The Aje Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Unfurled, is inspired by flowers blooming, but don’t expect any ditsy prints. “We wanted to explore our own way of doing a floral print without it being a pretty repeat,” says Edwina Forest, who co-founded the Sydney-based label with Adrian Norris in 2008. Known for a beach-goth uniform that mixes leather and sharp tailoring with floaty dresses, Aje has previously collaborated with the estates of two of Australia’s most celebrated artists, Brett Whiteley and Minnie Pwerle. For their Paris Fashion Week show this season, Forest and Norris took a more hands-on approach, enlisting their good friend, multimedia artist Vicki Lee, to create a series of hyperreal botanical images.
The trio met in Bali nearly two decades ago, when Lee was designing the contemporary fashion line My Pet Square and the Indonesian island was something of an incubator for young Australian labels drawn by its skilled lace and leather artisans. She later turned her attention to art, opening her own gallery in Sydney and working with brands including Chanel. “Our friendship over the decades made it much easier to trust the artistic fruition of the project, which, for me, is obviously the most important aspect of anything I do,” says Lee. “Trust gives you the freedom to experiment, to follow an idea and to let the work become what it wants to become.”
For Unfurled, Lee revisited a process she first explored in a 2017 photo series with photographer Ted O’Donnell, suspending roses in water, adding drops of paint, and photographing the pigment dispersing around them. This time, she worked with native Australian species including wiry grevillea, pom-pom-like waratah, dense banksia cones, and woody gumnuts. “They’re actually quite weird and sculptural, almost a bit aggressive,” says Forest of the qualities that made them a natural fit for Aje’s harder-edged take on femininity. In Australia, even the flowers have a certain toughness. “They have to be to survive in the heat,” says Norris.
Lee’s imagery appeared on vegan leather jackets and fluid gowns alike, some slashed and shredded so the prints broke apart across the body. Forest and Norris also interpreted her work less literally. Sunray pleating mimicked the opening of a flower, while cascading beaded fringe and tactile petal appliqué picked up on another part of Lee’s practice: plant bio-sonification, in which electrodes attached to plants register electrical activity that is translated into sound waves. “Whether through color, form, light, material, or scent, the medium is secondary to the feeling it creates,” says Lee.
