Josh Goot made a stellar return down under to a show that admittedly was bigger in scale than any he had done in London or New York. There was a frission of excitement though as the home crowd climbed up six flights of stairs to get to the huge car park show space where under raw strip lighting, his precise collection was put under scrutiny. In the first portion, you’d be mistaken for thinking you were seeing another designer as heavy satin moulded and sculpted the body in column-esque dresses.

Then slowly, the paint textures and colour blending of Goot’s artistic reference, Gerhard Richter, crept into his signature print work.  Still it was Goot’s solid blocks of colour and streamlined dresses that had waved stripes running down the front that really balanced out with the print story which isn’t the backbone of his collection as it once was with previous collections. If anything, we took away the new emphasis on shape be it the curve in a shoulder of a jacket or in a bulbous skirt that formed a much slicker canvas for him to paint his prints in selective dabs.   
 
Dazed Digital: Talk to us about returning to Sydney to do a show?
Josh Goot: We had a great opportunity to work with an amazing partner. We wouldn’t have been able to do it on this scale elsewhere. It was a great opportunity to do a show on our homeground rather than overseas. There’s almost more pressure because this is where we come from and I think there’s a great expectation for us to do something great here and hopefully that expectation was met.
 
DD: What prompted the change in silhouettes as it felt like the emphasis was on these sculptural shapes?
Josh Goot: I wanted to grow it up a bit. I wanted to show that I am growing up and our customers are growing up too. It felt right for the moment.
 
DD: Were there any references you were looking at?
Josh Goot: For the print story I was inspired by Gerhard Richter. I was trying to capture his way with paint textures and negative spaces with the prints. It’s of course important for us to deal with the prints but I think in this instance I wanted to use them selectively and almost make sure they don’t overtake the silhouette.

Photography by Mike Cooper