Welcome to our October Mens collection.

When I’m designing a collection I like to dream up a narrative about the subjects, a little fantasy. It helps me find a real owner of the clothes so to speak, and gives it all some sort of cause. I am more than happy to get pretty unrealistic about it too - Dukes, Counts, Marchese, Princes, movie stars, gangsters, ratbags, heirs to this-and-that, just normal folk like me.

We have some beautiful new loose fit linen-based outwear pieces for summer that make great sets. It is a series of garments I have called ‘Corbu’ after Le Corbusier (…the famous Franco-Swiss architect-designer). These are elegant, quite mature, yet still quite ‘off-duty’ feeling pieces. So I started dreaming up a young but well behaved aristocratic lad called ‘Lucien’. Lucien is lusciously-haired, tattoo-free, gapped-toothed and is willing to tow his title around, but out of duty. Lucien is a good boy, not a brat. (I did the aristo-brat in a previous shoot).

So in this little pretentious story to myself I had Lucien coming to Australia to host a fundraising dinner for marine cetacean habitat conservation, annexed by a brief holiday with the new girlfriend ‘Marta’, who is an activist and artist slightly prone to derailing sometimes, a bit naughty too, but in a good way. Marta disposed of her noblesse but naturally wound up with Lucien. They are both good eggs. Lucien is Nordic perhaps, maybe Germanic (?) and he feels responsible for whale strikes by ships because he is connected to shipping (of course) and thinks there must be a solution. So you can see where I am headed here: dressing for the event, dressing for the holiday and any duty in between.

I started the casting process and pretty quickly I found my Marta in Taylor Clark. Buzzy, bright, happy, heaps of spunk but with a determinedness about her. Easy. She also sported gapped front teeth, a not unwelcome edit to the storyline. Finding a male model was more challenging, for this narrative anyway. But then Nikolai happened. Count Nikolai de Monpezat to be precise. Lusciously-haired and ink-free I think, doesn’t matter, who cares, I had actually found Lucien. The model model Count. A former Danish Prince, 7th in line, now a Count. Dad is Prince Joachim, mum is Countess Alexandra of Frederiksborg. He is the eldest grandson to Queen Margarethe II. Great bloke too.