Toni Maticevski has made beautiful things for 25 years, yet he still remains surprised by the impact they can have.
The Australian fashion designer celebrates his 25th year in the notoriously fickle fashion industry.
Toni Maticevski doesn’t like talking about himself. The Melbourne-based fashion designer would prefer his work did it for him. He likes that everybody brings their own perspective and experiences to each of his intricate, sculptural pieces. Nobody will wear it in the same way, and nor should they.
But something that the designer didn’t foresee was just how much meaning the people who wear his clothes could take from them.
“I think so much has been around making fun of fashion. It’s not brain surgery and it’s not saving lives. And I feel like [that], if it gives you a rush and it gives you the energy and the positive thing that you need in that moment, then it might save your life and it might heal you and it might make an experience better,” Maticevski says of our relationship with clothing.
“I’ve had a lot of my clients say, ‘I felt safe and I felt protected, I felt beautiful and I felt all these things that are part of the shield or the armour that you wear’.”
This, the designer says, was unexpected.
“I think it totally surprised me that that’s also what [my clothes] did do. I think I initially [thought], ‘I just want to make beautiful things’. But then to see how that affected and still affects people who wear them, I think, well, there’s more to it.”
This year marks Maticevski’s 25th year of making said beautiful things. Gowns that open up as if in bloom, draping that sculpts the body, and cascades of fringing and frills. His clothes are mostly made in Australia and in fabrics such as bonded crêpe and silk-washed organza and satin.
Longevity in the slippery, tricky world of fashion is no mean feat.
Maticevski credits his clients for his still being here, for pushing him further.
“They know the brand inside and out. So when you are kind of cheating them a little bit by giving them something they may have seen … [or] my team would say, ‘That was a good seller, let’s just re-do that in a different colour’, and I’m like, ‘That doesn’t work for me’, I’ll try it because obviously some stores or some buyers want that, but the client sees through it.”
Staying true to his own vision, which sometimes calls for steeliness from the unfailingly polite and softly spoken designer, is something of which he is incredibly proud. “I think it’s just not giving in to the outside voices … people assume that by being polite you are open to the suggestion.”
Which is not to say that holding his line is necessarily easy. “Maybe I take it a little too personally, but maybe that’s just because I am sensitive to a lot of things and I see people who kind of just move on and [yet] some things will sit with me for years … I think that’s also part of the resilience. And for me it kind of led me to just stick to my lane and not worry about other people’s lanes and other people’s successes or failures and things like that.”
Creating a style in this way is something that Mitchell Oakley Smith, writer, curator and author of the 2016 book Maticevski: The Elegant Rebel, admires.
“At his core, Toni is a craftsman – there aren’t many designers around today that work in such a singular, hands-on manner,” Oakley Smith says.
“And what really stands out to me, especially in reflecting on the research and interviews I did for The Elegant Rebel nearly 10 years ago, is how he diverges from and returns to his creative pillars or hallmarks, each time with a fresh, refreshed take … Toni truly has a signature, something I find to be increasingly rare.”
Maticevski’s contribution to the Australian fashion industry, Oakley Smith says, comes in many forms. Not just consistency, but also possibility.
“In terms of his contribution to Australian fashion, I think Toni has done several things: he helped us, and the rest of the world … to see our local industry and aesthetic for so much more than we ever did,” he says.
“He’s been a true constant in Australian fashion for nearly three decades, and all the while he’s still being worn on Hollywood red carpets by such a diverse cast of talented women.”
Also, adds Oakley Smith – and this counts for a lot – Maticevski is a really decent person.
“And the last and perhaps lesser-known contribution is his genuine likability. Toni’s a humble, gracious designer that respects his peers whilst staying true to himself. I think that’s pretty admirable.”
Maticevski is proud of the cumulative effect of it all – highs, lows, still being here.
“I think it’s just having a presence really … everyone goes in waves of moments where they feel like they’re on a good trajectory or on a high, when there’s moments when you’re, ‘Oh, I’m sort of feeling a little lost in the narrative of everything’,” he says.
“But I guess within that, [to reach] 25 years and still have a presence and an audience and have maintained that when, for the first I’d say half of my career, most people were like, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do with your brand. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t sort of slot into anything we know’. I think the testament of it is that it still exists.”
That people eventually did understand his brand is also in part, he says, down to his customers.
“I feel like the customer was the driver in the end. They pretty much pushed a lot of the initial stockists that we landed into buying the brand because they would go into the store and be like, ‘Why don’t you have Maticevski?’. To this day the customer drives demand and that’s how we’ve been able to grow markets internationally.”
Ever since he was a child fashion has given the designer a feeling of freedom.
“I think it was always a bit of an escape from the real world and so even to this day I talk about my brand as my world and it’s like you are invited in but don’t bring the shit in,” he laughs.
For Maticeveski ideas are in abundance. Sometimes he will revisit something he started years ago, but with a different perspective. He likes figuring out how to do things. A lecturer at fashion school once told him he was doing something the wrong way. What he was really doing was doing it his way.
“I feel like my brain is constantly showing me things … and sometimes it’s the thing of having enough time to be able to do everything, but at the same time being an editor and looking at the overall thing and being like, ‘OK, well this idea can wait for next year or this idea might wait for another five years’,” he says.
“Sometimes it’s a thing where I have a rack of patterns that I’ve worked on and styles that just haven’t had a moment yet – and some date back 20 years ago – and so I’ll kind of look at them occasionally and be like, ‘Well maybe that’s the right moment for her’. I’m constantly navigating ideas and trying to put them in place for when they feel right.”
If he wasn’t a fashion designer, Maticevski might have been an artist, or maybe he still will. Or more accurately, he already is. His other creative practices of photography and collage are taking shape. And definitely taking over his Melbourne apartment.
“I think it’s becoming a bit of a big project and I’m not quite sure what I’m doing with it, but it’s sort of there in the sidelines, just waiting to have its moment eventually,” he says.
Maticevski has done many things. There have been costumes for ballets such as Phillip Adams BalletLab’s Miracle (2009) and Aviary (2011), for which he shared a Helpmann Award with milliner Richard Nylon. His work has been surveyed at the Bendigo Art Gallery, with his first major retrospective, Dark Wonderland, and within the 200 Years of Fashion exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2016 he was awarded the Australian Fashion Laureate award, a recognition of lifetime achievement in the industry.
His clothes have been worn by many celebrities, too, including such megawatt names as Selena Gomez and Jennifer Lopez. When Katy Perry was in Melbourne to perform at September’s AFL Grand Final, she wore a sequinned and pearlescent Maticevski two-piece set that made her look like a mermaid. Perry, by the way, has been wearing his clothes for 10 years.
Maticevski likes these celebrity encounters to mean something. “There’s a relationship there and there’s a mutual respect for, I guess, what we both bring to the table. And I think that’s how I like approaching celebrity: that someone very genuinely likes what I do and feels really good in what I do. It’s not just a content-created moment, because there is so much of that,” he says.
The designer has started to think about his next chapters. “I’ve just said to my friends for the longest time that I feel like 60 will be my peak,” he laughs.
“I don’t know what I’m working towards, but I feel like that is the goal. “That’s not too far away, but at the same time, whatever it is kind of feels exciting.”
This story is from the November issue of WISH.
