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t was in the crucible of Melbourne’s 1980s clubland that (RMIT). “I just didn’t have the patience for it,” she says of the long-
music, film, fashion and design began dancing to one
syncopated beat and posturing to a different modernity.
The Cold War was peaking, Reaganomics ruled, and
counterculture was resetting everything as the city’s
brightest young things raged against the dying of the light.
I “We all expressed ourselves in the most individual way we
knew how,” recalls fashion powerhouse Fiona Scanlan, cofounder
of the Scanlan and Theodore label — who back then belonged to
a coterie of cool kids counting teenager Martin Grant — who make-
shifted fashion into a new frontier. “I think back and compare it
with now and how people develop as creatives or designers. We just
did what we thought we needed to do, but we did it with conviction,
strength, personality and a cerebral edge. To look like anyone else
was tantamount to a sin. I don’t think people think that way now.”
Melbourne’s epochal insistence on one-of-a-kind pageantry
honed the tawdry sexuality of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the
dissolute darkness of filmmaker John Hillcoat and his photographer
wife Polly Borland, the formal poetics of Wood Marsh Architecture,
the performative spectacle of the Fashion Design Council, the
unnerving twilight of photographer Bill Henson, and the handsome
post-punk frisson of Scanlan.
To elucidate her near architectural build of fabric on the female
form; one softened by a hint of Regency line and louche materiality,
Scanlan informs that her sensibility first steeped in shades of green
— “Mum was fiercely creative and coloured everything in it” — and
sanctified in the reliquary and ritual of a convent school — “the
impact of middle-class Catholicism never leaves you”. There was
always the urge to create, she observes, but none of the nuanced
career guidance that helps drop talent in the right groove. After
leaving school, Scanlan remembers dipping her toes into different
creative waters and doing several terms in the interior design
department of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
138 vogueliving.com.au
cook of concept that made fashion classes elsewhere more appealing.
“But they were run by older women with great skills and no modern
headspace. I simply didn’t want to be taught by them.”
Still unsure of where she fitted in, Scanlan girded her loins and
went the hard road of fashion learning, employing the skilled makers
and cutters who could materialise her vision. “I was always designing
for me,” she asserts, “which wasn’t a selfish thing; more a gauge of
how a garment made me feel.” But her small production runs
instantly registered with a cohort of tastemakers who walked the
fashion tightrope between fierce and feminine. The editorial flowed,
the orders followed, and soon Scanlan was co-founding a ready-to-
wear business that brought her style to market faster and further.
In 1987, the refined flagship of Scanlan and Theodore, designed
by Don McQualter, opened its wrought-iron doors to Chapel Street
and the fashion pack charged. It became a hive of edgy ingenues,
with the queen bee holding court above the shop floor and cooking
long-table lunches for staff on Saturdays.
The business burgeoned, more boutiques opened, but Scanlan
began feeling the impingement of commercial realities on her
creative freedoms. She sold her share of the business in 2002 and
enjoyed a period of respite while seeking next-stage fulfilment.
The ensuing years celebrated marriage to Luke Aulich, a builder
who introduced her to an on-the-market Baptist church built in
Windsor in 1856. “A lot of chapters had already been told there,”
she says in recall of walking through the vaulted structure that
had changed denominations several times before deconsecrating
into domesticity. “I felt its power; it had six-metre-high ceilings,
two outbuildings, a body corporate block of land and I bought it.” ››
OPPOSITE PAGE in a view of the living and dining areas from the kitchen, circa
1970 Amma Extenso modular wall unit from Smith Street Bazaar; circa 1950
lilac vase (on right) by Damiano Russell for Albisola from Geoffrey Hatty
Applied Arts; Bundanon (2003) artwork (on top shelf, on left) by Peter Walsh.