She is an iconic Australian designer with a public persona to match but many still mistakenly believe Alannah Hill is behind the Alannah Hill brand. She is, most definitely, not. Alannah Hill walked away from her eponymous brand (and commercial rights to her own name) three years ago and redirected her unique style of feminine modernity into Louise Love. Here, Janice Breen Burns meets the real Alannah Hill in her Melbourne studio and learns about the triumphs, and limitations, of her creative process in an industry where artistry and commerciality are not always easy bedfellows. (Longform post: allow five minutes read time. This story first appeared in the March issue of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Gallery magazine.)
Alannah Hill’s studio is a flowery bower two flights up and overlooking a quiet little side street in the Melbourne suburb of Prahran. The lofty, light-washed Victorian room full of pretty things is an elegant, soul-soothing hideaway for the designer. Hill’s famous knack for mixing sweetness and darkness in a cohesive aesthetic is evident everywhere: her vivid, modern red resin desk, for example, perfectly offsets the sugary sweetness of silk flowers and antique vases. A set of elaborate timber screens handpainted with lush pink roses is huddled in a corner. Racks crammed with frocks (a puff of peach silk, a sliver of brilliant embroidery, a trackline of tiny bows) are pushed haphazardly against a wall.
Here and there, the tools of Hill’s trade are propped and draped about: mood boards, mirrors, model posters, swathes of complicated 3D sequin embroidery from an Indian factory, puddles of silk and curls of ribbon. Gallery magazine’s photographer wants to record all this eye candy, but Hill says no: ‘I’m sorry, love. I’m fussy. I’d have to make sure they’re all styled and nice. I hate being fussy, but I’m so fussy! I have to be careful what goes out [into the public arena]’.
Obsessive attention to detail has underpinned Hill’s uniquely feminine fashion designs for more than twenty years. Her work is often copied, but never very well. What’s missing among the mimics is Hill’s intuitive knowledge of girls’ and women’s wildest dreams: ‘I feel women all over the world have a real desire to escape into a fantastical ornamental world where they can lose themselves and pretend they’re somebody else just for a small moment in time.’
Also missing from the mimics is Hill’s strange ability (some would call it artistic) to process the emotive, tactile and visual power of certain combinations of colours, textures and patterns into clothes that can reach into a woman’s psyche. This ability has made her one of Australia’s best known and most loved designers. ‘I’ve never been to fashion school,’ she says, ‘‘I’ve never followed trends. I’ve always loved dressing up – I guess my real passion is clothing. I just love clothing. I love how it changes people’s bodies, how it affects how we walk, [I love] the “confident girl-spark passion” that dressing up and putting your best foot forward [gives one, and the effect it] has on one’s inner turmoil or inner glow’.
Her creative process may be esoteric, but begins with a practical search through myriad cloths, laces, handcrafted trims and buttons. Hill develops embellished surfaces with Indian artisans, patterned fabrics with Chinese factories, and combines her picks into sample garments which are then relentlessly tested for fit, feel, finish and fashion. Whereas imitations of her designs often slide helplessly into looks of saccharine femininity – florals, laces and other archetypal motifs of girly-girls – Hill’s garments invariably exude modernity and chic.
After pausing for a season to recover from a Melanoma cancer scare (discovered when she saw a doctor for a broken toe), Hill is focused again, this time on Louise Love. Her new fashion label launched online last August after she walked away from an eighteen-year partnership with business backer and manager David Heeney, of Factory X. Their 2013 split is important to mention here: it was deeply traumatic for Hill, who lost all commercial rights to her own name. (Hence ‘Louise Love’: ‘My middle name is Louise and I wanted to bring LOVE into the world.’ Hill says.) The separation brought the fragility of Hill’s talent into sharp focus in an industry that ostensibly thrives on creativity but is driven by commercial imperatives. ‘I think all that’s been quite well documented’, Hill says of the split. ‘It was a difficult and electric emotional time … I was often inconsolable, depressed, frightened of everything … and I often believed I would never get over it.’
In her final years at Factory X Alannah felt she no longer had the creative control she once had. Heeney had expanded the Alannah Hill brand to more than 60 stores. Hill found herself designing for price points and bottom lines, with strategies set in place to maximise commercial returns, which is not unusual in the fashion industry by any means but was eventually crushing for this sensitive talent.
Now, in a silver-lining twist, her separation from Factory X has triggered a return to basics and a new beginning. With Louise Love, Hill has returned to the creative processes she was bullied into abandoning years ago. In this airy little studio – admittedly humbler than the lavish accommodations she was accustomed to as THE Alannah Hill – she can ‘go nuts’ with meltingly soft and expensive French silks and laces. ‘I have full creative control again. I can buy french laces, handmade buttons, beads and baubles from European factories’, Hill says. ‘I look over my shoulder and think, “Who’s going to stop me? Who? There’s nobody there to stop me!’
Now unfettered by fashion’s commercial imperatives, Hill has been buying up big; fine French laces, embroidery trims, handcrafted buttons. She is developing and designing beaded, sequinned and crystal-pocked cloth and exquisitries again, not to achieve the perfect pricepoint but precisely the right tone, feel, kink of waistline and wattage of glint, among so many other subtle judgements, most likely to strum a girl’s heartstrings. These raw materials are Hill’s tools, as certainly as a painter’s paints and an apothecary’s chemicals. ‘I design with a little madness, mayhem and black humour’, she says wryly, ‘as I find the world of fashion a little meaningless and shallow’.
Hill stumbled into it as a young woman after arriving in Melbourne when she was sixteen years old, the daughter of a milk bar proprietor and insurance agent, from the tiny town of Penguin, Tasmania. The hyper-feminine aesthetic that later made her famous is, ironically, the reactive product of a dark childhood. This will likely be detailed in her memoir, which she says, will be published by ABC/Harper Collins in late 2017 – Alannah plans to launch a collection to coincide with the release.
‘As a girl I believed I was quite plain, unremarkable, forgettable and disposable’, she recalls. ‘I always felt like an unjoined girl, slipping through the cracks of life. I was desperate to become a big shot to impress my father who refused to acknowledge my presence despite living in the same house.’ Her visual antidote was a kind of transformation by fashion: big hair, high heels, alabaster complexion, cherry lips, trim floral and girly lace frocks – transforming into the doll-like character so recognisable as Alannah Hill today.
There is, however, a problem with Hill’s striking public persona since she parted ways with her eponymous fashion brand. In a cruel trick of legality, she is now its accidental pinup girl. ‘If I go outside, if I go anywhere, I feel that I’m promoting that brand, Alannah Hill, not Louise Love by me, Alannah Hill’. News of Hill’s ‘lost name’ hasn’t reached legions of her original loyalists who still buy the brand in the mistaken belief she is still its creator. ‘They think I’m still there, love’, she says sadly. ‘I’m not there, but they don’t know.’ If only they knew that Miss Hill is here, in this flowery bower, a hopeful branch of spring blossom balanced at the top of her stairs.
And her name is Louise Love, by Alannah Hill.
Alannah Hill appears in archival footage in the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition 200 Years of Australian Fashion, part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Cultural programme and showing from Saturday, March 5, until 31 July at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.
