You don’t always lose when you snooze. As a youngster in Karratha, a remote mining town in North West Australia, Kym Ellery says she used to doze and dream of becoming a fashion designer—maybe even one based in Paris. Today, shortly after bustling in off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, rain-drenched, she said, “I was thinking back to me as a young woman who grew up in the desert nurturing this dream . . . and now here we are: So where does the dream end and the reality begin?”
In a literal-sounding but subtly applied process, Ellery incorporated elements of her childhood environment and her own formative juvenile creative reveries into the garments. The camel cashmere dresses lined with pink silk satin were on-purpose riffs on the old-fashioned blankets she remembers from back then, as was the diamond-quilted doona (Australian for “comforter”) cape. The springily upholstered volumized check suits and skirts were a nod to the Australian school uniform, and the snake-print technical trench and separates with freshwater pearl belt buckles were, as references, outback souvenirs. The swirly print was a rendering of the crazy abstract shapes you see when you fly over Australia with your head pressed against the window.
The answer to Ellery’s question at the top was this collection, in which the decorative bric-a-brac of origin and memory played fairy-dust sprinkle on an offer of attractive clothing. And even if you did not know the difference between a doona and a schooner, it was still a territory worth exploring.
