‘It’s a sad day’: The uncertain future of Australian Fashion Week

The long journey onto the international runways for Zimmermann, Romance Was Born, Christopher Esber and Dion Lee began with models strutting their sequinned, slashed and embroidered stuff at Australian Fashion Week.

Today, the direction of that runway became unclear, as owner IMG said it was abandoning the event after nearly 20 years.

“The event has played a key role in ushering the industry forward,” Natalie Xenita, managing director, IMG Fashion Events Asia Pacific, said in a press release. “We are incredibly proud of IMG’s many accomplishments leading Australian Fashion Week for the last 20 years.

“We navigated a changing industry by introducing new initiatives including the strategic refocus on resort collections, a consumer integrated model that has been replicated globally, waiving participation fees to support designers since the pandemic, and hosting the first-ever Indigenous designer shows.”

A model posing at the The Bec + Bridge show staged at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal in May as part of Australian Fashion Week.Credit: Getty Images

Xenita and other IMG representatives were unavailable for further comment on whether the event had been sold to another organisation. The final association between IMG and Australian Fashion Week will be the Laureate Awards held at the Sydney Opera House next week.

With front-row whispers getting louder over past months that Australian Fashion Week was for sale, the future of the Sydney-based event remains uncertain. Since launching in 1996 with Akira Isogawa and Alex Perry on the runway, the industry event has drawn international buyers and press to Australia.

“Let’s hope it continues,” said designer Jordan Gogos, who has shown at Australian Fashion Week for the past four years.

“During Australian Fashion Week, I’m a celebrity, and on the day it ends, I’m a normal person.”

Gogos is preparing to take part in an exhibition at the Australian consulate in New York, and says that the media attention during fashion week has been a crucial factor in raising his profile as a multidisciplinary artist.

“Australian fashion struggles to get that gas, that attention, outside the week. I once made stuff out of cardboard boxes, and it was covered by everyone. You can sneeze and it’s covered.”

Critics of the event have focused on the recent shift in attention from what’s on the runway to street style outside the Carriageworks venue, along with the absence of recognisable labels, celebrities and models.

Simon Lock, the founder of Australian Fashion Week who sold the business to IMG in 2005, is disappointed by IMG’s decision to exit the business.

“It’s a sad day for Australian fashion,” Lock said from London, where he operates Ordre, a digital luxury fashion marketplace for wholesale buyers. “When I sold the event to IMG, it was trying to ensure the future of Australian fashion.”

“Over time, the event has become more focused on domestic retail and social media rather than the international market. For many designers, the return on investment in taking part is no longer there.

“The owners decided to pull back on international marketing for the event that really generated the commercial reason for designers to participate.”

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