S!X!

Two of Australian fashion’s rarest originals are working on complementary PhDs and their first “query to self” is – has to be – “What’s it all been about?” Peter Boyd and Denise Sprynskyj (pronounced sprin-skee) are raking over the first 18 years of their iconoclastic S!X fashion label that’s been lauded as genius and, occasionally but at least once notably, pilloried as bizarre. “We’re doing this reflection,” says Mr. Boyd, “Asking, ‘What have we been doing, and why do we do this stuff?’” In October when their PhD thesis are due, Ms. Sprynskyj’s answer will be tentatively titled Outside in, and Mr. Boyd’s Inside Out. Later, a joint paper will bind them. Voxfrock caught up for a long talk.

Photographs: Monty Coles (for Mr. Coles’ complete photo essay www.theloupe.org)
Styling: Virginia Dowzer
Make up: Abe Zakhem
Hair: Curly Siouxsie
Nails: Lalaine Zervos, 0403503577
Models:
Cassie Lapthorne and Grace Holt; Chadwick, Colette Walker; Scene
Assistant: Olivia Tran
S!X, La Chambre de Bonne, Von Haus, 1a Crossley Street, Melbourne
Longform post: allow 15 minutes read time.

The S!X studio and salon, La Chambre de Bonne, perches over a fingerling laneway up the Spring end of Melbourne’s Bourke Street. It’s a lovely light-filled little walkup, all elegant Victoriana, worn timber floors, scuffed oxblood walls. It’s swept and tidy, but crammed with frocky paraphenalia; fabric bolts and bits, a cutting table of course, and today, in a small back salon room, a bank of racks of pale, silky, glamourous things that instantly skew my notion of S!X as dark, deconstructivist tailors. Later Mr. Boyd explains these lush gowns (featured here in Monty Coles’ exquisite photo essay) sprang from experiments with flags; silky rectangles manipulated to grip and release around the body as garments. The glamour is a byproduct and my lesson for the day is; don’t pigeonhole these ever-evolving fashion artists.

When they’re not moulding future generations of fashion designers at RMIT university just up the street, Mr. Boyd and Ms. Sprynskyj are here in La Chambre de Bonne, working to a muffled backtrack of shouts and warm wafts of coffee from the Von Haus cafe below, making magic for their small, impassioned world-wide audience of S!X lovers and collectors. Most are creative professionals; artists, designers, architects, dancers, academics, actors, world travellers and savourers of The (Intellectually Conceived) New. They visit La Chambre de Bonne to commission from the S!X archive or current collection, or purchase from a small brace of wholesale stockists including Melbourne’s trove of rare and limited exclusives, Eastern Market.

But, let’s pause a tick for the benefit of any fashion outsiders who don’t know this much-loved Melbourne duo or why a trip into S!X might be remotely interesting. A short timeline of Mr. Boyd and Ms. Sprynskyj’s career highlights, awards and fabulous acquaintances appears below, but it’s on their history as groundbreakers and purveyors of The Extraordinary we focus today. The S!X designers recycled before there was even a word for it in fashion’s lexicon. In the early 1990s, in a Zeitgeistian synergy with comparable iconoclasts including Martin Margiela on the other side of the planet, they carved a revolutionary fashion genre that still resonates: essentially, new from old. It is so entrenched now, it’s difficult to fathom how strange it was then. Basically, it sprang from the deconstructed garment components they assembled into utterly new designs, fused with the integrity and patina of the originals.

There was no sub-agenda, no politics of sustainability behind their process in those days. They do however, acknowledge their accidental role in the global movement now. Mr. Boyd says back then it was about knowledge, experiment, and expedience. “We’d just got to a stage in our own learning (as RMIT graduates themselves) where we said; ‘Well where do we glean our knowledge now?’ Well, we glean it from old garments, jackets we take apart and look in and there, it’s like reading a book, there are layers, stratas, and we can learn stuff from that…” And, taking another step, spinning the disassembled components around, upside-down, inside-out, and mixing them into odd-ball combinations (for a fashion garment at the time) had a certain, Zeitgeistian logic. “Why do we take a pair of Levis and a tuxedo, and mix them together?” Mr. Boyd asks  rhetorically. Why not. Five, four, even two years earlier, it might not have seemed so right. But around 1993, they were nursing an utterly new aesthetic in its pupal evolutionary stage, and its time had come.

“There’s a clue to all this in the word, patina,” Mr. Boyd continues. “Why do we buy something that looks old, like it’s been around forever? We’re talking about an aesthetic of things looking old, looking in a state of construction or deconstruction, or garments that allude to other garments, or other things…” It’s an aesthetic plugged deep into our human yearning for connection, authenticity and stability. Fashion is a social construct, after all, an intellectual cocktail that Ms. Sprynskyj watches, intrigued, as she and Mr. Boyd introduce it to callow fashion students at RMIT every year. “We tell them to bring in a garment and unpick it, and look, and learn about its inner layers, then reconfigure it. And, they’re just wonderful, but it’s so hard to watch; some don’t even know what a tailored jacket is and they rarely think to turn it around or upside down..” As understanding and the courage to experiment swells, however, and the students begin to rearrange their garments’ parts into new originals, respect for the integrity and authenticity of couture also dawns on them.

Which brings us neatly back to the nature of S!X, the refuge of expressive individualists or, as Mr. Boyd admiringly describes; “A particular kind of person…” A person not always popular, not always understood. In 2001 at Australian Fashion Week, for example, S!X’s aesthetic and philosophical distance from fashion’s mainstream of mass appeal and production, was infamously pointed out on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. “Watching such an amateurish mish-mash of nonsense, was nothing short of embarrassing,” wrote reporter Maggie Alderson in her review of the show. S!X’s eccentric collection of deconstructivist originals was simply too far removed from fashion’s status quo for Ms. Alderson to stomach and she spoke for many with her scathing criticism and dismissive scoff. The editorial divided critics at the time, galvanised the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne as a contest of slavish followers and courageous innovators respectively, and crystalised a raft of tricky fashion issues. Like, why do most of us use fashion to blend in, a few of us to stand out, and how can fashion progress without support for its groundbreakers? “It’s a lot different now; there are a lot more people who are comfortable expressing themselves,” says Mr. Boyd.

“There’s a clue to all this in the word, patina…Why do we buy something that looks old, like it’s been around forever?” Peter Boyd.

Fashion has notably polarised in the last decade or so, into a market heaving at one end with big-box mass retailers such as Topshop, H&M, Zara and Uniqlo, but rebalancing with more consumers at the other end, who use clothes as overt, often eccentric and avante garde expressions of themselves and their beliefs. Ms. Sprynskyj and Mr. Boyd are aware their own offbeat brand is an educator of sorts, a catalyst against some forms of mediocrity. Mr. Boyd explains: “For instance, I might wear extreme Junya Watanabe (a Japanese brand renowned for being visually striking), or my Martin Margiela jacket that is cryo-vacced and a young person shopping in Topshop might say, “yeah, you’re an idiot” but there’s this other aspect too. You can see it in their face, that they “get” something about the rudimentary aesthetics; they intuitively know, there are clues in that cryo-vacced jacket or whatever, that this is a difficult thing, this is something of importance.” Even the most odd-ball designs executed by S!X, or Margiela, or Van Bierendonck et. al, can command respect for the design, skills and complexity of their couture process and the philosophies behind them. “We can educate subtlely, or with a sledgehammer,” says Mr. Boyd, and laughs. One day, they muse, the planets may even align to welcome the complex, marvellous, S!X philosophies and aesthetic into fashion’s big-box mainstream. A pod range for H&M perhaps? A diffusion of flagowns for Target? Stranger things have happened to fashion in recent years with Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela, even Albert Elbaz, the high priest of Lanvin, going mainstream for love of the masses. “Yeah, we’d do H&M,” says Ms. Sprynskyj, who counts H&M’s creative director among her many close fashion friends. “Why not?”

S!X (est. 1993) – an (incomplete) history.

Close friends and mentors (among many)
(the late) Anna Piaggi (Vogue Italia) and Mrs. Burstein (Browns, London).
Georgian Weir, Le Louvre (Melbourne)
Legendary Belgian designer Walter van Bierendonck.

Awards
Fringe Fashion Festival award (1994)
Melbourne Fashion Festival (inaugural) designer award. (1996).
Premier’s Design Award for Commercial Fashion & Textile Design, The Tunnel Illuminated (2008)

RMIT
Both graduated from the fashion programme and returned to lecture since 1995. By 2004, responsible for 4th year collections. Alumni include Sarah Schofield (Versace, Dior) Sam Fisher (Westwood), Ingrid Verner (TV), Shauna Toohey (PAM),Kate Reynolds and Amanda Cumming (Pageant), Christina Exie (Christina Exie and winner, Project Runway), Lui Hon (Lui Hon and Project Runway), Fiona Lau (FIXXED), many more notable graduates.

Runways
Melbourne Fashion Festivals, Australian Fashion Weeks, season collection shows, here and around the world.

Key Exhibitions
Christmas windows installations, Le Louvre, late 1990s.
Male Order: Percy Grainger, Ian Potter Gallery, University of Melbourne (1999)
Plastique, Span Gallery, Melbourne Fashion Festival Arts Program (vacuum-sealed tailoring examples and metallic-mesh lantern jacket.) (2002)
Australian Fashion & Textile Designers, Daegu, Korea (recycled jacket with paper and metallic-mesh inserts.) (2002)
Sourcing the Muse, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (Shibori shirt, laser-cut fan skirt, scrap books, trouser-jacket.) (2002)
Recent Acquisitions, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (deconstructed jacket, paper laser-cut dress, upside-down trouser-skirt, denim bustier and denim clutch bag.) (2002)
Shibori Symphony, runway, 4th International Shibori Symposium, Harrogate, UK (2002)
Unwrapped, exhibition, Bendigo Art Gallery, toured to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok (newspaper-encased Shibori shirt, flat folded skirt.) (2003)
Australian Style, exhibition, Stockholm, Sweden (2004).
A Matter of Time, exhibition, 16th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, Tamworth Art Gallery, (tuxedo jacket, upsidedown trouser skirt, shirt, shoes). Toured to Adelaide, Sydney, regional Australia (2004)
Remake Remix, Regent Theatre, Melbourne Fashion Festival/5th International Shibori Symposium, (with Japanese designer Yoshiki Hishinuma) (2004)
Sculpted Surface, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Fashion Festival/5th International Shibori Symposium (2004)
Rewards from Innovation: World’s Best Food & Fibre, exhibition, Parliament House, Canberra (2005)
Fusion: Shibori Wearable Art, Gallery Concept 21, Tokyo, Japan, (embroidered fan skirt, Shibori-dye cardigan, lapel accessory.) (2005)
After Fashion, Geelong Wool Museum, (foiled Yohji Yamamoto jacket, upside-down trouser-skirt.) (2005)
The Gold Room: From Como to Catwalk and Noble Rot: An Alternate View of Fashion, installations, Como House, Melbourne (garment remnants, lace prints, sprayed tailored jacket) (2006)
Partnership or Perish, University of Tasmania Academy Gallery, Launceston (exhibit and collection video) (2006).
The Tunnel Illuminated, Chiodo menswear store, Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program (Chiodo garments re-cut,dyed,sold as S!X.) (2007) (Note, Premier’s Design Award 2008.)
Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (two designs for the Flags on Top of The World series) (2013)

Media (from 1993 and ongoing)
International Arts documentary, ABC TV , (2004)
Fashionista, television documentary, SBS, (2004)
100 Design Innovators, Bulletin (2007)
Vogue, marie claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Ragtrader, Studio Collections, Oyster, Object, The Age, The Herald Sun, The Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Magazine, Lino, Poster, countless mainstream, digital, social media sources and platforms.