The lights go down on the catwalk, because the voice of Witiyana Marika of Yothu Yindi calls out over the sound system, singing bush wallaby manikay (conventional tune) in Yolŋu matha. Then Marika’s first-born grandchild, Yolŋu mannequin and Vogue cowl star Magnolia Maymuru, dances on to the runway’s pink carpet, wallaby-style. The lights go up, revealing Cassie Leatham’s Matriarchs Circles of Life robe, a New Look-style silhouette the Taungurung and Dja Dja Wurrung artist of the Kulin nation created utilizing scrap materials and a conventional coil weaving approach.
As Maymuru walks slowly, proudly, down the runway, the tune shifts to Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s This Land is Mine, a ballad of intertwined views – a settler-colonial one, by which Nation may be purchased and owned, and an Aboriginal one by which Nation and self are inextricably linked.
We’re on Larrakia nation, Garramilla/Darwin, for Nation to Couture, the annual showcase of First Nations style and textiles. The present’s highly effective opening encapsulates the whole lot that makes Nation to Couture not like another style occasion in Australia. It’s the sense of cross-generational relationships; the sense of neighborhood and kinship; the celebration of tradition and connection to Nation; the deal with caring for the atmosphere.
Over the night, 20 collections by First Nations designers and artists – starting from debuts to extra established labels comparable to Magpie Goose and Delvene Cockatoo-Collins – are showcased by First Nations fashions, to a wholly First Nations soundtrack. When Malyangapa Barkindji rapper Barkaa hits the runway mid-show and sings “that is my fuckin home” (as her mom, award-winning jewelry designer Cleonie Quayle, watches on from the entrance row), you actually really feel it.
The following morning Maymuru tells me she was in tears simply moments earlier than the present opened. Ready to stroll, she’d peeped a retrospective slideshow on the large screens both aspect of the runway, and seen images of herself on the very first Nation to Couture in 2016. It was her first time on the runway, aged 19. “All of it got here flooding again,” says the mannequin. “The tears simply began flowing.”
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Maymuru wasn’t solely considering of her personal journey. “There’s been such a giant shift [in the fashion industry] since I began out again in 2016; an enormous wave of First Nations style and fashions,” she says. “To be part of a technology the place we made an enormous motion that modified the nation – [and] to be part of it from the start proper up till now – it was simply an unimaginable feeling.”
Nation to Couture, now in its tenth 12 months, has been an important a part of that motion: the primary and largest showcase of First Nations style.
However Nation to Couture has at all times been as a lot about artwork as attire. Began by Darwin Aboriginal artwork honest (DAAF) in response to the calls for of collaborating arts centres – most of them in distant communities – it has constantly foregrounded collaborations between artists and style designers.
On the coronary heart of all of it is Nation and tradition, says the DAAF creative director, Simon Carmichael, a Ngugi man from Quandamooka Nation in south-east Queensland. “Throughout the entire totally different artwork kinds, whether or not it’s efficiency or style or design … these tales are delivered to life in actually impactful and vibrant ways in which allow individuals to attach with the tales and study extra.”
Michelle Maynard, a Tasmanian Aboriginal designer and supervisor of Indigenous Style Tasks, which runs Nation to Couture, says the occasion is “not attempting to copy the mainstream style business”.
“That’s there for individuals if their aspirations lie within the business panorama,” she says. “However I believe the higher share of our contributors’ aspirations aren’t.”
“We’re sort of carving out our personal form of how we need to take part in style.”
Maymuru, who has walked runways throughout Australia, says Nation to Couture is not like another. “It’s selling the distant,” she says. “You get to see individuals’s identities; you see who they’re of their designs. You hear their tales. Every single one in all us have our personal totems, our personal songlines, our personal Nation. And we inform these tales by means of artwork and thru style – and DAAF permits us to indicate it to the world. I simply assume that’s wonderful.”
She closed this 12 months’s first runway present in a cape that includes hand-painted designs by artists from Bula’Bula Arts within the distant Yolŋu neighborhood of Ramingining in north-east Arnhem Land.
“That cape really represented the artwork centre, the individuals, the land,” says Maymuru. “I used to be very honoured to put on it.” Earlier than the present, she met two of the artists backstage, and found a reference to one in all them by means of the Yolŋu kinship system. “Seems I name the designer grandad! It was simply such a particular second,” she says.
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It was Bula’Bula’s third Nation to Couture and second 12 months collaborating with Darwin dressmaker Marcia Russell, AKA Black Cat Couture. Often the artists work in conventional types of weaving and portray utilizing pure supplies, and Angela Banyawarra, whose work of Gumang (magpie geese) – one in all her totems – featured within the assortment, says there’s a “freedom” in portray conventional designs in a brand new medium.
The primary aim, nonetheless, is sharing historic tales: “The best way we paint comes from the place we come from and the place we belong.” Portray clothes is a method to “present everybody what it’s all about”, Banyawarra says.
For individuals in Ramingining, in the meantime, sporting garments that includes their conventional designs and totems, is empowering. “It’s good for the Indigenous younger women to put on it … we really feel proud,” Banyawarra says.
Eunice Yu, a Yawuru and Bunuba girl and supervisor of Nagula Jarndu, a ladies’s arts and useful resource centre in Broome that was a part of Nation to Couture’s first 12 months, talks about “mabu liyan”, a Yawuru idea that “embodies this complete sense of feeling good about the whole lot that you simply do”. The ladies working with Nagula Jarndu need to see their artwork on garments as a result of “it’s one thing you possibly can put on and it makes you are feeling good”, she says. “Some issues are out of your management, however we wish to have the ability to really feel good the entire time.”
This 12 months, Nagula Jarndu partnered with Saheli Girls, a like-minded social enterprise based mostly in Rajasthan, India, bringing collectively Yawuru designs with Indian block-printing, embroidery and pure dyeing methods to supply a set of free, flowing attire and informal pants and tops.
As with all Nagula Jarndu’s collections, the artists will earn fee from promoting their garments. The centre, in the meantime, used the partnership with Saheli, a longtime atelier, to develop their considering round financially and environmentally sustainable fashions inside style.
“We don’t need to contribute to the large waste administration points [in fashion],” Yu says. “We’re going to have a look at sustainable methods of manufacturing and manufacturing.”
Magpie Goose, a style label and social enterprise based mostly in Magandjin/Meanjin/Brisbane, can also be pushed by the cultural and financial empowerment of the artists it really works with. For each assortment, the label companions with a unique arts centre or collective for its prints, and up to now it has raised greater than $700,000 in royalties for these artists.
“Artists and tales are the main target,” says co-owner Amanda Hayman, a Wakka Wakka and Kalkadoon girl and artist. “Style is only a platform.”
For this 12 months’s Nation to Couture – their second – they debuted a collaboration with a collective of Quandamooka artists together with 2025 Natsiaa finalist Elisa Jane Carmichael.
Hayman says style is a troublesome enterprise and “positively not a cash maker”. Though Magpie Goose is extra of “a love undertaking”, she says “it does create impression for the distant communities that we work with”.
“It’s additionally stunning to see the artworks remodeled into this different factor – and for the artists, to see different individuals sporting their story is de facto particular.”