‘Tasmanian royalty’ rules the Jordan Gogos runway

Rather than pander to celebrities, or have to pay them, designers at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney are enlisting high-profile friends to promote their shows.

Celebrity cookbook writer Nigella Lawson looked on at Lee Mathews, while television personality Melissa Leong walked in Gary Bigeni’s show. Radio host Carrie Bickmore sat front row at Aje and former Victoria’s Secret model Jessica Hart walked the runway for Bianca Spender.

The enfant terrible of fashion week Jordan Gogos aimed higher, summoning the couple often referred to as the closest thing to royalty in Tasmania, excluding Queen Mary of Denmark. David Walsh the founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, dressed in Gogos’s label Iordanes Spyridon Gogos to watch his wife Kirsha Kaechele model on the runway from the front row.

“It just made total sense for me because Kirsha is so theatrical, and she’s got so many ideas,” says Gogos, a fan of Kaechele’s creative defence of the male-free status of the controversial Ladies Lounge at Mona. At the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last March, Kaechele was inspired by Robert Palmer’s 1980s music video Simply Irresistible to perform silent choreography alongside a group of performers in navy suits, red lipstick and pearls.

For Gogos, Kaechele shimmied down the Carriageworks runway in a multicoloured coat dress with neon-trimmed knee-high spats, stopping in front of Walsh for more elaborate dance moves.

“I feel that everything she throws herself into from the deep end is authentic,” Gogos says. “Also they’ve been collecting a bit of my stuff.”

Gogos manipulates fibres into one-off creations for the Sotheby’s crowd rather than the Shein set. Even his runway shows are art, with stiff patchwork pieces and rough quilting, giving the impression of a Muppet Show reboot with classical motifs ran by an alternative art collective.

“I was on the treadmill earlier wondering how I got into this vortex and feeling the excitement of being a part of this,” says Gogos, who made his fashion week debut in 2020. “I remember seeing the fashion week schedule in 2019, the year before my first show, and thinking that there was a space for this. There was a space for what I do.”