When the going gets weird... the weird turn frow

martin margiela SS09/daily mail

Did you have any doubt that Rosemount Australian Fashion Week SS1011 risks turning into a blogocalypse? Representing a mere whisper of RAFW coverage back in 2006, when The Sydney Morning Herald's online arm smh.com.au published what frockwriter understands was the first RAFW blog (authored by yours truly - even if grassroots bloggers would most likely not consider it a blog), bloggers’ numbers have grown each year in the interim. Bryanboy generated coverage in 2008, his first OS fashion week outing. Last year, several high profile bloggers arrived, upping the indie reportage ante. Yet more blogstars are about to descend on Sydney for next week's event, from Tommy Ton to Susie Bubble, Scott Schuman and Garance Doré. Australian celebrity Lara Bingle isn't a blogger per se, but that hasn't stopped Harpers Bazaar Australia from announcing they will launch the scandal-magnet into blog orbit.

And of course a swag of local blog names are planning to attend. Some with official accreditations - others not.

Last week the buzz on Twitter about ticketing/accreditation triumphs or tragedies reached fever pitch, prompting the beginnings of a backlash, with bloggers accused by their social media peers of everything from having “a misguided sense of ticket-entitlement” to outright “lying”. One party sniffed “its not miss America”, warning all those currently high-fiving each other on Twitter, that “most will be standing”.

Oh the drama.

One group of players has thus far managed to slip under the radar.

Enter Australian INFront and its ragtag team of bloggers, some above-the-line - two of them planning to take anonymous potshots from backstage and behind-the-scenes.

The decade-old digital-specialist design website will trial a new events coverage system for RAFW. In fact the site goes live tonight - head to the home page and look for the "RAFW" button:



Team leader is Cairns retailer Lorena Mercado, who operates a boutique called We’re.

Mercado is married to digital-specialist graphic designer Damien Aistrope (who has built content management system sites for a plethora of Australia fashion names).

Now, Mercado will be attending RAFW as an accredited buyer. So will one member of her reporting team: jewellery designer and online retailer, Alicia Hannah Naomi from Melbourne (Sea of Ghosts).

According to Mercado, the duo did try to register as media delegates, but they were knocked back by IMG - and their enquiries about access to the media centre have thus far gone unanswered. (UPDATE 29/04: Surprise, surprise. The duo has just received media accreditation - two of numerous last-minute media accreditations that frockwriter has heard were cleared in the last 24 hours).

A third team member, Adelaide design student Selina Battersby has media accreditation under her own blog.

Mercado has already loaded 10 designer biographies on the INFront site, with five new bios to be added per day for the rest of this week and coverage added throughout each day of the event. A Twitter widget on the page will aggregate all the team’s #RAFW Australian INFront Tweets.

There are two other members of the reporting team and yes, they too are bloggers. They’re also models. Anonymous models.

Currently blogging under the hybrid name of "MUTT", which could be an amalgam of their names - or not - they have been quietly blogging away for the past couple of months on an “art project” called Heyweird. To add to the surreal nature of this new startup, it consists of interviews with anonymous subjects. Potentially among them, other Australian models. Frockwriter wonders, for example, if Catherine McNeil could be the subject of the latest post which discusses modelling and an upcoming marriage to another woman.

According to Mercado, both are “high profile” Australians with work experience in New York and London, which somewhat narrows down the field. If they really wanted to cover their tracks, they could be a little more discreet. Frockwriter has done more than her fair share of anonymous model blogger reportage, so we do look forward to this latest chapter.

How does Mercado plan on wrangling their backstage dispatches? Via the old school way apparently. Mercado told frockwriter:

“They’re going to be transcribing interviews on paper and handing to me....they will be interviewing designers, production assistants, stylists... anyone involved in the creative process”.

Let the games begin.

RAFW SS1011 - The 15 year anniversary video

Park of the lineup at Wednesday night's Frock Stars launch was a retrospective video commemorating 15 years of Australia's biggest fashion kneesup - if not actually by size (with the title of Australia's biggest fashion event officially going to the biannual trade show Fashion Exposed) then certainly by media profile. The video has just gone online, courtesy of its author, Sydney filmmaker Melvin J. Montalban. Most of Australia's major runway faces are there, including the late, great Mark Keighery.

Carson Kressley talks Oz fashion, emus and tv conservatives

So Australian Fashion Week SS1011 is launched. Well, kind of. Wednesday's launch of the Frock Stars exhibition at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum served as a defacto kickoff, two weeks ahead of touchdown. Covered it briefly on Twitter. And frockwriter must admit, as we predicted, it was a little awkward. Case in point: amongst the speeches, not a peep from the event's founder Simon Lock, which seemed odd. The official schedule is now online. Frockwriter got pretty close to nailing it - here it is, superimposed over our original draft. Many thanks to all the tipsters who helped fill in the gaps. Celebrity stylist Carson Kressley was one of few celebs at Wednesday's launch. He was in town for a Westfield promotion and we had a quick chat - recorded on the BB using Qik.

The exhibition, which runs until the 29th August, features garments, sketches, photographs, videos and even press clippings (including one of my Sydney Morning Herald stories).

It was nice to see the following quote from Lock blown up at the exhibition's entrance and repeated on the Powerhouse website:

"Fashion week says to the world that Australia is able to compete in the most image-led, sophisticated, cultural market in the world, which is ready-to-wear fashion".

Behemoth rocks

Coupla shots of the fans at last night's Behemoth concert in Sydney. Frockwriter has talked about Norwegian black metal and its influence on fashion. Well Behemoth hail from Poland and fit into a sub-sub metal genre called blackened death metal. They rocked the full corpse paint and came out for their encore in masks - made by Zenon Darski, the metalsmith dad of lead singer, Adam "Nergal" Darski - which was pretty impressive.

And while the band's Satanic stage antics might strike the fear of God into some, it's worth bearing in mind that off-stage, Darski is engaged to the Polish pop singer Dorota Rabczewska, whose oeuvre includes the albums Diamond Bitch and Bimbo. So he can't be all that scary.

That's Nergal in action in the last, fabulous Bluralist shot by Kent Vaughan (Mr Frockwriter) - which bears some resemblance to Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream.

New girl alert: Sarah Lorimer

We first saw Sarah Lorimer at Leona Edmiston's Spring/Summer 2010/2011 presentation in Sydney on Thursday. Well here she is again in a few more dresses from the collection, as booked by Edmiston for her SS1011 lookbook that will be dispatched next week. The fresh-faced 18 year-old, who is repped by Chadwicks in Sydney, has been modelling fulltime since the beginning of the year. She will be one of the agency's hot new faces at RAFW next month and in July will be heading off to try her luck in Europe. Frockwriter thinks she has a great look: a little Miranda Kerr, alotta Heather Graham.

Cruise control

Glorious day in Sydney and what a way to spend it - or at least an hour or so - down at the Overseas Passenger Terminal on Sydney Harbour. FYI international readers, this is where luxury cruise liners berth while in town. And while once a daggy, quasi-industrial zone, the area has been revamped with a series of chic restaurants and bars. It also happens to be the venue of Rosemount Australian Fashion Week, which kicks off in three weeks time, so it felt like we had all arrived a tad early. We were there to toast Leona Edmiston's Spring/Summer 2010/2011 season launch.

Three models, nine looks... Edmiston might not be joining in RAFW's 15th anniversary festivities, but she did do a fantastic job of launching the season at Quay restaurant with a charming capsule collection of fifties sundresses featuring retro prints and glamorous draped jersey eveningwear.

All accessories by Edmiston, with some spectacular millinery by Nerida Winter, makeup by MAC's Nicole Thompson and hair by Michael Brennan.

The three models were Chic Management's Hermione Cahill (top) and Chadwicks' Sarah Lorimer (third photo, L) and Bronx Whitehorn (pic 11 - with the blue and white turban).

I covered it live on Twitter, but here is a selection of other shots I snapped in and around the venue, before having to dash back to work.

Bring on RAFW.

Malcolm McLaren was not the first British record producer to die from mesothelioma

Getty via mirror.co.uk

Pop legend Malcolm McLaren died on Thursday from mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer that is almost exclusively caused by exposure to asbestos fibres. To date noone has released any information indicating how McLaren may have been exposed (update 11/4: one theory is that he may have been exposed whilst refitting his King's Road shop SEX in the early '70s). But you have to wonder what, if any, role asbestos soundproofing in older recording studios might have played. One asbestos-specialist legal firm suggests it's not beyond the realm of possibility. Interestingly, McLaren is the second British music producer, and in fact the fourth recording industry professional, to have succumbed to mesothelioma in seven years. In 2003 another British producer, Mickie Most (The Animals/Herman’s Hermits/Donovan/Susie Quatro) and American singer songwriter Warren Zevon were felled by mesothelioma, with Irish singer songwriter Christie Hennessy dying from same in 2007.

Death of a pop culture genius

Sad news about the death, at age 64, of Malcolm McLaren, following a secret battle with cancer. Unfortunately I don't have the time to write a full obit, but suffice it to say he was one of the most influential cultural figures of the second half of the 20th century. To be sure, his sphere of influence was pop culture. But the Punk revolution of the mid-late 1970s, in the commercialisation of which McLaren played an intrinsic role, rattled the foundations of music, fashion, graphic design and publishing.

A former manager of The New York Dolls, McLaren's early 1970s efforts to relocate New York poet/musician Richard Hell to London proved unsuccessful. McLaren engineered Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious instead, with Hell's spiked hair and ripped T-shirts providing what many believe was the inspiration for The Sex Pistols styling.

McLaren's (many) other music ventures included Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants. And of course, he collaborated with Vivienne Westwood, his erstwhile business and life partner, with whom he also had a son, Joe Corre (co-founder of Agent Provocateur).

In this journalist's opinion, Westwood's collections were at their most subversive during the Westwood-McLaren collaboration years. Together they rocked London's Kings Road with their controversial boutiques, whose names changed from Let It Rock to Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, Sex, Seditionaries and World's End. People were arrested for wearing Seditionaries T-shirts. It's hard to imagine today.

But the seeds for McLaren's brand of subversion had been sewn over a decade earlier, while he was an art student in London, against the backdrop of the May 1968 student riots in France. The riots themselves were rooted in the 1950s political/art movement Situationist International, of which McLaren became a disciple.

Above is an interview he did with Australia's Enough Rope program on the ABC on 10th July 2006.

Four months before that, I spoke to him backstage at Paris Fashion Week. We chatted about a number of things and I will endeavor to track down the original interview. One grab from it appeared at the end of this news story.

On the subject of artists, he told me:

"Artists have to always, always stand up and say, 'I'm not for sale' - meaning that your heart, your mindset, your artistic vision is not for sale. If that's for sale, then you're just a goddam wristwatch."

Garance Doré and Scott Schuman head back to Australia

jean-philippe delhomme via oftenenamorado

Well it's not quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite the same as sitting front row on the OS show circuit, but last year's power blogger frow could almost be about to reassemble in Sydney. Well, with the exception of Bryanboy, who sadly can't make it down. We already know that Canada's Tommy Ton is heading down to next month's Rosemount Australian Fashion Week. Ditto Susie Bubble, who has claimed that she would have been part of Dolce e Gabbana's new media publicity stunt in September, had she not had to return to London. Well frockwriter can reveal that French street style photographer/illustrator/blogger Garance Doré is coming to Australia at the end of April and, according to well-placed sources, intends to stay on for RAFW.

Commissioned by Westfield to create a series of illustrations of Australian designers, Doré will unveil the drawings at launches in Sydney and Melbourne. Doré's partner Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist, is expected to accompany her.

If all goes to plan, this will make the second consecutive RAFW for the First Couple of fashion blogging, after Schuman was brought down to the event by Tourism Australia last year and Doré accompanied him.

Louise van de Vorst has stalkers

Or so she told frockwriter at Fitzroy, Melbourne resto Cutler & Co on March 14th, on the occasion of the Calvin Klein Collection dinner, immediately following the launch of the L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival. Our tablemate for the duration, van de Vorst mentioned the challenges inherent in living with one of Australia's best-known musos (Silverchair's Daniel Johns). We won't go into the details, but suffice it to say, Johns has a lot of ardent fans. Although dressed for the evening in Calvin Klein Collection, the Chic Management model, fluent Dutch speaker, Gemma Ward doppelgänger and aspiring fashion designer is apparently more at home in her own label, which is due to be unveiled in one Sydney boutique in the next couple of months. Why hasn't she tried to infiltrate the OS runway season? No particular reason, she explained, before adding that she might have a crack next season. We have a hunch she would be a hit.