With thanks to
Redken | CLO Virtual Fashion | Wacom | Seamless | David Short - EY | Marcel Pandher - Belle Marc Pty Ltd | Andrew Cuccurullo | Leaf
2025 The Innovators - The Next Garde
Meet the Designers
LUke rutherford-durney
LUKE RUBÉN
Seek the strange when beauty is not enough.
Born and raised in Sydney and of Anglo–Spanish heritage, Luke Rubén designs through duality — balancing restraint and romanticism, satire and sincerity, rebellion and refinement.
With an enduring fascination for characters, narrative, nature and mythology, Luke approaches fashion through the lens of world-building. Designing not simply garments, but orchestrated stories, constructed of conceptual caricatures that exist somewhere between myth and radical modernity.
For Luke, fashion is both theatre and thesis: a medium to question beauty, parody tradition and fracture identity.
Rooted in the rhythm of streetwear yet elevated through avant-garde precision, his silhouettes are dominant and sculptural, merging comfort, function and spectacle. Each collection draws from the natural world as much as from imagined realms — textures that echo earth and pelt, tones that feel mineral and botanical.
Sustainability and respect for the natural world underpins his practice. A scavenged textile language of existing material defines the brand: upcycled second-hand materials, original Australian mohair knits, recycled-fibre latch-hooking, preserved premium deadstock fabrics, natural botanical dyes and experimental printing techniques.
Luke Rubén creates for those who see clothing not simply as adornment, but as ritual, reflection and imagination made tangible — where beauty is only the beginning.
oliver parry
OLIVE PARRY
Oliver Parry is a form of entertainment. A connection, not a combatant, devoted to the ritual of dressing. His practice explores hereditary fashion, where garments become inherited gestures of creation and decomposition. Rooted in severe craftsmanship and monumental conceptualism, Oliver Parry treats fashion as language spoken through cloth, textiles, and transformation. He believes that a true artist bleeds for their work, that creation demands devotion, and sometimes a quiet kind of sacrifice. Design is movement, it’s ritual, it’s obsession.
Oliver Parry’s signature of buried fabrics, experiments with textures and stains, seasonal natural dying and a playful exploration with the body and the way the world touches it, leads to the ambition of making every stitch, every cut, every collection a small ceremony, to make people feel, to make them see and to douse upon their bodies.
Oliver grew up with his house-cleaning mum, watching her turn care into ritual, every detail perfect, every gesture for someone else’s delight. She was someone who kept her beautifully illustrated tarot cards hidden in her top drawer beside her bed, which Oliver would stare at, waiting for his own reading one day. The concepts for his collections are born from accumulations of psychic readings gathered over the years of his life. This process is combined with the practice of collecting fibres from previous owners and transforming them into garments which are naturally dyed, deconstructed and reformed into something entertaining.
Tate boswarva
ATTÈ
Tate Boswarva is an emerging Australian designer and founder of ATTÈ, a label defined by material experimentation and textile artistry. From her studio on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Boswarva constructs one-off fabrics using laser-cut denim meticulously hand-laid into new circular formations, cyanotype-dyed silks marked by molten textures, and water-soluble bases stitched into negative space to create lace-like structures.
Manipulation of material feels both scientific and sensual. Techniques such as natural dyeing, flocking, screen printing, and custom beading crafted from contraception blister packs, balances precision tailoring with raw edges and deconstructed silhouettes. Hand-blown glass is pushed beyond adornment into garment form, to reveal a practice grounded in process and innovation inspired by the natural colour palette of the environment and reflecting her commitment to ethical and expressive design.
Conceptual yet wearable, ATTÈ creates garments that explore the body as both architecture and canvas. Boswarva’s work has been featured in Forces of Fashion: Vogue Street Style, The Vanilla Issue and in 2024 she was a finalist and winner of the People's Choice Award in the Australian Environmental Art and Design Prize.
zoe markopoulos
MARKO
MARKO is an emerging fashion brand that aims to redefine ideas of permanence and value in fashion.
With a focus on process and emotional resonance, the brand encourages a slower, more considered relationship with clothes and the wearer.
It’s debut collection ‘PATINA’ explores the process of curation and material storytelling, where textiles like leather, heavy canvases and waxed organza's are chosen not only for their aesthetic quality but for their ability to hold and reveal time.
Drawing from poetry and the rugged Australian landscapes of the designer’s youth on the South Coast of NSW, the collection evokes a sense of resilience, nostalgia, and the quiet romance of endurance, echoing the mythos of the cowboy.
Copper plays a central role in this narrative that has been directly communicated in my work, a material that naturally oxidizes, darkens, and transforms through touch and exposure.
Within ‘PATINA’, copper becomes a living emblem of change: a reflection of the body’s interaction with its environment, and a testament to beauty found in transformation.
