Australia’s 27-Year-Old Fashion Wunderkind Is Ready for the Next Chapter

In 2025, Lady Gaga emerged on the Coachella main stage in a colossal 7.5-metre-high ruby-red gown. The armour-like Elizabethan-style dress was made, in part, from velvet theatre curtains which dramatically opened to reveal a metal cage, where inside dancers were framed behind steel bars. The designer was Samuel Lewis, a couturier also responsible for Gaga’s grungy, gothic look – a sharply corseted lace-up leather jacket and silk skirt swelling in drapes – at the Grammys earlier that year.

For Gaga’s Mayhem Ball world tour, which ended in April this year, Lewis designed every look for the show’s first act.

In just three years, the 27-year-old Australian Taiwanese designer has become one of Australian fashion’s biggest success stories, with a roster of celebrity clients that also includes Madonna, Chappell Roan and Christina Aguilera. Few Australian designers of his generation are operating on this scale, or with Lewis’s level of radically bold playfulness.

From a young age, Lewis knew fashion was his calling. His mum taught him to sew, and fashion magazines introduced him to the possibilities of the artform. Flipping through runway images of Alexander McQueen’s last show of Spring/Summer 2010 was a pivotal moment. It feels almost kismet that Lewis would go on to work closely with Gaga, whose most famous looks were created by McQueen.

When Gaga calls, “I’ll do anything,” Lewis says with a laugh. He’s back in his Melbourne studio after a year travelling back and forth from LA.

Lewis first caught the attention of European and UK stylists while studying at Polimoda, the prestigious Florence fashion school co-founded by designer Emilio Pucci. Lewis’s whimsical 2022 graduate collection, Do Angels Need Haircuts?, catapulted him into the spotlight. “That started my relationship with publication and celebrity,” he says.

Two looks from the collection quickly spread across social media. The first was the Flying Nun, an ultra-cinched, monochromatic gown with an exaggerated bottom and headpiece, inspired by the shape of whale flukes. `

The second, the Mattress dress, transformed silk taffeta into sculptural padded forms. “It was the idea of taking an everyday object, something as mundane as a mattress, and adding a surrealist twist to it and warping it into an extravagant couture dress,” Lewis says.

Gaga’s then-stylists, Nick Royal and Peri Rosenzweig, became aware of Lewis during this period and commissioned his first-ever custom piece: a tour look for American musician Yves Tumor. In 2024 the stylist duo reached out again, this time to ask Lewis to design something for Gaga for her music video for Disease, the launch track for the singer’s 2025 album, Mayhem.

Lewis created a sheer grey, hand-dyed silk gown for the music video. Next, it was a corseted lace-up red dress for her single Abracadabra.

His client roster quickly expanded to include Chappell Roan (designing her rock-and-roll nun look at Iowa’s 2024 Hinterland Music Festival), Madonna, Kali Uchis and Jennie Kim. More recently, Christina Aguilera wore a custom Lewis gown and so-called “silk duvet opera coat”, covered in feathers, for her Christmas in Paris television special, performed and recorded in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Lewis credits the architectural grandeur of his designs to his time in Florence. “In such a small European medieval city, there are so many sculptures around and nothing that stops you from touching them and staring at them at 3am on your walk home from a party,” he says. It was this “unfiltered experience”, he says, that helped develop his taste and style.

Lewis’s theatrical silhouettes require immense technical expertise, drawing on traditional corsetry patterning, boning and tight-lacing. Exaggerated form is executed with flattering precision. Uncanny silhouettes warp and reshape the body to create optical illusions. The work demonstrates the emotive power of proportion, in the space between camp and the avant garde.

“I’ve been coining the term ‘illusion dressing’ because I want people to take a closer look at the clothing and be like ‘What is that?’ or ‘How does that work?’”

His references lean heavily on the historical, drawing on armour, portraiture and centuries of gothic imagery. He has a recognisable visual language that feels as playful as it is sophisticated.

“I have a very particular taste in material. I’m always in leather, silk, velvets. I think true innovation comes from making materials that have been around for decades, into something new. What does that [material] look like in a couture context or a stage context? I love to take a historical jacket, and now we’re making it in pony hair leather – something it would never be made of. That’s my bread and butter.”

Film is another constant influence, and Lewis often riffs on a mix of pop culture references in a single design. His sequin-covered The Red Angel dress, part of his graduate collection and later worn on the red carpet by Julia Fox, drew on a look worn by Shirley MacLaine in What a Way To Go, Dorothy’s red slippers in The Wizard of Oz and 1948 British dance drama The Red Shoes.

Lewis hopes to launch his debut ready-to-wear collection at the end of the year. It will feature recognisable elements of his couture fingerprints, with motifs that are “loosely based” on his life since the last collection. He sees it coming to life in the form of “a macabre fairytale”.

“I’ve been a designer for other people for so long, but how do I translate that into my voice without a ‘name’ attached to it, or the fame that comes with that [name]?” he says. “I was chasing recognition for so long, wanting to get my name out there. That was fuelling me for a long time.

“Now that I’ve been able to work with some of my idols and create on such a large scale. I’m ready to quiet down and lay the foundation for what my brand, and my identity, will be in the future.”

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special Innovation Issue, presented by Mercedes-Benz.