Rosemount Australian Fashion Week

Overview

For some reason I always think RAFW stands for Royal Australian Fashion Week, like how the racing course is Royal Randwick. Maybe because there's a certain amount of competitiveness and a lot of young leggy creatures involved in both? But no, it is Rosemount Australian Fashion Week and it means that Circular Quay is going to be full of people wearing terrifying and amazing shoes. The fact that it's not a Biennale year makes the conceptual wardrobe thing a little harder ("I see a post-industrial textural inflection!" "I see Lady Gaga dressed up as someone who is dressing up as Lady Gaga!"), but fashion is hard work. It is a serious business. Do you know how many hours some of these garments take to make? Quite possibly you do, but I don't imagine you spend much time thinking about it. Or, to put it another way, have you ever seen Karl Lagerfeld smile? No.

Like fashion weeks everywhere, RAFW is an exciting intersection of fashion as art and fashion as celebrity culture, with basically everything and everyone in the general area of it being a photo-op waiting to get blogged. 56 Australian designers, including some official household budget threats like Manning Cartell, Therese Rawsthorne, Michael Lo Sordo, Yeojin Bae, Saint Augustine Academy, Stolen Girlfriends Club and Kirrily Jonston, will be showing their Spring/Summer 2011 collections to local and international buyers, press and people who've finagled invitations or are famous. Luckily, if none of the aforementioned include you, the collections will appear on various fashiony blogs and websites before you can say 'get me out of these shoes. Now.