Melbourne Fashion Week

For the past six years, we’ve partnered with the City of Melbourne’s premiere fashion event, Melbourne Fashion Week – working with the event’s creative director Jonine Standish on reshaping how the city saw the festival and positioning it as a serious contender on the Australian fashion calendar.Throughout our relationship, the brand continued to build year-on-year, becoming more confident in its voice and ultimately getting both the Melbourne public and the fashion industry to stand up and take notice.


2017 – year one: establishment

In the festival’s first year, the goal was to grow awareness and gain credibility in the industry and with audiences in Melbourne. Our creative took to the streets to own Melbourne, collaborating with the city’s best designers, such as Scanlan and Theodore, Gormon, and Pageant, to add local authenticity to the campaign and differentiate it from other existing fashion events.


2018 – year two: amplification

For year two, we took to the rooftops to amplify voices and celebrate the optimism of the city through buoyant photography partnered with the tagline ‘The City of Dreams’. The campaign harnessed the creative energy of Melbourne, uplifting the city’s independent and emerging talent by showcasing them on the city’s famous rooftops.


2019 – year three: changemaking

Year three was an opportunity to have a voice and stand for something, to lead the charge, be the change, and make smarter decisions around fashion’s most important new frontier – sustainable style.

This year’s campaign saw a cast of changemakers stand united through downtown Melbourne, purposefully symbolising collective change within the city of Melbourne itself.


2020 – year four: digitalisation

Out of COVID-induced necessity, year four was a digital-only project. This was an inversion of the usual approach for an event that previously had sought to draw people to the city.

A campaign shoot was ruled out due to lockdown regulations. Instead, we used imagery from previous years to create dynamic collages. The result was a fresh campaign in dialogue with the fashion industry’s conversations around sustainability – recycling and repurposing imagery that would typically only be used once.

Ultimately, the successful digital-first creative grew the event’s audience and significantly increased engagement – benefiting events in the following years.


2021 – year five: collaboration

Melbourne was once again in lockdown during year five, which – fittingly – focused on collaboration and creativity thriving in the face of adversity. The campaign creative centred around a collaboration with South Sudanese-born, Melbourne-based artist, Atong Atem.

Tapping a collaboration like this highlighted the confidence Melbourne Fashion Week had gained over five years – speaking to a brand that was successfully able to pivot and be unafraid of doing things differently.


2022– year six: celebration

The sixth year of the festival brought everyone to the front, celebrating the many talents that make the Melbourne fashion community greater than the sum of its parts. Using archival imagery from previous festivals, the campaign spotlighted everybody from all backgrounds – from the backstage to the front row in a rousing celebration of Melbourne’s collective creative consciousness.