Emerging out of darkness and stepping into the light is a difficult path best walked with sartorial reverence, it seems.
For Bianca Spender, the founder and creative director of the eponymous contemporary womenswear label, this voyage is one she’s recently traversed, intimately sharing with the audience at her milestone fifteenth-anniversary runway presentation the trials and tribulations of coming into your own, and the ease radical self-acceptance can provide.
“Designing clothes has long been a type of cathartic therapy for me as I find my own voice in an industry in which my mother was so dominant,” Spender candidly revealed.
Spender’s reference to her late mother Carla Zampatti, a fashion maven and maverick rolled into one fabulously dressed woman, highlights the dissonance between individuality and living up to expectations that arises from her unique position.
But as Spender revealed in a pre-show statement and displayed on the runway, her strength lies in embracing the inextricable qualities between her own distinct design methodology and her “ever-evolving tribute” to her upbringing in the world of fashion.
“Of late I am more experimental and optimistic than ever. Confident that my clothes make people feel inspired, courageous and happy,” Spender noted. This mood was apparent at her Resort ’24 runway show, presented during Afterpay Australian Fashion Week, with Spender solidifying her fluid-meets-functional aesthetic and sartorial language.
For a collection entitled ‘FIFTEEN’, the nostalgia was palpable, suspended in the air on the runway as Spender’s designs paraded around the sand-laden runway. An ode to the every-woman, pieces were versatile with airy and soft silhouettes scattered throughout Spender’s inventive tailoring, draping and layering techniques. A moving collection in more ways than one.
Spender revealed she drew references from the Australian landscape for her Summer 2023 offering. Cloud-white sheer shirts and checked skirts gave way to a melange of ombré skin-clad dresses that hugged the form and featured surprising twists or asymmetrical details that makes apparent that beauty can be found in imperfections.
Injections of periwinkle, cobalt, daffodil, rust and emerald within the collection disrupted the Spender’s masterfully monochromatic mood-board, evoking a sense of transience or everlasting motion that propels the wearer to her next destination. Poetry in motion, indeed.
Spencer featured recently-launched vegan and sustainable footwear label, Edie Collective, a reminder to always put your best foot forward when persevering through these precarious times.
The final note was one said best by Spender herself: “Somewhere on this journey I found I was no longer second guessing myself. This is the unbearable lightness of being.”
Onward, into a new dawn.
