RMIT students Alexandra Groves and Rubee Hay have taken out the top prize at the 2023 Melbourne Fashion Week (MFW) Student Runway, jointly winning the MFW Student Award.
This year is the first time the competition has had joint winners, with the judges unable to separate the two showstopping collections.
Groves' collection is driven by the desire to create future heirlooms. It reinterprets luxury and elegance through the language of knitwear.
Sustainable hand-processes reflect the intimate, embodied experience of how we wear and perceive clothing, achieving a tactile exploration of the material.
Hay's collection 'Broken body, silly little girl' is an introspection on vulnerability and protection. At once a little too small and a little too big, her garments represent a little girl shielding herself from the world in response to her own self-aware fragility.
Each design holds within it a narrative, reflecting a belief that the way we talk about garments influences how we wear and care for them.
Groves described the feeling of winning the student runway as "pretty crazy".
"I was a bit anxious entering the competition, so it was very rewarding to see my work being so well received."
"It was also super cute and special to win alongside Rubee and to share this experience with a friend."
Groves said she aimed to create garments that people could cherish and would withstand the test of time.
"I found inspiration in the couture designs of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the work of Cristobal Balenciaga," she said.
"What excited me about these designs was their ability to encapsulate a specific era while remaining contemporary to this day."
