For a peppercorn price, a crew of young Melbourne creatives helps fledgeling, artisan and niche designers to market like mega-brands. Their latest Fred Hates Fashion film and runway show opens tonight, a highlight of Melbourne Fashion Week’s curated programme. Janice Breen Burns reports.
This feature first appeared in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald
Three years ago Alice Edgeley sank her savings into a shop for her eponymous fashion range of “catsuits and crazy things”. She’d just returned from a design job in Britain, didn’t have any girlfriends here, so wasn’t even certain the whole “granny whore” and “ladylike punk” thing she liked and designed for herself would scratch out a following in Fitzroy. But on hope and a shoestring, she’d give it a go anyway. “It was absolutely terrifying,” she recalls now. “I worked really hard (managing, serving, making clothes from scratch) but was scary poor. ”
Alice Edgeley (pictured wearing one of her own catsuits), went from fashionable poverty to “doing all right” after her eponymous brand featured in the Fred Hates Fashion lineup last spring. www.edgeley.com.au Photo: Eryca Green.
So poor, Edgeley says, it was only a generous partner, patient landlord, and sales to a dribble of passing officianados of her “punky, crazy stuff”, that saved her from the fate so many tiny niche fashion brands suffer; slow and certain ruin.
Then along came Hinny.
A few months before last year’s Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, entrepreneurial young filmmaker Hinny Tran, 27, and his partners (most in their early to mid 20s) were scouting for small niche and emerging designers to feature in their second annual Fred Hates Fashion show, a video, music and runway project that has to be to be seen in action to be believed.
The Fred Hates Fashion crew, lead by creative directors Tran and Allan Lim, mobilise a mini-army of volunteer filmmakers, composers, technical and production engineers, hair and makeup artists, stylists and marketers to achieve, for a $1000 peppercorn fee, what normally costs tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars.
Hinny Tran, left, at work
They make an original “storytelling” brand film and soundtrack in collaboration with each designer, link it to a full-bore 60-model runway, then hand the lot back to the lucky little brand to use in their own PR and social media marketing campaigns. (Revenue from ticket sales is ploughed into the arch costs and the next projects.)
It’s a godsend with global potential for small-fry designers like Alice Edgeley, struggling at the deep end of a polarised fashion industry with well-funded high street and global mega-brands dominating at the other end. Fred Hates Fashion (a play on our addictive /ambivalent relationship with fashion) closes the gap, at least for one campaign season.
“We can break into that international audience,” says Tran, “with storytelling, and forward thinking. We work with the designer – a pure collaboration – to translate their brand, the passion they have. There’s a lot of trust involved, and absolutely no egos. We’re about taking risks on something new.”
From the collaboration between emerging designer Vincent Li and filmaker Dan Von Czarnecki, showing in the Fred Hates Fashion project during Melbourne Spring Fashion Week 2015
They’re also about pulling in favors on a gobsmacking scale. “Our people don’t care about the money,” Tran says of his FHF core group of 10 and their flexible creative crews. “They just love to be part of it. This is the third year and we’ve got a lot more (emerging professionals) now who’re willing to give up their lives to be part of our lives.” (Many use holiday leave, or take time out from day jobs. Tran, for example, fits FHF around his commercial video work.)
Not long after she met Tran, Alice Edgeley felt the full force of FHF on her first film set; a rack of those “granny-whore” frocklets in front of her and 30-odd crew buzzing around her. She’d split the $1000 fee and exposure with a friend, Hanna Tusler, who designs handbags, but had still had to pay off her half in instalments. Now, here she was. “There was just so much energy,” she recalls. “It was exciting, and it was terrifying. I’d never done more than a (stills) shoot before. I just couldn’t picture how a film would look.”
The FHF creative process was a revelation. “Hinny’s work is very impressive,” says Edgeley. “Very professional. Very slick.” The finished Edgeley and Tusler film – contrary to most FHF films which tend to be cerebral, or strikingly graphic, or mesmerisingly beautiful, or moodily dark, or all of the above – was a bright-coloured, chirpy little narrative of two girls in naughty frocklets and sparkly turbans who dream of matching handbags.
From the Edgeley Tusler film by Fred Hates Fashion
A year after it opened the FHF show and Edgeley had converted its stills for her own releases, newsletters, postcards and stickers and posted the film itself to her social media streams, it still resonates in her market and the threat of permanent poverty has receded. “Someone’s just posted it on a Chinese website,” she says, “And I know it’s reached a lot more people who weren’t already my customers.” So has her FHF project, to put it bluntly, “worked”? “Yes, definitely.”
Tonight, five new designers get the FHF treatment. Their films, completed in recent weeks by five crews lead by five directors and featuring original soundtracks by five emerging composers, will play backdrop to an “epic” collection show in the cavernous Studio 2 venue at Docklands. Its back-theme is “wearable technology” and tagline “Curious about fashion”.
One of the five Chosen Ones is Gabrielle Brown, a recent RMIT graduate with a delicate talent for merging technical fabrics into luxurious-looking minimalist dresses and ensembles. Earlier this year, she won Target’s new designer award at the Melbourne Fashion Festival and produced a pod collection for the stores which quickly sold out.
Award winning designer Gabrielle Brown will feature in tonight’s Fred hates Fashion runway and film show at Docklands
But, her eyes are now on the future of her eponymous little brand. For all her success, she knows kudos can dissolve and casting a wide enough net to reach her scattered potential market – her niche – is tough, risky, and expensive. “You’ve got to think of ways, all the time, to get out there,” she says, “What will make them gravitate to your brand? You’ve got to be thinking about the ideas behind it, how you want it portrayed, all the time Is this right? Is this? You’ve got to strive for it in everything.”
The young designer’s devotion and market savvy was a magnet for Hinny Tran, who assigned Sydney film director Andrew Lee to Brown’s film. “That’s what we look for: passion, good ideas, hard work,” he says. “Anyone can sew a few clothes but we look for so much: an identity, quality, passion, (the potential for) longevity and, we look for the story.”
When they find it, up to 40 passionate young Fred Hates Fashion people will collaborate to tell it.
Fred Hates Fashion film and runway show featuring designers Vincent Li, Alabama Blonde Jasmine Alexa, Gabrielle Brown and Yesterday’s Virgins, is part of Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, curated by the City of Melbourne and opens tonight from 7 pm. At Studio 2, 476 Docklands Driver, Docklands. Tickets; $39 – $72, www.fredhatesfashion.com
