Talking the talk: Fashion Torque, Live in the Studio and Insight

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Have always been a big believer in fashion forums. In my brief incarnation as editor of Australian industry newsmagazine Ragtrader, I initiated a (very short-lived) series called “Breakfast with Ragtrader”, inviting various fashion players to have a yack about industry issues. In the many and varied fashion panels in which I have been invited to be involved in recent years (including FGI, New Zealand Fashion Week, the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival and a talk series hosted by the State Library of NSW during last year’s Rosemount Sydney Fashion Festival), I have always walked away thinking that if anyone were to initiate an ongoing in-the-round fashion series in this country, it would probably be a hit. Social media conversations are fine, but nothing beats a live event. Interesting to see more and more activity in this regard. Fashion Torque was initiated a couple of months ago by Melbourne stylist Philip Boon and designer Jenny Bannister with various guest panellists. It runs every Thursday at 6.30pm at the Globe Café in Prahran and is free to attend. 

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] in Melbourne's Federation Square is running a (ticketed) panel series called Live in the Studio hosted by award-winning Melbourne-based UK animators/designers Ian Gouldstone and David Surman. Tomorrow night’s event at 7pm is dedicated to fashion and the small screen, notably Project Runway Australia and the guest speakers are Project Runway Australia series 2 winner Anthony Capon and yours truly. Click (here) for more details. 

The good folks at Australian creative portal Australian INfront have just launched their own talk series at Sydney’s Apple store on George Street called Insight, focussed on people working in the digital domain. Again, the series per se is not dedicated to fashion, but the third installment on April 27th just happens to be.

I was honoured (and somewhat gobsmacked) to be invited to present this third edition of Insight. Australian INfront editor Damien Aistrope was interested in my personal trajectory as a fashion journalist moving from print into digital, so that’s what I’ll be talking about for anyone who happens to be interested. 

The event was not deliberately timed to synchronise with Rosemount Australian Fashion Week, which runs from May 2-6 not too far down the road at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, but it’s serendipitous. These talks are free. Click (here) for the full blurb. Thanks to Sonny Vandevelde for the promo portrait. 

Girls on film at the L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival 2011

screen cap 'catwalk' via 123nonstop.com

Arguably more fashion-specific documentaries have been lensed in the past four years, than in the last two decades combined, with offerings including Lagerfeld Confidential (2007), Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton (2007), Valentino: The Last Emperor (2008), The September Issue (2009) and Picture Me (2009). That's not counting the recent proliferation of fashion shorts and videos, whose distribution has obviously been facilitated by the net. For anyone who is interested in seeing some older examples of the frockumentary genre, in addition to some less high-profile recent examples and who happens to be in Melbourne next week, this year's L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival, which officially kicks off tomorrow - and which frockwriter will be attending as a guest of the organisers and Tourism Victoria - has an abundance of offerings.

As part of its ongoing fashion on film series, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] is running a festival dedicated to the model doco called Fashion Models on Film.
 

screen cap 'model' via ACMI

Featured are Sarah Ziff and Ole Schell's controversial Picture Me: A Model's Diary (2009); Robert Leacock's Catwalk: Milan, Paris and New York (1996), which tagged along after Christy Turlington during one runway season; Frederick Wiseman's Model (1980), which profiled New York's Zoli agency (since subsumed into Click) and Dressed for Summer 2011 (2010), the Spring/Summer 2011 chapter of French journalist Agnès Boulard's longrunning French television series on Paris Fashion Week.

ACMI's screenings kicked off on Thursday with Picture Me, but here is the remainder of the program:


Picture Me                           Sun 13 Mar 2011, 5.30pm
Model                                  Sun 13 Mar 2011, 7.30pm
Catwalk                               Mon 14 Mar 2011, 3.30pm
Dressed for Summer 2011  Mon 14 Mar 2011, 5.30pm
Model                                  Mon 14 Mar 2011, 7.30pm
Picture Me                           Tue 15 May 2011, 2.30pm
Model                                  Wed 16 May 2011, 2.30pm
Dressed Up                         Wed 16 May 2011, 7.30pm
Catwalk                               Thu 17 Mar 2011, 2.30pm

ACMI  

Address: Federation Square, Melbourne

Phone: +61 3 86632583

Web: http://www.acmi.net.au/fashion-models-on-film.aspx

screen cap 'catwalk' via 123nonstop.com

On Monday this week, as part of the broader LMFF cultural festival, ACMI also hosted the launch event of a new Australian initiative called NoHome.tv.
 

Conceived by Alastair McCann and Justin Watson, NoHome.tv is a fashion film portal that will go live on March 20th, showcasing submissions from, among others, Alexi Freeman, Arabella Ramsay, Beat Poet, Carly Hunter, Limedrop, Orri Henrisson, Upper Left Arm and Sweden’s Acne – with consumers encouraged and enabled via the site to remix the films.
 

On Thursday, sadly prior to the arrival of many out-of-towners for LMFF, a separate project called FASHIONFILM screened a number of short films at the Rooftop Cinema in Melbourne’s CBD, notably Mark Skaszy’s Corrine Day Diary, which documented a decade in the life of the late, great British fashion photographer.