Having been in business since 1999, fashion designer Lee Mathews is always searching for something out of the ordinary. “At 25 years it feels like you’ve seen everything and worked with everyone,” she says.
For her anniversary runway at this year’s Australian fashion week (AFW) in Sydney, she decided to add friends to her usual cast of professional models.
“Casting was more about how people wear the clothes,” she says. “Not how tall they are or how polished they look.
“Asking someone who’s not a model to try on clothes and walk a runway takes a kind of vulnerability. I think that subtle awkwardness and lack of polish brings a different energy to a show. There’s honesty in it, and it reflects the collection in a more human way,” she says.
The runway is a full circle moment for Mathews. She has been producing clothes that she and her friends would want to wear since the brand’s inception at her kitchen table. Now her clientele reads like a roll call of Australia’s female creative class: producers, artists, chefs and writers, including Saskia Havekes, the director of Potts Point florist Grandiflora, who took to the runway this week.
“I’m very fortunate to have her as a friend. She’s given me so many beautiful things over the years. I’d look like a bag lady if it wasn’t for Lee,” says Havekes. When asked to model, “I said ‘absolutely!’ straight away.”
“I can return the gesture by putting in my best effort next Tuesday,” she says. “No matter what’s going on, I will be there.”
To prepare for the show and calm her nerves, Havekes felt she had to practise her walk. So she spent her evenings walking home from work through Rushcutters Bay park. “I was thinking, knowing Lee, she’ll want it to be as natural as possible,” she says. “I better not swing my arms.”
In her work as a florist, Havekes is used to being the creator driving the arrangement. She found her experience of being a model, in the hands of a team of stylists, hair and makeup artists, an interesting role reversal. “I felt like I was the vase, and they were putting the flowers together – being the clothes,” she says. “They were like, ‘we’ve got to have her hair parted in the middle and combed down.’ They were making me into something else, which I enjoyed.”
While Havekes walked the runway, another of Mathews’ high-profile friends, Nigella Lawson, sat in the front row.
Mathews joins a long list of designers at Australian fashion week who platform their communities by casting their friends, clients and collaborators in shows – including Alix Higgins, Nicol & Ford, Jordan Gogos, Gary Bigeni and Romance Was Born – the last of which is celebrating 20 years in business.
This practice seems to come from two places: creating better vibes on the runway and backstage, and wanting to showcase clothes on bodies that reflect their customers.
Drawing from their community allows Katie-Louise and Lilian Nicol-Ford – the married couple behind Nicol & Ford – to build a sense of intimacy and energy that’s impossible to replicate with a casting call. “When you see someone on a dancefloor in the early hours of the morning, you often see their purest and most liberated form,” they say. The duo try to capture that confidence and presence by putting it on the runway.
Casting friends again and again has also engendered trust between model and designer. “Each model is allowing us to create a highly visible statement with their body, [so] careful consideration and conversation is essential for our process,” they say. The ability to do this is invaluable for a brand that embraces gender fluidity and body positivity.
In an industry often characterised as aloof and self-serious, fostering a warm and welcoming atmosphere on and off the runway feels forward-looking – a necessary departure from a tradition of closed doors and exclusivity that has long been critiqued as superficial and unattainable.
“I love the support backstage,” says designer Jordan Gogos, who presented his fifth AFW runway this week. Although he is primarily an artist, Gogos has developed a reputation for high-intensity, performance runways which star his friends, muses and even his sister Yasmin.
“There’s beauty working with someone you love. That IYKYK [if you know, you know] in each other’s eyes. They know what’s running through my head and I know what’s running through theirs,” he says. “More often than not [after the show] we refer to the garment by the name of the person who wore it.”
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While runways in Australia are embracing the joys of friendship and inclusivity, international fashion weeks continue to send thin, unsmiling, youthful models down the runway – an apparent retreat from a brief foray into body positivity.
According to the Vogue Business Autumn/Winter 2025 Size Inclusivity Report, at the last four major fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris, just 2% of the models featured were mid-sized and 0.3% were plus-sized. This was down from the season before, where 4.3% of models were mid-sized and 0.8% were plus-sized.
Industry insiders blame the body diversity backslide on two forces: the rise of conservative ideals that emphasise control and female subservience; and the popularity of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic.
Designer Gary Bigeni casts sizes 8 to 20 (the equivalent of US size 4 to 16) in his runway shows. Bigeni says the return to ultra-thin models “makes me sad”.
“It’s a completely unrealistic representation of real women, and more importantly a completely unrealistic representation of how your clothes are going to look on them.”
Pointing to data that shows the average Australian woman wears a size 16 (US 12) and only 9.1% of women are between sizes 4 and 8, he says: “I would much rather show that my collection works on – and for – a range of sizes and ages.”
According to its Code of Conduct, AFW (which is being run by the Australian Fashion Council after IMG’s departure last year) encourages participants to promote body image positivity and body kindness, along with ethnicity, gender, ability and body types that are “representative of the diversity of Australia”.
For designers, casting friends is about business as much as ethics. In an industry that is rapidly changing under ever-evolving digital pressures, ultra-fast imports and tensions in global trade, the runway is a rare opportunity to show off the communities who love to wear their clothes. In a sense, it is a flex that comes from the heart of their business – their customers – and challenges what the fashion industry is, and who it is for.
Bigeni wants his casting to tell a story that people can connect with. This year, one of his most famous mates, Dessert Masters judge Melissa Leong, made her first ever modelling appearance in his show.
“It isn’t just about fashion and runways – it’s about life and dance and colour,” he says. “My last show ended with a big group hug.”
The group hug is becoming something of a tradition for Bigeni – his show on Thursday concluded the same way.
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