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.
“I love Australia, but being so geographically far away and isolated, there aren’t that many career options, which is why I haven’t considered returning yet,” he says.
Australia’s fashion industry has always been outward looking. When David Jones opened in the 19th century, its imported garments acted as a conduit to Paris. By the late 1940s, the department store was recreating fashion from couture houses onshore for clients.
In the latter half of the 20th century, a thriving community of local designers emerged, supported by skilled manufacturers who benefited from tariffs on imported goods. Australia became a vibrant talent incubator, producing brands such as Collette Dinnigan, Akira Isogawa, Zimmermann and Sass & Bide, who succeeded at home and abroad. But in the early 2000s, a combination of political, digital and market forces saw Australia’s local industry flounder.
Under that shadow, millennial fashion graduates turned their ambitions to the bright lights of the world’s fashion capitals.
In 2009, Australians-turned-New-Yorkers consultant Malcolm Carfrae and businesswoman Julie Anne Quay established the Australian Fashion Foundation (AFF) scholarship. Winning the scholarship in 2015 helped Kanevsky begin his international design career.
The prize is $20,000 and an internship at a luxury fashion house, initially just in New York, but over time the scholarship’s remit has expanded to Europe. “The philosophy of the foundation is to help young Australians gain world-class, hands-on international experience,” says Carfrae. “It serves to further expand and enrich the future of Australian fashion.”
In the first decade of the award, there were 19 winners. Analysis by Guardian Australia found that only three have returned to design roles within Australian fashion businesses, and just one has launched her own label. Nine are still working in New York, Paris, London or Milan.
Carfrae says the low rate of return is due to the “scarcity” of design jobs in Australia. The Australian Fashion Council estimates 364,000 people are directly employed in Australia’s $27.2bn fashion industry; but data from Jobs and Skills Australia suggests only 3,700 of those employees, roughly 1%, are designers.
Carfrae says international training and work experience is “important” regardless of whether or not winners come back. The award took a pause in 2025, but Carfrae says “it will resume in 2026”.
Georgia Lazzaro was the first person to win the scholarship and completed two internships in New York – at Narciso Rodriguez and Calvin Klein. Having both companies on her CV “opened so many doors from the get-go”, she says. She went on to spend 15 years in New York, before returning to a design role at Matteau in Sydney this year.
Just as it did for Lazzaro and Kanevsky, for many recipients, the initial fashion foundation internship extends to a long-term stint overseas.
The 2013 winner, Talisa Trantino has a resume that reads like a Paris fashion week schedule. After an internship at Alexander McQueen, she worked for Celine, Bottega Veneta, Wales Bonner, and until recently she was head of jewellery and special projects at Loewe.
Although Trantino would like to be closer to family (“I always wish that Australia was a two-hour flight away”), a move home feels impossible.
“It’s such a conflict of mine because I love Australia but leaving now feels like turning your back on something you’ve worked so hard to build,” she says. “I don’t know if there is an opportunity that could excite me enough to bring me home.”
At the heart of her hesitation is the difference in manufacturing and artisanal capabilities. She doesn’t know if Australia can compare with “really fine-tuning craft into products”, processes she’s used to at European luxury houses.
Australia’s dwindling manufacturing capacity is undeniable: only 3% of all garments sold in Australia are made onshore, so opportunities to work closely with skilled makers are hard to come by.
On 12 March, the Australian Fashion Council launched a 10-year manufacturing strategy aimed at rebuilding the sector.
For some designers, creativity thrives under such limitations. “Everyone can have an idea, but it’s about being able to execute it within the environment you are in, using the resources that you have,” says Natalia Grzybowski, who won an AFF scholarship in 2011.
Grzybowski is a rare example of a scholarship recipient who has built her career in Australia.
After six months with Lazzaro at Calvin Klein, she took up a senior design position at Alice McCall in Sydney. She went on to roles with Josh Goot and Lee Mathews and is now the creative director at swim and resort brand Bondi Born.
While “working in design houses where you have endless options and you can do intricate embroideries and use beautiful materials” abroad might be creatively fulfilling, she says, “working within constraints requires a different type of creativity”.
“There is opportunity here. I partly stayed because I wanted to create that for other people,” she says. “If everyone leaves, you don’t have anyone here. We can have a fantastic industry, so I’m always going to encourage people to stay.”
Those returning to Australia after long international careers can face specific challenges. Set designer Athanasia Spathis spent almost 10 years living and working between London and Paris before returning to Australia early in the pandemic. Her clients abroad include Louis Vuitton, Dior, Schiaparelli, Hermès, Maison Margiela and Vogue, but she describes her work in the local industry as diluted both financially and creatively.
“In Europe of course there’s bigger budgets but there’s also more room for collaboration,” she says. “Their references are drawn from a plethora of things – it can be a small personal interest, or something within cinema or the arts. Whereas I find here … there’s a lack of confidence to try things.”
Lazzaro has had a different experience. Although her decision to return to Australia was driven by a desire to prioritise her young children, creatively, despite it being early days, she has found “it’s really exciting to come back”. The local industry has “a sense of pride”, she says.
Her optimism is shared by jewellery designer Seb Brown, who founded his business in Melbourne in 2009. “It was an absolutely amazing place to start,” he says. “We were stocked at Monk House Design and Alice Euphemia. They’re closed now, but they were incredible incubators of brands. Those glory days of retail really made an impression on me.”
But like many Australian fashion talents, a few years ago Brown began to feel the limits of the local market. “There was a ceiling,” he says. In June of 2024, he opened an arm of his business in Paris, while keeping his atelier in Melbourne’s Century Building.
In Paris he has better proximity to buyers from global retailers, international media and European clientele, but he has found running a business there to be “fairly backwards”. Whereas in Australia, “there is just sort of this get up and go, let’s give it a crack attitude”.
Conservative, mid-market fashion retail chains are a dominant force in Australian fashion. As a contractor who built her portfolio in the ateliers of Europe, for Spathis the difference in her Australian clients’ priorities – and budgets – is jarring.
Brown has had a different experience as an independent designer, sidestepping the local industry’s creative restraints while benefitting from Australia’s wealth and space. “I don’t think I would’ve been able to do the same thing in Paris, one bit,” he says.
Even so, “I felt I had to explore outside of Australia to grow and be taken a little more seriously,” he says. “I guess I’ll always have to be travelling back and forth.”