The Internet is much maligned for creating divide and social isolation. That’s not the case for Alix Higgins, a 28-year-old designer who came of age in the early ’00s Tumblr era, a time that seems near on quaintly old now. As a young person, Higgins geeked out on fashion online, watching videos of runway shows and connecting with like-minded obsessives in chat rooms. Those more innocent online days have informed his popular gradient print pieces, which feature words and short phrases reminiscent of the intimate unselfconsciousness that once pervaded personal blogs.
Higgins cut his teeth working as Marine Serre’s print assistant in Paris, and he was keen to show off the technical training he gleaned there at his first runway presentation in Sydney. The gradient motifs are elongated digital images of the sunset in varying powdery shades, the result of a happy printing accident. A floral that he used on a dress with a removable peplum was actually a scan of his Paris bedsheets which he reprinted onto a dark background, glitching the pattern to meld the language of the Internet with that of traditional fashion.
Combined with words like ‘finally fantasy,’ and ‘God,’ the floral telegraphed delicacy, spirituality, and intimacy. “Everything's disintegrated, fallen off you, and you just have emotion left and poetry left,” he said. Higgins’s fan base responds with devotion to his exploration of identity and invitation to interpret his words. These are clothes for a generation familiar with the solitary feeling of searching for your tribe. Higgins’s tribe is growing and it already includes Grimes and Hunter Schafer.
