Of 19 Australian Fashion Foundation scholarship winners between 2009 and 2019, only three have design roles within local fashion businesses. But those who do are optimistic about the industry
When he was studying fashion at RMIT in Melbourne, Vlad Kanevsky thought international runway shows looked like a “fever dream”. Now, as a senior designer at Thom Browne in New York, with a decade of experience in the industry, he says: “Things that didn’t seem possible in Australia have become a reality.”
Kanevsky is part of a generation of Australian fashion designers whose careers reveal a hard truth about the local industry: while it can produce world-class talent, it does not always have the scale to employ them.