe’s energy and the potential to offer an Australian alternative to Zimmermann’s prettier approach to femininity. In 2010, she was part of Vogue Italy’s Who Is On Next talent program and had a capsule collection stocked in one of Dolce & Gabbana’s Milan boutiques.

“What’s interesting is that no matter where I go, I’ve stayed true to where I am. Even in London, Paris or sunny Queensland. I feel like my creative practice can still flourish and grow strong within my garden space, here at home in Brisbane.”

Part of Sorronda’s truth is her commitment to her aesthetic in sheer black net dresses, high collared shirts and chunky accessories. It’s difficult to imagine her in jeans and a white T-shirt.

“It’s almost self-preservation,” she says. “Being creative and putting yourself out there requires a strong exoskeleton. I dress to be a strong woman.”

Sorronda also derives strength from more mysterious sources but like a good magician, she’s keeping her Cupid’s bow pursed.

“I would like to talk about it more but sometimes that magic needs to be kept in a special place where it can alchemise, transmute and you can draw something creative from it,” she says. For the time being, that place is Brisbane.

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