THE ANNIVERSARY OF WHEN IT ALL BEGAN

This time of year always takes me back to a hot and sticky summer’s day, when sitting at my share house kitchen table, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through jobs on Seek. It had been a daily activity for the past 3 months since I had graduated from my fashion degree at RMIT and I was beginning to feel like, well frankly, an idiot.

There literally wasn't a single job I wanted to apply for. I wondered, how on earth I'd been so foolish. To have done a 4 year degree (off the back of a 3 year Arts Degree) and and never really thought about who I’d actually want to work for at the end of it all.

Other than my puzzle maker grandfather on my mum's side, I come from a long lineage of people who get conventional jobs working for other people. The idea of starting my own business never even crossed my mind. It seemed a default, that I needed to get a job. And yet, on that sticky day, staring at the cold hard reality zooming past me on my scrolling laptop screen, I realised I couldn’t do it. Or rather wouldn’t do it, at least not in Australia.

I was deep in the rosy bliss of early love, with my now husband, and was gutted as it dawned on me - I was going to have to leave and move overseas if I wanted to get a job in the fashion industry I found remotely fulfilling. Probably New York or Paris.

I love design, but I need to work with good materials. The idea of designing trend-based clothes in cheap, (mostly) synthetic fabrics felt like a prison sentence. And yet that’s what seemed to be dominating the landscape here in Australia.

I'm not sure what it is, but I think there's something in the Australian collective subconscious that has informed our approach to materialism as a country in recent years. I've since discovered that Australia (per capita) is the largest consumer worldwide of fast fashion, and to me, that checks out.

Like many other countries before commerce went truly global, Australia used to have a proud history of manufacturing high quality goods, but in the 90’s (due to changes in trade relations) there was a mass exodus of our manufacturing in the pursuit of lower costs and higher margins. We’re now decades on and I really believe it is starting to have an effect on our collective subconscious and our wellbeing.

Everything around us has gone down in quality — our buildings are increasingly low-quality eyesores, furniture isn't built to last, and our food comes wrapped in plastic. There's a low benchmark that has been normalised, fostering a mentality where we seek to solve perceived consumerist problems with cheap solutions that are easily replaced when they inevitably fail.

These were the conversations Sarah and I kept coming back to. She was a trained shoemaker and my housemate at the time, and we were both restless in the same direction — frustrated by what the industry had become and drawn to the idea that it didn't have to be that way. Seeing my stuck-ness, my husband suggested I work on something with Sarah while I looked for jobs and decided what I wanted to do. Probably trying to delay my seemingly inevitable move overseas

I'm so glad he did, because what started as a delay tactic quickly evolved into something that felt incredibly meaningful to me…and eventually took shape as a plausible way to spend my working life. Now, about eleven years later, even my parents have jumped on board and stopped telling me to get a job. And as we head into 2026, I'm more committed than ever to making things that matter.

So happy anniversary people. So grateful to have found you, my far-flung and (astonishingly) worldwide community of people who love things that nod to the way things were.


Jo x