LMFF, Refinery 29 downunder and Sonny Vandevelde comes of Age

It's a busy week next week. On Sunday frockwriter will be down in Melbourne for the opening of the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. On Wednesday 17th, we will have the honour of moderating the Sydney presentation by Refinery 29 co-founders, the New York-based Philippe Von Borries and Piera Gelardi. Staged at the Museum of Sydney and organised by Melbourne digital outfit Portable, it’s one of three Australian talks the duo will deliver over the next seven days, providing an insight into what went into building one of the web’s hottest indie fashion sites. Tonight they will be in Brisbane and on the 18th, Melbourne. Then on Friday 19th frockwriter will be back down in Melbourne, where we will also have the honour of opening the first Australian exhibition of our buddy, Belgralian backstage snapper Sonny Vandevelde at Mars Gallery.

The exhibition's soft opening is this Saturday and it runs until March 28th, so check it out if you are in town.

Now a regular contributor to the online entity of The New York Times' fashion magazine T (among many other publications), just last week Sonny was thrilled to find several of his shots being used on the site's homepage to flag its Fall/Winter 2010/2011 coverage.

Sonny already knows he is the focus of an upcoming feature in the Melbourne broadsheet The Age, penned by fashion editor Jan Breen Burns - which will in fact be the first mainstream Australian media profile of his work.

What he doesn’t yet know is that he is in fact tomorrw's cover story of the paper's A2 arts supplement. Above is a sneak peek at the A2 cover which features one of his shots. Buy the paper to read how this Sydney surfie became one of the best backstage photographers in the world. We'll update with a link once the story goes online (and voilà).