Watching Alix Higgins’s Australian Fashion Week show this year, I felt the urge to look away. Phrases torn from his personal journals were repurposed on deconstructed garments, half-shredded scarves and reworked sweats. “Good boy”, “obliterate myself” and “I forgive you god”. I felt myself catching second-hand vulnerability.

This particular brand of wearing your heart on your digitally printed sleeve is synonymous with Alix Higgins, the Sydney-based label launched in 2021. It’s these printed garments, full of tongue-in-cheek feeling, that’ve helped the brand cultivate popularity through IYKYK (If You Know You Know) online spaces. The 30-year-old behind the eponymous label has dressed musicians Grimes and Troye Sivan, and actor Hunter Schafer. In 2023 he became the Australian Fashion Laureate emerging designer of the year.

Speaking to Higgins over the phone, it’s clear he is his label personified. His work is often equated with poetry and is inflected with imagery of angels and fairies. Over the course of our call, Higgins is introspective, gentle and generous. His voice dreamlike.

“My work is always translating my emotions and my experiences … it’s a kind of touch point for where I’m at in the world,” he tells Broadsheet. “It’s hard to explain exactly how my emotions get into the work, but that’s always been kind of the goal – that emotion and sense of vulnerability that you just don’t really get from any brand that I can think of … For me, it is about that kind of messiness, and my own voice bleeding into the work.”

Irreverence and a “too cool to care” attitude are often glorified in creative spaces, heightened by Australia’s tall poppy problem. But Higgins rejects this. His heartfelt pleas and unspoken desires are imprinted on his art; his own fingerprints created the polka dots in his latest collection. Higgins isn’t shying away after a particularly tumultuous personal year either, posting on Instagram, “Every garment is a space between you and I that gives me everything I need.”

All of that said, he doesn’t take himself too seriously (Higgins once described some of his customers as people wanting to wear “the weirdest outfit possible”). There’s humour in his work. His “bottom” top and “I was late to the party but still I drank the most” tank are both fan-favourites. He leans into what critics would dub “op shop fashion” (a marriage of Sydney’s inner-west and Melbourne’s northside style).

Alix Higgins is a product of the digital age – a fashion label that brings internet adages into the IRL world. Higgins says he only began to care about fashion in his teenage years, living in Otford, a small town outside of Sydney. He channelled his interest in film and music into the blogging platform Tumblr, where he found an outlet to explore image and identity.

“I grew up [a] five-minute walk from the beach, but also, in my backyard was a river and this kind of lush rainforest. It was very amazing,” he says, adding that there was just one cafe in town, where he worked. “I worked there with my friend Dan, who actually made the video artwork for the [Australian Fashion Week] show this year, and that artwork is based on a beach in that town.”

There’s a cyclical nature to Higgins’s career. His late grandparents were tailors; his grandmother made his mum’s workwear and wedding dress. Chloé Corkran is Higgins’s creative consultant, casting director and best friend – the pair met on Tumblr over a decade ago.

Though Higgins and his brand have an ethereal, daydreamy quality, he has the formal training to back it up. He completed an undergrad in fashion and textiles at the University of Technology Sydney and a masters in womenswear at the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris. He’s also not afraid to talk about the financial hardships that come with a self-funded independent label.

“It’s something I speak really openly about because I think there’s no shame … having to be so careful financially just forces you to make smart decisions,” he says. “I have to work carefully and sustainably and slowly … it’s part of the design process for me. People always talk about “designers problem solving”, and for me, the problem to solve is survival, like making money and being able to pay my rent and pay for production and pay for the models.”

In his third year of operation (the brand is now his full-time job), he assures me it’s getting easier. “I can make multiple little pairs of stockings to style [now]; there’s just things that in the first show were not possible and now it definitely feels easier.”

Higgins questioned whether he’d return to Australian Fashion Week this year, citing how financially stressful it had been the previous year. “It was really, really hard to put the show together. There were just so many obstacles that were kind of unexpected,” he says. "Vans sponsored the show last year… but it was very, very last minute so up until that point, I was just like, ‘I don't know how I'm gonna pay for it’.” But immediately post-show, Vans (Higgins refers to the brand as his “guardian angel”) put their hands up to do it all again.

In his recent seasons, Higgins has relied on upcycled materials. It’s partly a response to limited budgets, but also driven by environmentally conscious practices and the history pieces carry. “The real point of it for me is that so much of my brand is about memory and … making something with an emotional weight to it. And when you start from a brand-new roll of fabric, you have to work quite hard to imbue that, whereas when you start with a material that already has a history and a life and character, it’s so much easier.”

When Higgins started out, he felt an implicit pressure to create attention-grabbing, viral-worthy pieces. “When nobody knows who you are, it has to be about image,” he says, reflecting on how his clothes lived on Instagram before they had a chance to appear elsewhere. “Now I still have that sensibility in some ways, but I feel much more comfortable having pieces [that are] much [simpler] and much more about cut or colour or fabrication.”

Higgins holds himself with a quiet, understated confidence. There’s a sweet earnestness to him you can’t help but want to align with. “I feel really proud about the fact that I even exist. I never wanted to have a brand actually, and I never thought of myself as a business person,” he says.

“I’m just proud that, as a business, things seem to be bubbling away and getting bigger. I feel I have more time to design and write and play and draw and make prints and just explore my own creativity. I’m just proud that … in this financial climate, that it’s still here.”

alixhiggins.com

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