The 2023 PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival is GO and Voxfrock’s Rookie crew of future fashion journalists and photographers is revving to post from all points: runways, streetstyle, cultural gigs, off-beat off-sites across the city. Follow their exploits on Voxfrock from tomorrow and today, dive into this special roundup of CreatiVictoriaFashioNews (CVFN) for a cherry-pick of its best bits and creative people. (Subscribe to CVFN here)
Meet MFF’s new fast-talking visionary CEO, Caroline “Ralph” Ralphsmith and two key managers in her creative team, plucked from worlds where fashion intersects with art and ideas.
Artist Sai-Wai Foo manages the self-funded Fashion Culture programme Former NGV curator Paola Di Trocchio is in charge of maintaining the festival’s 27-year reputation for world class, high-voltage premium runways.
In their separate professional ways, this is how Ralph, Sai- Wai and Paola wrangled their creative briefs, with one eye on the complicated Zeitgeist and fashion’s shifting sands, the other on their bottom line.
Read about creative director/style impresario Philip Boon’s exhibition, “The Daily Boon”, a phenomenon at the delightfully wacky end of the festival’s sprawling, nine-day, multi-layered, ideas-laden Fashion Culture programme.
We’ll also introduce you to social media content producer-slash- photographer Karen Woo, a festival goer who plumbs the stories, ideas and layers of meaning behind the runways’ designers, collections, trends and the people who wear them.
More than 100 events, pitched from high-fashion to family- friendly, are running across Melbourne until March 11, with the festival’s familiar hub returning, after a forced three year vay-cay, to the vast vaulted and utterly glorious Royal Exhibition Buildings.
We’re smack in the middle of a fractious period of fashion history: consumers are up for a deeper fashion festival experience than just watching frocks. They’re fussier, more cynical, more educated and politically and morally motivated than ever before.
For the full free and ticket programme click here.
