The edge of their seats
Lessons from Gilmore, Australia’s most marginal electorateApril 2006
Arts & Letters
Mercedes Australian Fashion Week
On 26 April, the eleventh Mercedes Australian Fashion Week will open in Sydney, complete with shiny new operators IMG Fashion – the slick outfit that runs the bigger, better New York equivalent and has Kate Moss on its books – and industry insiders will commence their annual bitch-fest about how undercooked so much of it is.
The omissions! (Akira Isogawa will do his bit for his adopted country, but many of the big guns are staying away: Sass & Bide, Willow, Scanlan & Theodore, Collette Dinnigan.) The amateurism! (In the absence of the grand fashion houses that are the norm in Paris and Milan, a disproportionate number of Australian fashion graduates go out on their own, without apprenticeship.) The theatrics! (The 169 rats unleashed by Sydney it-boys Tsubi in 2001 were the tip of the iceberg; everything from Afghan hounds to midgets in lederhosen has been used since.) The plagiarism! (There hasn’t been a year without an entire collection ‘inspired by’ the European catwalks; last year one designer delivered a show that was shamefully reminiscent of Viktor & Rolf’s ‘Flowerbomb’ collection seen in Paris three months earlier).
But look hard at the premier event on the Australian fashion calendar and there is plenty to be hopeful about. While the papers stay busy printing pap-shots of soap stars and weather girls B-listing their way through the after-parties, buyers from boutiques and department stores, domestic and international, will be quietly placing orders for Spring–Summer 06–07, while young design stars – Josh Goot, Camilla and Marc, Marnie Skillings – continue to rise.
Ours is a young industry that supports young designers – hiccups, theatrics and all. Sydney is in a different league to Paris and Milan. We need to stop lamenting the lack of local equivalents to Chanel, Balenciagia, Gucci and Rochas. While it’s tempting to hate your husband for not being George Clooney, it’s better to try to love him for who he is.
How to be a prime minister
The task ahead for Anthony Albanese in restoring the idea that governments should seek to make the country better
The future of the Liberal Party
Peter Dutton doesn’t just have a talent problem on his hands
Ghosts in the war machine
Does the military attract violent misanthropists, or are they forged in murky theatres of war?
The dream machine: The 59th Venice Biennale
Curator Cecilia Alemani’s long overdue Biennale overwhelmingly features female artists and champions indigenous voices and other minorities
Mission statement: Daniel Boyd’s ‘Treasure Island’
An AGNSW exhibition traces the development of the Indigenous artist’s idiosyncratic technique, which questions ideas of perception
Shades of grey: Kerstin Thompson Architects
The lauded Melbourne-based architectural firm showcase a rare ability to sensitively mediate between the old and the new
Fear as folk: ‘Men’
Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film is an unsubtle but ambitious pastoral horror, mixing the Christian with the classical
‘Trust’
The American novelist Hernan Diaz audits the silence of great wealth in a story of four parts presented as novel, autobiography, memoir and diary
‘Irma Vep’
Olivier Assayas revisits his 1996 film in a delicious palindromic limited series, in which a frazzled director remakes his ‘Irma Vep’ film into a TV series
‘Trespasses’
The powerful debut novel from Irish author Louise Kennedy is a masterclass in emotional compression
‘An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life’
Alienations and fantasies of escape unify the stories in Australian author Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collectionGhosts in the war machine
Does the military attract violent misanthropists, or are they forged in murky theatres of war?
A dog’s breakfast
Notes on John Hughes’s plagiarism scandal
App trap: ‘Chloe’
‘Sex Education’ writer Alice Seabright’s new psychological thriller probing social media leads this month’s streaming highlights
‘The Picasso Century’ at the NGV
The NGV’s exhibition offers a fascinating history of the avant-garde across the Spanish artist’s lifetime
