SA’s emerging designers have hit the runway, and their ideas are big. Here’s your first look – before their work ends up in wardrobes everywhere.
Decomposing couture, cocktail-glass costumes, and a menswear manifesto for colour – Adelaide fashion’s class of 2025 has come out swinging.
More than 700 people filled Adelaide Entertainment Centre last month for Chrysalis — the 2026 HomeStart Fashion and Costume Graduate Parade and SA’s biggest standalone fashion event – to see graduating collections from TAFE SA and Flinders University’s Bachelor of Creative Arts in Fashion and Costume Design.
Here are some of the standouts.
Aaliyah Brook: Beauty in decomposition
Aaliyah Brook’s collection started with a photo of a hand drawn at five stages of decay, each finger annotated – and a question she needed to ask her lecturer before she could go any further: am I actually allowed to make a collection from this?
She was. The Stages of Decay Collection – five avant-garde couture pieces moving through Skin, Bloat, Active Decay, Advanced Decay, and Skeletonisation – became the most talked-about collection of the night.
The concept is morbid. The execution is exquisite, and that tension is entirely the point. She was aiming for “dresses falling apart that look beautiful and like they’re meant to be falling apart” – drawing on icons of the gruesome-made-glorious aesthetic, from Alexander McQueen to Tim Burton.
Aaliyah pulled colours directly from her old SFX bruise palette – the same kit she used freelancing as a teenage makeup artist – to nail the purples and blue-purples that run through the collection, each shade carefully chosen to evoke the discolouration of a body in decay but also flatter the wearer.
Translating that vision into actual garments was no small feat. Making her bloat dress required her to ruche two layers of fabric separately rather than together, doubling the work, just to get the colour gradient right. For another, she stiffened bouncy, impossible fabric with hairspray – coat after coat, repinning anything that shifted – to create the effect of veined, wrinkling skin. “I almost gassed the whole class,” she jokes.
That level of creativity and craft earned Aaliyah an Academic Merit Award – especially meaningful for someone who left school before graduating year 12 and had never quite found her place in traditional schooling.
She’s finishing her final semester now, with an internship lined up at Couture+Love+Madness. “My story proves you don’t have to be good at everything,” she says. “You just need to be really good at one thing you love.”
Monte Montederamos: Menswear gets its colour back
Monte Montederamos enrolled in the TAFE SA Certificate III in Apparel, Fashion and Textiles to kill time before starting an architecture degree. He never made it to architecture, and he has zero regrets. Fashion got him first, and he kept going all the way through to the bachelor’s degree.
His graduate collection is called Kasaysayan – the Filipino word for a history imbued with meaning. It opens in vivid green silk and slowly degrades across outfits, with fabrics fraying and colours dulling, to trace the passage of time through the clothes themselves.
It’s also a manifesto for bold colour in menswear – which is part of the culture among Indigenous Filipino men. Monte traces Western men’s reluctance to wear it back to industrialisation, when conformity became easier than expression, and believes it’s time to bring it back.
“Before I got into fashion, I thought of it as purely utilitarian – you just put it on, it’s not really communicating anything,” he says. “But actually, what you wear affects the way you feel about the day – and that matters.”
He’s currently at Acler, learning how a fashion business actually runs – logistics, fit feedback, finance, marketing. The long-term dream is his own label, but for now there’s plenty to absorb from one of SA’s best-known fashion houses.
Adelaide, he reckons, is a good place to build something. “I’ve looked at brands I love and they’re in cities even smaller than Adelaide,” he says. “I’m seeing a lot of development here.”
Kendra Ware: The cocktail dress, reinvented
Kendra Ware’s final collection began with a spark she almost talked herself out of – a bag shaped like a martini glass – and grew from there into something far bolder.
A Toast to Time: Elegance in a Glass features three costume pieces inspired by classic cocktails: a Martini, a Manhattan, and a Champagne. Each one starts with the glass shape and the atmosphere of the drink. The Manhattan is deep cherry red, the skirt’s volume referencing an upside-down cocktail glass, the fabric catching light like liquid.
The Champagne dress she made by inventing her own textile – silicon fused with fabric, then covered in glass beads to read as rising bubbles. “It wasn’t the greatest fun to make,” she says. “But it’s turned out quite nicely.”
Kendra came to costume design after starting a film and media degree at Flinders – she still wants to work in film, but realised she wanted to be more hands-on. Switching to the TAFE SA and Flinders costume design course, the only one of its kind in Australia, turned out to be the perfect fit.
“Good costume design is almost when you don’t notice it,” she says. “Once an actor has their costume on, it can transform their whole view of their character. The costume should just work.”
Winning the Lecturers’ Choice Award meant a lot – especially for someone who came into the degree “not that amazing at sewing”. “I only knew the basics,” she says. “Being given an award at the end was a really great feeling.”
Other graduates to watch
Fashion:
- Janyne Pereira dos Santos’ Cria Vision – Brazilian street culture on the runway, including a jaguar tracksuit and a favela scene built entirely from discarded fabric scraps
- Maree Vatenos’ Rêve de Mariée – modern luxury bridalwear for women unafraid to stand apart
- Melody Ding’s Xuan – Chinese heroes, cross-cultural design, and a black that contains a hidden spectrum, like a crow’s iridescent feather
- Tahlia Byford’s Petals and Panes – florals reimagined as architecture, with light and shadow turning fabric into stained glass
- Tara Kruszynski’s Midnight Sun – Australian flora meets Scandinavian winterwear for her So Lucky label, some pieces cut from upcycled second-hand tents
- Madelaine Zammit’s Soma – a collection where each look embodies a different emotion, exploring how feelings shape the body’s posture, movement and presence
Costume:
- Astryd Stevenson’s Alice’s Wonderland – Carroll’s classic reimagined as a psychological portrait, where the asylum becomes Wonderland and familiar characters are fragments of Alice’s unravelling mind
- Jayce Smith’s The Lost Mythos – costumes imagining the creatures and encounters that follow Dr Spencer Black after the end of The Resurrectionist
- Julia Sciacca’s Bound, Buckled & Burned – an artist trapped in a mirrored realm, battling her inner demons made physical
- Morgan Brennan’s King Diamond’s The Puppet Master – a heavy metal concept album imagined as a dark cinematic world
The course – and the industry – behind it all
The Bachelor of Creative Arts is offered jointly by TAFE SA and Flinders University, with both a fashion and costume design stream. What it builds, beyond technical skills, is industry-readiness – students leave having collaborated across disciplines, worked to real deadlines, and presented to an audience of 700-plus that includes key figures from the SA fashion and arts sectors.
They’re graduating into a local industry with serious momentum. Paolo Sebastian has had a year that would have seemed implausible a decade ago – Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and most recently the bride of F1 star Charles Leclerc have all worn their gowns.
Acler, where Monte is already working, has hit $35 million in turnover with global stockists, and chose ADL Fashion Week to debut their Resort ‘26 collection. ADL Fashion Week itself expanded to a five-day citywide event in 2025, with more than 30 events across the city.
The class of 2025 picked a good time to graduate.
Find out more about TAFE SA and Flinders University’s Bachelor of Creative Arts – Fashion and Costume Design here.
