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Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. Maiden, mother, crone. Creatrix, dominatrix. Valkyrie, vanquished.

In the first of Ruby Assembly’s MSFW Australian designer editorials, we explore theinherent duality in each of our natures. Captured in these glorious, rose gold-bathed images at Little Projects’ Central South Yarra Rooftop Retreat, I externalise the idea of a modern Melbourne femme fatale – inspired by the latest Winter 2015 collection of Alice Edegley.
Edgeley’s unique aesthetic draws on vampy silhouettes, burlesque extraversion and costume refined into small-yet-outstanding capsule collections which empower their wearer. Pulling the smooth magenta wool of Edgeley’s Elvira dress over my limbs, having my waist impossibly cinched by Tusler’s Shield belt, my feet Cinderella’ed into 1940’s-style Clara Courts by Preston Zly before being swathed in a sleek black Dr Seuss-like Tanzer stole with extraordinary pompoms from Gun Shy Design – I felt like the most serious, beautiful and self-curated version of me. If fashion cannot represent the power of beauty at its full blossom – if minimal design in living cannot represent opulence and a community in a moment of time – what reason for its being, then? I am past embracing a popular culture where beauty and sexuality must be coated with the illusion of ‘I just woke up like this’, a Bachie-girls coquettishness which pretends a lack of awareness.
For me, this special series of images represents the physical expression I love best: performative, simultaneously curated yet spontaneous, comfortable in its own weight and representing an aspect (or avatar) of myself which I see as the strongest, truest and most powerful iteration of me.
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Photography: Breeana Dunbar
Hair and Makeup: Shella Ruby Martin
Shot on location in South Yarra, Melbourne.