Fashion graduates bring life to festival

Three days into a fashion festival and often even the hardiest fashion journalists are starting to feel the tiniest twinge of fatigue, but a showcase of freshly-graduated fashion designers is virtually guaranteed to re-inject the pep you think you've lost after opening night festivities are over.

This was certainly the case in Melbourne last night, with third-evening action at the 2011 Melbourne Fashion Festival handed over to the best and brightest talents from Australia's various fashion and textile design schools.

It may sound like a cliche, but based on what I and several hundred other eager-eyed fashion lovers saw last night, the future of the Australian fashion industry is in very good hands indeed.

After Tuesday night's lacklustre opening show, which brought together some of the country's most commercially-minded designers and a beautiful but sedate late show presented by Vogue, the LMFF National Graduate Showcase brought some life, humour, colour and inventiveness to proceedings.

You can always be sure that the experimental, wildly imaginative edges of just-graduated designers will not have been wiped off or sanded away by the commercial realities of the mainstream fashion retail industry.

They are still at the idealistic, conceptual, free-form stage of their careers, where the possibilities are only limited by their imaginations - and, of course, their financial resources.

There was not one dud in this astoundingly good collection of 12 wildly varied designers, although some took the breath away more sharply than others.

The wildest applause was reserved for the show's final designer, Curtin University's Celene Bridge, who doesn't just design clothing - she creates mythological figures that are part human, part animal, part mermaid and part alien.

Her dresses come with fish scale-like textures, giant paws, beaks, horns and claws wrapped around models' heads; it's a striking, gothic vision that hurtles headlong into costume rather than conventional everyday wear (unless you are exceptionally brave, or Lady Gaga, who I could imagine wearing some of these designs, and I mean that as a compliment, rather than an insult).

Also from Curtin University, Jennifer Nebel showed a strikingly geometric, origami-inspired collection of pure-white and digital print dresses.

What was most inspiring about the graduate showcase was the sheer diversity of apparel on display. Kate Watson, from Sydney University of Technology, showed loose printed catsuits and hooded dresses with a relaxed, pyjama-dressing feel, while RMIT student Kate Sala showed sheer, sportswear influenced pieces with spliced blocks of bright colour inserted into otherwise all-white ensembles.

Jennifer Chua, also from Sydney's UTS, showed an impressive collection of martial-arts inspired menswear, while Laura Anderson, from RMIT, created fetishistic, sculpted corsetry in leather.

Judging by the animated buzz after the show, I wasn't the only one inspired by what I had just seen.

L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival continues until Saturday.

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