It’s the fifth consecutive year Nicol & Ford has shown at Australian Fashion Week. As is customary, the Sydney designers spotlighted a historical figure to build the world of their new collection. The married couple chose Adrian Feint, a New South Wales-born bookplate designer, illustrator and painter. To Katie-Louise and Lilian Nicol-Ford, he was a “quietly radical figure”. 

Employing academic rigour and boundless imagination, the pair translated his work into wearable garments. The result? A delicate blurring of the line between intimacy and opulence, a careful dance that acknowledged the challenging history of queer Australia, while celebrating camp joy. 

The Elizabeth Bay House venue’s neo-classical, Regency-style grandeur was a fitting backdrop for Nicol & Ford’s extravagant feather accessories, statement headpieces and daring dresses. Excitement was palpable in the intimate, saloon-like setting. So much so, that many of the attendees lingered post-show, basking in the glow of the models who were waving and posing from the balcony – an unofficial encore of sorts. 

We spoke to the Nicol-Fords post-show to hear about the decisions, dreams and stories that brought the Treading Feintly collection and exhibition together. 

How’d the show go? How do you feel now that it has wrapped?

Lilian: We are so elated with the show; everything came together so beautifully across our collaborations under the careful eye of our stylist, Miguel Urbina Tan. We are at the venue again today to install over half of the collection for a two-month exhibition titled Treading Feintly, so are still very much immersed in the world we have built.

Tell us about Adrian Feint. How did he inspire this collection?

Lilian: Adrian Feint was a Sydney-based artist and designer working in the early-to-mid-20th century, whose work feels surprisingly overlooked in Australian cultural history. For us, he’s a quietly radical figure – someone who helped shape Australian camp through elegance, ornament and wit, at a time when those qualities weren’t openly recognised in that way. With this collection, we wanted to bring his work into view for our community and audiences.

What continues to draw us to Feint is the duality in his practice. On one hand, there’s the formal refinement of his floral still lifes, borrowing from 17th-century Dutch genre painting. On the other hand, there’s a more coded, symbolic language, influenced by European surrealism, where something more sensuous and deeply personal starts to surface. That tension felt central to the collection. We were interested in that split between outward composure, the performance of taste or artifice, and a more expressive, interior world just beneath it.

How did this show build on the world of Nicol & Ford?

Katie-Louise: Our runway collections in 2024 (Thorn) and 2025 (Parrhesia) engaged quite directly with darker histories, particularly the persecution and silencing of queer figures. In 2026, we wanted to shift the mood slightly. The research is still grounded in archives and queer histories, but the focus has moved more towards celebrating how beauty, expression and a kind of coded joy continue to exist despite constraint. It still feels very much like us, just with a lighter and more camp energy tied to expressions of intimacy, resistance and identity that shimmer just beneath the surface.

Any favourite or standout parts of the show?

Katie-Louise: I love the first looks that opened the show. It was such a joy working with [artist] Natasha Walsh; we found a methodology to genuinely bring our practices together in a way that felt singular. We both learned so much from each other’s processes, techniques and ways of seeing, and that exchange really lives in the garments. They also tap into this idea of the collector as performer, and the way the collectors of Adrian Feint’s work would circulate their most recent acquisitions, almost wearing them as a signal of patronage and alignment with a certain bohemian Sydney. That sense of display – of social performance – felt like a really rich thread to explore through the clothes.

How did the collaboration with Natasha Walsh come about? 

Katie-Louise: The brilliant and talented Natasha Walsh approached us in 2023 as subjects of a series she was painting while undertaking a residency at the Brett Whiteley Studio. We were, of course, humbled and delighted, and formed a treasured friendship. Natasha went on to submit our double portrait to the 2024 Archibald Prize, where it was hung as a finalist and later entered the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s permanent collection. 

In approaching our development for Feint, we also saw Natasha’s work in N Smith Gallery last year, where she turned her eye to organic and natural forms. An idea for collaboration was born. It has been wonderful to reinterpret Feint’s work on a series of one-off silk garments that Natasha has so skilfully handpainted. 

Tell us about some of your favourite looks.

Lilian: We’re both slightly obsessed with the closing look, which was inspired by a cornucopia vase made by ceramicist Clarice Cliff in 1935, that Adrian Feint returned to in a number of his still lifes. For us, it really captures those gently warped, almost surreal forms he was drawn to – shapes that begin to feel distinctly organic, where the vessel takes on a kind of bodily presence, holding and animating the flowers it contains.

It was also a particularly rewarding piece to realise. We worked closely with an extraordinary group of interns from the Fashion Design Studio at Tafe NSW, who helped bring the structure to life. Much of the fun leading into a runway is problem-solving these complex forms, so we loved having the students on the journey towards its realisation.

Casting is always such an important part of Nicol & Ford runways. How did you approach it this year? 

Lilian: The opening six looks draw on the society women of the 1940s-60s who became Adrian Feint’s patrons, ultimately securing his legacy through significant bequests at a time when his work was often dismissed as merely decorative. We wanted to honour these women, while also acknowledging the complexity of the artist-patron relationship and its enduring power dynamics.

For this section, it felt important to cast women who actively shape the cultural landscape today. We were honoured to cast former Art Gallery of South Australia director Rhana Devenport and Vault editor Alison Kubler, alongside artists and arts workers, who collectively continue to navigate and negotiate these same systems today. Across the rest of the show, the cast expands to include artists, performers, community leaders and close friends of the brand. Each brings a distinct presence, helping to animate Feint’s coded visual language while reflecting our ongoing commitment to an organic, diverse and community-driven approach to the runway.

The show was held at Elizabeth Bay House. Can you tell us a bit about its history and what it means for you to show there?

Lilian: Elizabeth Bay House carries an incredible layered history. Built in the 1830s as one of the grandest homes of European colonisation, it later took on a very different life. In the early 20th century, the estate was subdivided, and by the late 1920s, the house itself was informally occupied by artists and writers, becoming part of the bohemian culture of the Kings Cross area. That history felt particularly resonant for us in relation to Adrian Feint. For much of his life, he lived just across the road at Darnley Hall, in an apartment overlooking the same harbour view which appears in many of his paintings. There’s something poetic about that proximity and the likelihood that he visited the House for raucous parties with overlapping artistic circles. 

To present the collection within Elizabeth Bay House wasn’t just about the beauty of the space (although it has that in abundance). It was about placing the work back into a living history. A site of colonial wealth, later reoccupied by artists and creative communities, and intimately connected to Feint’s own life. 

Visitors can see some of the works from the runway as part of the Treading Feintly exhibition. Can you tell us more?

Katie-Louise: In developing our partnership with Elizabeth Bay House and Museums of History NSW, we saw an opportunity to extend the life of the runway beyond a single moment through Treading Feintly. Opening on the weekend following the show, more than half of the runway collection will be installed throughout the house, alongside works by Adrian Feint, generously loaned from private collections. We’ve worked closely with the museum’s curatorial team to shape the exhibition so that it doesn’t just frame our work, but creates space for a deeper engagement with Feint’s practice and legacy. Acknowledging fashion shows can only be seen by a limited number of people for such a small amount of time, we really wanted to make our work accessible to wider audiences through the exhibition, which will be open to the public from May 17 to July 13 with free entry. 

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