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Pulsefest: Art Gallery of WA puts emerging fashion designers at the centre stage of its festival arts weekend

To Gigi Raphael, death isn’t black. It isn’t frightening or macabre. In the young fashion designer’s hands, death is soft pink and delicately sheer, adorned with flowers. Raphael’s fashion design is part of her creative outlet to process and honour the lingering grief she feels for her older sister, Tatiana, who died as a baby from a chromosomal disorder. The legacy of that “short but beautiful life”, which ended before Raphael’s began, has been ever-present for the designer. Now, her Blooms For Tatiana collection will be a highlight of a WA-first fashion parade being held as part of The West Australian Pulse. Raphael is one of 21 graduates taking part in an unprecedented showcase from all four State fashion education institutions — ECU and Curtin Universities as well as North Metropolitan and South Metropolitan TAFE – to be held at The Art Gallery of Western Australia next weekend. The fashion shows form a key plank of Pulsefest 2024, programmed around The West Australian Pulse 2024 exhibition: a festival showcasing the best and brightest emerging talent in the fashion and design scene, with two impressive runway shows and a collaboration with Second Life Markets. The dissolution of Perth Fashion Festival, followed by a global pandemic, a rise in the cost of living and plummeting retail sales, opportunities to highlight the emerging talent in Perth’s fashion scene have been few and far between. The Art Gallery of Western Australia’s director Colin Walker is determined to see that change. “AGWA is more than a gallery. We are committed to providing a platform for youth and for emerging creatives to showcase their ideas and works and that’s across all artistic mediums,” Walker tells STM. Building a thriving artistic community in Perth is at the heart of AGWA’s mission to champion the youth of today. It’s reflected in the transformation of the gallery’s audience demographics — before the pandemic, the two highest visitation age groups were 55-64 and over 65, now it’s the 16-24 and 25-34 age brackets, with young people making up 44 per cent of its audience. “We want to celebrate and support fashion as an accessible artform,” says Walker. “These emerging fashion designers need to be seen. Fashion should be a viable career pathway in WA and, as the State gallery, we want to give them a real platform to advance their careers.” Utilising fashion as a medium to process emotion and express identity has underscored design for centuries. The strength of fashion as an artform is clear as STM speaks to four of the graduates taking part in the runway show as they reveal their inspirations, the inner workings of their creative process and the power of their collections. Raphael, from South Metropolitan TAFE, is determined that her collection dedicated to her “spiritual sister” would be a beautiful tribute, with none of the dark “shock factor” an association with death so often carries. Instead, she used the design process to communicate her perspective on the various steps of death and grief, including mourning, embalming, decomposing and resurrecting. “Blooms for Tatiana was a perfect way for me to tell everyone that it’s OK to talk about death. It’s not a scary thing. I’ve dealt with it. My mum’s dealt with it,” the 25-year-old founder of label, Gigi Capri, says. Navigating the trenches of grief was “a hard thing as a little kid” but she has since found solace, and creating this collection in Tatiana’s honour was an emotional yet rewarding accomplishment. “I feel like I was able to give her this little gift from me, hopefully she was watching from somewhere,” Raphael says. It’s safe to say Raphael will be following in the footsteps of the Bentley-based training institution’s renowned alumni including Natalie Rolt, Remi Lane and even her own parents, who own North Perth bridal boutique Galleria Couture. “I basically grew up on the cutting table,” she says. “I feel like I’ve had such a different upbringing (because) my parents aren’t working nine to five, they work a 24-hour job,” she says. James Gatfield — from Curtin University and South Metropolitan TAFE — has also explored something close to his heart for his graduate collection: ballroom culture. Ballroom was a movement created by African American and Latino queer communities in the 1960s, centred in New York, which included the stylised from of dance known as ‘vogue’. “It was created by black trans women, for black trans women,” he says. “The reason that was my inspiration is because we have a ballroom community here in Perth. I’ve fallen into it and really found a space that feels safe and authentic to me.” Gatfield’s collection is a celebration of the dance performance movement’s legacy and pulls from rave and traditional clubwear aesthetics. It’s designed for all genders. The inclusive nature of the graduate’s capsule collection is synonymous with the ballroom community’s willingness to accept newcomers with open arms and respect. Gatfield believes these safe spaces are “crucial to some people’s survival”, especially in minority groups such as the LGBTQIA+ community and people of colour. “To exist authentically in a space that is free from judgement, I think that’s really important,” he says. Authenticity is a common thread woven between all four of the talented designers’ collections; the key to thriving in today’s crowded, ever-changing fashion landscape, so often dictated by social media and fast fashion trends. “I think that some of the greatest designers in history have always stuck true to themselves and design from a place that is personal and different,” Gatfield says. “So I always let my experience and my gut dictate what I think is good and bad, because the best style and the best fashion comes from when a person relies on their intuition. “(Because of ballroom) I understand where I come from, and people have validated this through sharing stories. I know what I’m about. I know that I have a group of people that are going to support me. I can hold my head a bit higher.” When it came to Amber Ponta-Churchill’s graduate collection, she didn’t have to go far to stumble upon her concept. Ponta-Churchill, who attended Edith Cowan University’s fashion program, came across the idea of exploring her family’s military history when looking at old photos and connecting the dots of similarity and connection between relatives. Ultimately, it was her grandmother’s uncle, George Edwards, who became the centrepiece to her concept of exploring his experience serving as an SAS paratrooper during World War II. “As I started to explore these ideas, I landed on this mental imagery of a paratrooper who becomes entangled within their harnessing ropes and parachute during the jump,” she says of her collection, aptly named Suspended in Context. “The collection evolved into a way of processing where I’ve come from and how my family’s values have influenced me. They’ve always held very strong political opinions and so this was woven into the collection through the idea of families having to continue through loss that has occurred due to the will of others.” The young designer incorporated elements of wartime colour palettes, red stained motifs and deconstructed parachutes. In North Metropolitan TAFE graduate Kristian Francuski’s exploration, he delved into a realm devoid of human life: liminal spaces. Prolific online as an internet aesthetic, these are images of eerie vacant spaces that portray emotional and metaphorical transitional feelings of disorientation, nostalgia and loneliness. Understanding and interpreting the complexities of human existence is no easy feat, but Francuski reveals he has a history of exploring left-of-centre, esoteric themes. “I explored the concept of being stuck in these transitional spaces and our reaction to being put in that type of setting,” he explains. “It’s a little bit eerie, but I also explored accepting being in that state and having a positive outlook on it at the same time. Embracing being in between a certain state and not trying to rush to get from point A to point B. Slowing down and just experiencing what’s around you.” Part of this process meant navigating and fusing together unconventional textiles. “If you can imagine a huge plastic sheet that suctioned to all four walls of a room just completely covered in this plastic. I was thinking what would happen if I got plastic and melted it to fabric, so it’s forever trapped underneath, which is very similar to the imagery,” Francuski says. The part-time barber reveals his aim is to create garments that blur the lines between avant-garde clothing and what society views as “acceptable, mainstream”. Unlike the other graduates, Francuski grew up in Sydney’s western suburbs, later making the move to WA. “We actually have a really good lifestyle here (and) there’s huge interest in fashion,” he says. “Something I’ve noticed is a lot of people begging to get out of Perth, but then they end up coming back because Sydney, Melbourne, or ‘xyz’ is not all it’s cracked up to be. “People have this attitude about Perth saying ‘there’s nothing to do here’ … there is stuff to do, you just need to go out and support them so they can keep happening. But there’s no shortage of great things that happen in Perth.” AGWA Design Store curators Leith Groves and Robert Marshall are also fierce advocates for Perth and its artistic community. Since stepping into their positions, Groves and Marshall have collaborated with a plethora of up-and-coming talent for projects at the store, with the aim of putting emerging artists at the forefront. This year’s Pulse program is no different. As well as the runway shows, students from all four fashion colleges will have the chance to create a product to be commercially produced, then sold in the store and showcased on the runway. North Metropolitan TAFE students have been busy knitting unique beanies and reworking second-hand shirts with a sustainable edge. “We are very isolated (in Perth), which makes us very unique. I find that we design differently because we have to be much more resourceful,” Groves says. “I just think this town is absolutely loaded with creative talent.” For details on Pulsefest, visit artgallery.wa.gov.au. To purchase tickets to the WA-first runway shows, visit eventbrite.com.au

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Pulsefest: Art Gallery of WA puts emerging fashion designers at the centre stage of its festival arts weekend

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Pulsefest: Art Gallery of WA puts emerging fashion designers at the centre stage of its festival arts weekend