Fashion

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Fashion is language.

A way of saying who you are without ever needing to speak.

It’s heritage.

Our subcultures, values and tastes all stitched into the clothes on our backs.

When the right fabric gets cut, tacked and sewn into shape, it is more than clothing.

It is innately personal and inseparably political.

That’s why it has to go beyond a trend.

It has to be more than just seasonal prints, ever-changing hemlines and fads that dictate who’s in and out.

In the right hands fashion can be advocacy.

In the right hands it can mean sustainability.

In the right hands fashion is innovation and enterprise; dismantling old production systems to create everything from flame retardant materials, to more ethical supply chains.

There’s a reason we call it the “fabric,” of society – because in the right hands, fashion shapes our world.

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AUDIO: Modern instrumental music.

VISUAL: Sequence of images that depict students and a model in a lighting studio.

SARAH SPEAKS: I think that we're at a really interesting time in the history of fashion. We're at a great advantage as students and young practitioners to shape a new industry that we want to work in. My name is Sarah and I'm studying the Masters of Fashion Design at RMIT university.

VISUAL: Montage of shots showing SARAH working on fashion sketches and designs and SARAH as she works at her table.

SARAH SPEAKS: I'm really loving studying again. I'm really excited to be back here. It's very hard work, but it's quite a luxury as well to really take the time to focus on yourself and your own practice. It's a chance that you don't normally get.

VISUAL: Shots of her fashion studio and other students working.

SARAH SPEAKS: In the masters, you're really refining your own practice and what you've been doing in the industry and what really inspires you, so really soul search and work out what you want to do and what you're good at. For me, it's couture techniques. For some of the other designers, it might be pleating or fabric manipulation or sustainability and recycling garments, and you're bringing that inspiration that is core to you as a designer, and you're working to develop it and refine it through the course, through the master classes, then into the future.

VISUAL: Various shots of the fashion studio and students collaborating with others and talking. SARAH also addresses the camera.

SARAH SPEAKS: The academic level is very strong at RMIT. It's not merely just about decorating clothes, it's about understanding clothing, understanding how people will wear them, and the greater aspects of the fashion industry.

VISUAL: Shots of a fashion model being manipulated and touched by SARAH and other students.

SARAH SPEAKS: Just a real sense of achievement to follow a garment from the very first inspiration to the final finished product is really amazing. When we were watch those models walking down the catwalk wearing our designs, it's your vision from start to finish and it's going to be a great sense of achievement.

VISUAL: White background with RMIT logo.

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[Start of transcript]

In this video three students speak to camera interspersed with scenes of students and student work exhibitions.

Duration: 2:37

[Opening title]
RMIT University logo

[Screen title] Vivian Lai - Advanced Diploma of Visual Arts

Vivian: With the end of year exhibition coming up, I think it's a bit nerve wracking. I've never been confident enough to like exhibit my staff or like show more work to people, so it's a really big thing.

[Screen title] Isaac Francis - Bachelor of Industrial Design (Honours)

Isaac: There's not a chance I could have done this four years ago, even three years ago. I don't think there's a chance I could have got to this point. I had no idea how to do anything that I've done here, 12 months ago.

[Screen title] Justine Di Natale - Bachelor of Design (Games)

Justine: With the end of year presentation I'm hoping we can get lots of play testing done, and I hope to see people having fun playing it.

Isaac: It's a little bit nerve wracking showing this work to so many people as I've showed it to maybe under 10 people.

Justine:  Before this course I was making smaller flash games, very simple. I never thought I'd be able to produce a physics game, and I can do that now.

Vivian: Initially I was just playing around with like different colors that I was seeing in those patterns and didn't really represent the culture that I wanted. It was just more like pretty colors.

Justine: So our mentors help us out by pointing us in the right direction with our game.

Isaac:  And so my supervisor, when we started this year, said we would keep coming with new ideas and new pathways and pushing us back into kind of more unknown territories.

Justine: Collaboration's really important because you can bounce ideas off each other rather than just working on your own.

Isaac:  Talk to me a year ago, this is not what I would've done for this year. Every semester has just brought some really vast direction change.

Vivian: I've never exhibited an artwork before. Getting it more exposed like to more people and having the feedback that people do give me, whether it's good or bad criticism, just to develop my artwork has really helped me gain that confidence.

Justine:  I never imagined getting here when I started the course. Yeah, I didn't think we'd be this ambitious and create anything this big.

Isaac:  I've found that RMIT more so than other universities are supportive in us really exploring what interests us. If there's a particular material, or a particular type of object that we're kind of curious about, they've been really supportive and kind of pushing us down whichever path we want to go. That's why you see so many different projects in this room right now. You're able to do anything here. You're able to make and design anything you want, so use that freedom.

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