CHEESE!

Voxfrock’s weekly roundup of worthy kneezups and Hooray Charlies is dedicated today, to The Inimitable Clearys, Alex and Georgie of Alpha60.

The Inimitable Clearys. Photo by BRIONY WRIGHT for i-D magazine. Click link below for i-D’s Cleary Q&A.

Yesterday they pitched up with a band of models, monster puppets and a 200-odd brace of devotees in the half-light of a soft Melbourne dusk to celebrate their first decade in business. Ten years! Gone, in a proverbial flash. In swirling mist, they marked the milestone with a mythical narrative, played out in the Queen Victoria gardens (around the ephemeral MPavilion, opposite the National Gallery of Victoria) by a cast of creeping skeleton men, Alphavirgins (in Alpha60 frocks, natch) and one headless, armless giant. As you do. The Clearys were never ones for toeing the classic, formulaic fashion runway line.

The first major Alpha60 show was in 2005, ironically staged with a Vivienne Westwood retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Ironic, because within half a dozen seasons, Alpha60 was embedded in the hearts and minds of Melburnians and widely embraced as the go-to provider of The Melbourne Look. At the time, that constituted a lot of black, a lot of clean, unfussy and often voluminous silhouettes, a lot of drapey things that were strangely, strikingly MO-DERNE, yet had no particularly overt allegiance to fads or seasonal trends. The classics you have when you’re not having classics.

Since those heady days, the Clearys have diversified via their Alphaville stores in most states (nine so far), into colour, intuitive textural mixtures, and accessories including shoes, never abandoning their unique signature that is still, and always, so intrinsically Melburnian. In 2015, they plan to strike out beyond Australia although, to where exactly, is not certain. Alex Cleary confided to i-D magazine, he’d like “300 stores in Japan” and that seems perfectly reasonable.

Nice one, Alpha60, love eternal from all at Voxfrock. (Scroll down for our edit of the Alphavillians.)