Ms Melissa Campbell
Melissa completed her BA in Creative Advertising at RMIT in 1998, and should now be a practising copywriter. Instead, she pursued an MA thesis in the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, examining the Australian cultural phenomenon known as bogans, bevans, or westies. Having become a successful boganologist, she is now preparing her thesis for publication, and beginning a PhD project on Australian actors, fashion designers and musicians as cultural exports. Her other research interests include intersections between advertising, fashion, popular music and youth subcultures.
G'day, World: Designing 'Australianness' for the Global Catwalk
Australia's peripheral position in the fashion world has echoed its general geographic and cultural marginality. Australian fashion designers are deemed internationally to rejuvenate fashion clichés through a 'fresh' or culturally uncontaminated perspective, linked to the harsh, pristine Australian landscape. However, as Australian fashion develops a presence in global markets, designers have re-negotiated the terms of 'Australianness'. 'Australianness as lack of cultural contamination' now sits uneasily alongside 'Australianness as culturelessness': designers' willingness to offer their clothing as 'clean slates' for international consumers to inscribe their own meanings. By mapping methods of exporting Australian fashions onto the sorts of Australianness they signify, this paper traces anxieties surrounding Australian identity within global cultural production. First, I compare localised, landscape-based forms of Australianness, expressed in 'lifestyle' brands like Speedo and Billabong, with the transnational networks, including 'premiere wear', personal celebrity and international fashion festivals, that define the export of designers including Collette Dinnigan and Elle Macpherson. Finally, I examine the positioning of designers like Alannah Hill and Sass & Bide in global discourses of 'avant-garde' fashion. I argue these brands' networks of privileged knowledge, limited and fetishised distribution and collection allow them to operate similarly to global subcultures. Because these 'subcultural' fashions reconfigure Australian marginality as 'exclusive', rather than 'excluded', they provide interesting opportunities for fashion to articulate Australian identity on its own terms.
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