Photography Liz Ham | Styling Jolyon Mason
Grooming Max May best erection medication| Hair Jenny Kim

Publishing a men’s fashion magazine in Australia is no easy feat. We live in a sartorially savvy but altogether rather small country, with a true fashion industry younger than the average age of our reader, which certainly proves challenging when pulling together the multiple shoots that make up each of our issues. How many times we have cried out for more clothes, interesting designs, bolder cuts and innovative fabrics. Who better to fill the market gap? The designers of tomorrow, of course!

As in issue III of Manuscript, for our annual graduate designer portfolio we sifted through the collections of bright young things from around the country, this year welcoming over thirty submissions. Of course, not all were good. Across the board there is a tendency for students to pay homage – or, to put it more bluntly, plagiarise – their design icons, and, on occasion, the quality of craftsmanship falls below par. But, as with the hidden gems we uncovered in 2012 – including the TAFE Design Institute’s Yuliy Gershinsky and University of Technology’s Vivien Shen – this year’s round-up included some names we believe will be up in lights in a few short years, too.

Interestingly, two of the five designers featured in this portfolio are female. Following in the footsteps of her UTS alumni Ms Shen, we recognised the brilliance of Evelyn Wong at the university’s end-of-year runway presentation. The 25-year old designer graduated with a Bachelor of Design in Fashion & Textiles, under the wise guidance of Manuscript contributor Todd Robinson, and, additionally, a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, taking six years in total. It’s a long time spent studying fashion, but the experience is evident in Ms Wong’s confident graduate collection.

Curiously titled Biology of the Wondrous, the capsule collection of contemporary suiting references the wonderfully meticulous illustrations of German-born naturalist and biologist Ernst Haeckel, employing various shades of mint and muted lime green to expose the dimensionality of the fabrics used. “Menswear has traditionally been more considered than womenswear, not as overwhelming,” observes Ms Wong. “I enjoy these established codes, but I like that there are cracks forming within them and we’re seeing a new junction in menswear.” In exploring these gaps, the designer created classically tailored men’s silhouettes in unlikely fabrics, such as silk and memory polyester, that shed new light on the form.

As you might imagine, Ms Wong believes her time in the hallowed halls of a university has come to an end. “I’d like my next learning experiences to be from the work force; the real world,” she explains. “Design is such a point of interest for me but before I dive into my own label I’m really hungry to soak up all the knowledge I can, hopefully working for a label in New York.” Doing just that is 26-year old Perth-born designer Timothy Watson who, after graduating from a three-year Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Design at Curtin University in his hometown, was awarded a scholarship from the Australians in New York Fashion Foundation, seeing him pack his bags bound for the design studio of our cover subject, Thom Browne, in the Big Apple.

We salute these children of the cloth that have labored for many years in the classroom and now, rather excitingly, enter the industry full of fresh ideas and talent.

“The experience has been fantastic so far,” explained Mr Watson from his base in the hip borough of Brooklyn. “I’m settling in well and Thom is just incredible to work for.” What impressed the judges of the scholarship, including Calvin Klein’s Executive Vice President of Global Communications, was the young designer’s exploration of contradicting forms and shapes in menswear. “I wanted to explore bold shapes on men and ended up working predominantly with spherical silhouettes,” says Mr Watson of his creations. “I felt as though these forms offered the wearer a sort of protection and decided to further enhance the protective element by drawing on the structure of sportswear and hi-vis workwear.”

They might not be hi-vis in the sense of the reflective clothing worn by construction workers, but the clothes of Melbourne-based designer Mia Zielinski are certainly attention grabbing. The 30-year-old graduate of the four-year RMIT University Bachelor of Arts in Design degree first studied costume designer at James Cook University, Townsville, helping to explain the theatricality of her graduate collection. “I enjoy exploring alternative modes of dissemination for my work, like film, performance art and installation,” explains Ms Zielinski. “I want to keep exploring unorthodox materials like resin, silicone and fiberglass, and am reveling in the creative freedom that I’ve experienced since graduating from university.” Recently, Ms Zielinski relocated to Los Angeles on the offer of an internship with the inimitable Belgian designer Bernhard Willhelm, taking advantage of her dual citizenship. The budding designer shares a lot in common with her new master.

Ms Zielinski’s collection, Pop Goes the Surrealist, takes its namesake literally, heavily influenced by the pop surrealism and counter-culture of artists such as Mark Ryden and Salvador Dali. The latter is particularly evident in some of the accessories the designer created to accompany her clothing: resin-dripped visors, printed pigskin foot appliques, and detachable moustaches. “There are so many elements woven into this collection that it becomes quite busy, but when you break the pieces down they are very wearable, if bright, created with volume and transparency.”

Ms Zielinski’s designs might not exactly slip easily into the average male’s wardrobe, but her collection demonstrates the breadth of the genre and how broader ideas about culture and society can be communicated through clothing. The graduate’s classmate, 22-year-old Vladislav Kanevsky, similarly aimed to push the boundaries of menswear, creating a new consideration of the form. “I didn’t want to be constrained by our understanding of masculine or feminine in the conventional sense,” explains Mr Kanevsky. “This collection explores androgyny without the predictable extreme of gender ambiguity. It is reminiscent of the last era of the dandy where masculinity was implied with confidence and a comfort with one’s self.”

Aptly titled Crocodiles in Tuxedos, the designer focused on the concept of anthropomorphism “where the man, symbolic of the consumption of luxury, transitions into the primal devourer, the crocodile.” Simply and effectively, Mr Kanevsky finished his clothing the applique of crocodile scales and beading, creating a luxurious patina that hints at notions of trophy-ism in the luxury industry. “Luxury, being a desired and largely unobtainable commodity, is the trophy. The same traits we might value in the animal we display on ourselves, just as feathers suggest the exoticism of birds of paradise.”

They’re certainly doing something right at RMIT, given three of the five designers featured in this portfolio emerged from the same course together, including 23-year-old Jack Hancock. Currently working as an intern with pattern maker and designer Glen Rollason in Melbourne so as to gain greater experience in tailoring, Mr Hancock’s collection is perhaps the most traditional in the sense that he looked at classical notions of men’s dress, but like his peers he so cleverly subverted and interrogated the form that the resultant collection – an exaggerated take on Edwardian suiting, achieved through the combination of layering – feels entirely modern.

“I wanted to investigate the manner in which men dressed themselves, to create a formula for the production of design that would then create a formula to dress,” explains Mr Hancock. “Layers means options, and I wanted to put fabric on the body in a different way, such as with bias-cutting and whole-cloth usage.” As a collector of late 19^th and early 20^th century garments, the young designer is interested in the mood of the era: “the sadness, sorrow and romance of the Victorian era, even as modernity began to kick in.”

And with that, we salute these children of the cloth that have labored for many years in the classroom and now, rather excitingly, enter the industry full of fresh ideas and talent. Wishing them well, we continually look forward and welcome submissions from students graduating from fashion courses in Australia this year. Write us, send pictures of your clothing, pop in for a chat. We’d love to hear from you.

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Jack Gibbeson and Saxon Dunworth/London Management Group | Jacob Hankin/IMG Models
Photography Assistance Elle Green | Digital Operation Cara O’Dowd
Styling Assistance Alex Rost | Hair Assistance Dom Harrison for Prema
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