The 2013 L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival is firing on all cylinders and Voxfrock celebrates with a visit to the atelier that Tiffany National Design Award winnes Alexander (Alex) and Tim Britten-Finschi of menswear brand From Britten share with their famous mother.
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Photographs, Monty Coles, (for Mr. Coles’ complete photo essay, www.theloupe.org)
Mr. Coles’ assistant: Mikey Whyte.
Model: Blair, London Management
Words, Janice Breen Burns
It must be confusing for visitors to veteran bridal designer Linda Britten’s Melbourne atelier, if they’re unaware of her sons. And ditto, anyone visiting for Tim and Alex Britten-Finschi’s From Britten menswear collection, who hasn’t a clue about their mother. The Brittens’ shared space, perched high over hip-happening Flinders Lane, is an intriguing testament to passions at polar opposite ends of fashion. A thin corrugated plastic screen is all that separates Tim and Alex’s neat, regimental racks of technically impeccable avante garde menswear, from the whimsical mess of their mother’s bower, all lace wisps, spangles and silken bolts; the raw stuff and debris of her heart-flutterer bridal frocks and lavish opera gowns.
“A thin screen separates Tim and Alex’s neat, regimental racks of technically impeccable avante garde menswear, from the whimsical mess of their mother’s bower..”
The day we visit the Brittens, is also Voxfrock’s first collaboration with legendary photographer Monty Coles. And we both twig instantly, this aesthetic disparity between mother and sons, between elegant va-va-voom glamour and masculine sobriety, won’t be fairly reconciled in a single essay. So we split it. Mr. Coles makes a date to photograph Miss Britten’s operatic/fashion event for the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival on tonight, and I arrange to review it. Mr. Coles then borrows a smashing young visitor to model for him (so smashing he later marches the young man into a model agency downstairs, suggesting they’d be mad not to sign him up this instant) and picks out a sleek coat to photograph from the From Britten rack in a shade of blue with an electric life of its own. He clicks a triangular LED light prop together, and begins doing what he does best.
“This aesthetic disparity between mother and sons, between elegant va-va-voom glamour and masculine sobriety…”
I settle in with the sons.
Alex, 26 and Tim, 24, are boyishly handsome, fashionably bearded, with laid-back calm and a twin-like simpatico.
I remember years ago, 2005 or 06, they plugged their first collection (they recall brocade jackets and orange pants) into one of their mother’s fashion shows. They were teenagers, barely out of school, and the quality and execution of their ideas was already remarkably good. “Mum had said, ok, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it properly,” says Tim. So naturally, they did. And still do. Everything. Absolutely. Properly. Meticulously. Perfectionism is the lynchpin of their growing reputation, one they plan to spread globally in the next 12 months. “We know menswear is growing at double the rate of womenswear,” Tim says, “So this is a good time for us.” They’ve already had one successful toe-dipping season in Paris, their international agent is confident a salon show during menswear week next July will go off, and they have shrunk their local wholesale business to concentrate utterly on their own showroom-shop (called simply CUSTOMER, and open to the public in Flinders Lane) and their go-global goals.
“We know menswear is growing at double the rate of womenswear” Tim Britten-Finschi
Today, as Mr. Coles lopes about with his camera, and their mother directs her own traffic of crystal-crusted showstoppers and frothy bridal gowns and bowls the odd helpful observation about her sons into the conversation, the Britten-Finschi boys pick over racks of their current collection for ways to explain themselves. “This coat,” says Alex, twirling it on a hangar, “LOOKS like a normal coat at first, but, from a design and construction point of view, it’s astronomically different.” The coat is tailored as finely and sleekly as you will find anywhere, by From Britten’s rare, 50-year veterans of the art, based in Melbourne. But its impeccable classicism is also kinked, cleverly, into the avante garde. “You don’t notice straight away, but the more you look, the more you discover,” Tim says. The coat’s body panels and sleeves are cut and tailored in complex curved segments from two subtly complementary shades of navy cashmere. (What difficulties must their tailors have overcome to achieve this? The mind boggles. Then, Miss Britten murmurs something about bottles of whisky and Tim’s winning smile. Aaah.) The coat’s pockets are devilish, invisible slits in the side seams. Its lining is a technically advanced Japanese fabric, incredibly strong, cosy as fur, light as air; “So you have the warmth,” says Alex, “But not the bulk.”
“This coat…LOOKS like a normal coat at first but…it’s astronomically different.” Alexander Britten-Finschi
Another jacket has a similar pattern of curved panels, but in sharper, light and dark contrasting black and white. Alex shrugs it on, and its tailored silhouette immediately sharpens the look of his casual outfit (I do love the instant, transformative power of tailored menswear); “Now, I move my arms,” he demonstrates, lifting them so the neat, intersecting pattern of curves, flowing from sleeves to front panels, breaks up and apart; “And you can see how it changes.” This curving aesthetic repeats across the collection in other tailored garments and even, technical T-shirts. It’s inspired, say the brothers, by architect Oscar Neimayer: “The whole idea of fluidity within structure…motion within solidity.” As they mention Neimayer however, they worry about sounding wanky, or lame. God forbid. Like so many other young designers now, they are touchy about not being associated with the preciousness and fakery perceived (sometimes quite rightly) to be prevalent among fashion people. “We never got that facade, that idea of the glamour of fashion because we grew up in all this,” Tim gestures around the atelier. “More harsh reality. We lived in Flinders Lane, we came here after school. The workrooms were like our playground.” They learned a lot by osmosis; that’s obvious from their concrete and intuitive knowledge. Both took only a year of formal studies at Melbourne School of Fashion, yet both excel in a range of creative disciplines. “They do well whatever they seem to try,” says their mother. Tim is a gifted graphic artist and cook, Alex a gifted photographer, both have been heavily involved in the production of Miss Britten’s fashion shows since pre-puberty, both are obviously, gifted menswear designers.
“They are touchy about not being associated with the preciousness and fakery…among fashion people..”
Miss Britten remembers the boys’ school years at the machines and knees of her veteran seamstresses. At night, they returned to a calm home where her own fussless take on fashion, and the passions of their father, renowned interior designer Wayne Finschi, were the relentless focus. Was a career in fashion pre-destined? “Fashion was between all those things that we liked doing; so yes, it was natural,” says Tim, (or was that Alex?) Until their launch of From Britten in 2010 (the first year they were named among the Tiffany National Designer Award finalists), they dabbled in a dozen different streams of fashion, from a thriving business in tailored restaurant uniforms, to a collaboration with their mother in a revival of her Aniseed ready-to-wear brand, a forerunner of her legendary eponymous bridal label of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Some successes were wilder than others, and skullduggery by an Indian manufacturer did snuff the 40-stockists and two-flagship-stores Aniseed project out in a season, but there were no failures. Far from it.
Today the brothers are poised on the brink of something even more marvellous and longer lasting. There is something in their air. Their talents are rare, their market is swelling a piece, they have the loyalty of veteran tailors in a waning local industry, they have the the osmotic knowledge and intuitive baggage of years immersed in a creative family within a creative industry, and they have youth.
The world’s their proverbial….
‘Operette’, a challenging fusion of opera and fashion by Linda Britten ,was a sellout sensaton on the first night of the festival.
The Tiffany National Designer Award was announced on Wednesday. Alex and Tim won from a field that included celebrated womenswear designers Lui Hon, Kathryn Becker and Livia Arena of Victoria and Michael Lo Sordo of New South Wales.
www.frombritten.com.au
www.lindabritten.com
www.lmff.com.au
