PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL BARBERA, UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
When you’re a graphic designer and an aircraft engineer with zero fashion training, and yet you find yourself becoming the go-to clothing line of Melbourne — worn by the likes of Patti Smith, LCD Soundsystem, and Jamie Oliver — you learn to get really good at improvising. And trusting your instincts. So it goes for Alex and Georgie Cleary, the brother-and-sister duo behind Alpha60, who base its designs not on fashion trends but on whatever random pop-culture reference they happen to be into at any given moment.
When they launched the line four years ago, it was Alphaville — not the German synth band, but the 1965 Jean-Luc Godard film, which stars an evil computer called Alpha60. “It was an accidental hobby, and we just picked the name because it was a favorite at the time,” says Alex, who had just been let go from a bankrupt aircraft company. Meanwhile, Georgie had been messing around with screen-printing one of her graphics onto the pockets of button-down shirts and giving them away to friends. “Five turned into ten, ten turned into twenty, we started selling them to local shops…” he says. “That’s how it all happened. Step-by-step rather than by some grand plan.”
To Georgie and Alex — only children who grew up on a rose farm with art-loving, ephemera-collecting parents — every album they hear, film they see, artist they discover, or strange object they acquire can be a potential starting point for a collection. And they’re the kind of siblings who agree on almost everything, so when Georgie was obsessed with the op-artist Bridget Riley, Alex ran with it, and when Alex wanted to riff on the tracksuits worn in the ’90s movie La Haine, Georgie was on the same wavelength. It’s all part of their ongoing quest to make an asset out of not fitting in with the fashion establishment, never mind that with five stores in Australia and their sights set on London and New York, they’re already becoming a part of it. Like Godard famously said: “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” And a few hundred really good ideas.
Sister-and-brother team Georgie and Alex Cleary founded Alpha60 in Melbourne in 2005. The label’s unofficial tagline is “sophisticated quirk” — the pair likes each piece to have some point of difference, something that sets it apart from the fashion norm. Photo by Annevi Petersson
The piece that inspired the pair to found the brand was a button-down with a rough, black-and-white picture of a girl printed on the pocket. Monochrome graphics have since become an Alpha60 signature — this image is from the current season.
Not all of the clothes follow that formula, however. Recent collections have included sleek black suits and airy cotton shorts for men, and colorblock pants and flowy abstract-print dresses for women. Plus recurring oddities like those above, which manage never to stray into the realm of kitsch.
Alpha60’s offices are housed in a 3,500-square-foot converted warehouse in the Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne, on Brunswick Street. It’s one of the city’s hipper thoroughfares.
The name Alpha60 was borrowed from one of the siblings’ favorite movies, Jean-Luc Godard’s sci-fi classic Alphaville. Alpha60 is the name of the computer in the film that “controls society without love or creativity,” says Alex. “Dark, beautiful, mysterious.”
Godard has his own section on the Alpha60 website titled “Our Hero,” and his visage, as seen on this bookshelf, is omnipresent in the studio. So are books — Georgie’s “insane for them,” says Alex. “We’re building a new house, and the main priority is a massive bookshelf for the hundreds of books she has. And it has to have a ladder.” The books help feed the pair’s constant stream of pop-culture references.
Alex hit the caps lock to annotate this photo: “FOREVER GODARD — YES FOREVER”
Even Georgie’s glasses carry a whiff of the French auteur’s influence.
Georgie and Alex have five shops in Australia, where they make their visual references plain: One features a giant picture of a dead Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic, while a Godard portrait covers the back wall of this Melbourne outpost. When Godard’s ex-wife Anna Karina was in town for a film festival, she came to a party at the store and “was a bit blown away,” says Alex. Photo by Al Penfold
More black-and-white imagery back in the studio. The upside-down glasses were made by friend and artist Brendan Huntley. He also sings for the curiously named Australian garage-rock band the Eddy Current Suppression Ring.
The siblings’ creative process is anything but regimented, according to Alex. “It just sort of happens,” he says. “A lot of it in Georgie’s head.” But they do love to cut and paste from books and other photographic materials, which they do both to fill scrapbooks at the beginning of the process and to develop the final imagery at the end.
This picture of a man wearing a tutu, for example, was the starting point for a special t-shirt the pair made for the Australian ballet, whose directors were looking for ways to attract a younger crowd.
But not all of the imagery used on the clothes is photographic. This t-shirt — from The Beta State, the brand’s diffusion line — features a drawing Georgie did of Naomi Campbell.
The clothes that don’t include graphics at all refer back to the pair’s source materials in subtler ways. They describe the current summer collection, for instance, as “the lovechild of ’40s filmmaker and voodoo practitioner Maya Deren and La Haine’s Vinz,” the latter being the 1995 breakthrough role for French star Vincent Cassell. The colored stripes of the tracksuits he wears throughout the movie inspired the spliced geometries of the t-shirts, pants, and dresses in the Alpha60 line.
Because neither Alex nor Georgie has formal fashion training, they have staffers who take care of the cutting and sewing and other technical aspects of putting together the line.
They save their energy for hunting down new obsessions to fuel their expanding brand. Georgie’s been stuck on Christo lately — “not to where I’m going to wrap everyone in plastic, but the forms and the graphic inspirations” — and also on these 100-year-old doll heads, which were recently found buried among the remains of a German doll factory bombed in WWI. She used them to make jewelry for the current season.
The dolls are influencing the graphics for the next collection — in the form of faces with blacked-out eyes — and the pair also had reproductions made so they could cover the ceiling of an upcoming Sydney shop with an undulating wave of 400 doll heads. “I saw lots of creepy websites while trying to find someone to make these for us,” says Alex. “Like dolls that look and feel exactly like real babies.”
For now, the heads live on top of the studio’s conference table. Next month, it could be anything.
For more than three years, the Argentinean sisters Sol Caramilloni Iriarte and Carolina Lopez Gordillo Iriarte kept a design studio on the second floor of a building in Barcelona, handcrafting an eponymous line of leather bags in relative privacy. Sol, 32, was working part-time as a set designer for films; Carolina, 25, had just finished a year apprenticing under her friend Muñoz Vrandecic, the Spanish couture shoemaker. Called Iriarte Iriarte, it was a modest operation. Then in June, fate intervened.
Lauren Kovin had one of those creatively privileged childhoods we all dream about: Her father was a graphic designer, her mother an interior designer who stocked their New Hope, Pennsylvania, home with Memphis furniture and modern art. Kovin spent more time in galleries than in shopping malls. An Avedon portrait of a nude Nastassja Kinski hung over the family’s dining room table. Heaven, right? Wrong.
“I’m a professional provocateur,” Sissel Tolaas says between sniffles, her Norwegian accent blunted by one of the colds the artist and world-renowned scent expert often gets after maxxing out her mucous membranes. Visit her at-home laboratory in Berlin, where she concocts conceptual fragrance studies for museums and for megabrands like Coty, and the provocations begin almost immediately.
