Grassroots Style: Re-evaluating Australian Fashion and Aboriginal Art in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

Facing growing globalization of the marketplace, a number of Australian fashion designers in the 1970s and 1980s abandoned a long-standing reliance on Europe for inspiration to examine their domestic and indigenous 'grassroots'. They believed that by using indigenous sources, they could find an alternative to current Western concepts of fashionable style. This paper is an attempt to rethink assumptions that these fashions were inspirationally self-contained and their sources uni-directional. It uses the notion of cross-cultural 'threading' as a way of thinking about the spread of design ideas and engagements that took place across both European and indigenous cultures, and especially between orthodox fashion and indigenous art and design.

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