Today Ruby Assembly are very excited to feature designer and PhD Candidate Georgia McCorkill, who is curating a ‘living exhibition’ of sorts during the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. In brief, the Red Carpet Project involves Georgia creating and metamorphosing a range of dresses which will be worn by a range of people (including Iolanthe of Ruby Assembly) throughout the festival. Usually, red carpet gowns have short life cycles – but with this project Georgia looks to the principles of environmental sustainability, as each piece is altered, worn to an event, returned and altered again to prolong its usefulness.
Georgia (inset, left) is a talented designer who has been working within Melbourne’s fashion milieu for a decade. This project rings in a new phase of her professional career, and is bang-on theme with ideas such as sustainability and thinking more broadly about the way we ‘use’ fashion. She has taken out a beautiful gallery space/pop-up studio in the Nicholas Building throughout the LMFF, which charts the ‘social life’ of the garments as they are worn to various events – as well as the dresses themselves. For further details on The Red Carpet Project click here.
As each new participant come to Georgia’s pop-up studio, Georgia modifies gowns to suit the event and body-shape of the client. The materials are diaphonous, the colours soft and beautiful. Here’s Kyra of Pybus PR during her fitting.
Keeping in theme with all things sustainable, I will be wearing one of Georgia’s creations to The Spirit of the Black Dress 2012 – another project with its eye on mindful fashion practice. Here I am above as Georgia works her magic on this delicate tea-rose coloured gown.
What a lovely and useful business to start up…requires imagination as well as a strong sense of the needs of our time.