By Jennifer Thorp
This week, Rescu. highlights a rising star of the Australian fashion world breaking the boundaries between fashion and art.
You have to be careful with the label ‘next big thing’ in fashion. Sometimes it seems there have been more of them than tabloid rumours about Angelina and Brad – and, alas, like the rumours, they often don’t live up to the hype.
However, Dhini Couture is a different breed. She’s got the accolades to back it up, for one thing. She was a finalist in this year’s L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival Designer Award – which is nothing new to her, since she was first a finalist for it back in 2007. Her looks are the darlings of fashion editors, who are the hardest people in the fashion industry to please; her work has popped up in Australian Vogue, Marie Claire, Grazia and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. So she must be doing something right.
That, plus comparisons to Riccardo Tisci, Azzedine Allaia and Rei Kawakubo, mean that the buzz is reaching crescendo point.
The main attraction? A serious artistic bent. Once an assistant at BOUDICCA, the London label known for its revolutionary take on tailoring, Dhini’s earliest collections of 2006 and 2007 did some astounding things with shape. Skirts morphed into jackets; folds and pleats were structural features rather than pretty trimming; dresses had the appearance of being put on backward and strapped into place.
Her current collection, New World Order, references drum-majorette chic, from places like Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl aesthetic and the artwork of the reclusive American ‘Girls On The Run’ artist Henry Darger. Previous collections have been filled with surreal, architectural masterpieces, treading the fine line between wearable fashion and art with brilliant élan. As she acquires confidence and whimsy, it’s a bit like watching a very young, technically focussed Alexander McQueen.
The woman behind the label is Sri Lankan Australian Dhini Pararajasingham. A winner of RMIT’s most promising student award, with training from a Tokyo design school and a stint with bridal maven Mariana Hardwick thrown in, Dhini defines her aesthetic as ‘complex experimental tailoring contrasted with drape’.
Her label isn’t motivated by trends, or increasingly even by a unifying concept, but by pushing the limits of fashion and technology. Her latest interest, for instance, is the combination of laser-cutting and embroidery by a textile mill in Switzerland.
Why does Rescu. love her? Her work’s a technical tour de force, feminine and high-concept – and we know she’s going to keep delivering the goods for years to come.
Image courtesy of www.dhinicouture.com
