Young Brisbane fashion designer Emma Rea isn’t one to sit still. As this story goes to print she will be packing her life in suitcases and preparing to depart Brisbane for her new home in China. Her namesake label will travel with her; it is her baby after all so it’s never out of arm’s reach. “I’m going to a place called Qingxi Town, just above Hong Kong,” Emma explains, noting it is a relatively poor industrial town and will be like living on another planet. “I’m moving for personal reasons and it will be an adventure. It’s a great opportunity for the label because there is so much happening in manufacturing in China, and even though my label is still on a small scale I think it will work well for it.”
It is still early days for Emma Rea, having launched her label in 2008. Just three years on, her collections are making waves on cult fashion blogs and in magazines such as Russh, Fallen, Oyster and Grazia, with stockists across Australia. Using a moody colour palette mostly of blacks (yes, even in summer and spring), Emma creates an intriguing range of feather-light silk and cotton couture pieces – hooded maxis, tailored jackets, floaty slips and billowy skirts – that swing between the romantic, poetic, dark and ethereal.
Not one to play it safe, Emma finds it difficult to define her style because it keeps changing. Her upcoming collection is a departure from her previous work. “The collection I’m working on is much more feminine than previous collections,” Emma shares. “I guess most people have pigeon-holed my stuff as androgynous, as having masculine elements to it … It changes all the time but it’s not about trends; it’s that you’re always pushing yourself and if I stick to the same aesthetic every time, then that’s not really doing anything groundbreaking, is it?”
Emma’s approach to design, in part, stems from her play as a little girl. She was born in Sydney and grew up in rural towns – in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales and near Samford in Brisbane – so she says she certainly didn’t have her finger on the pulse of what was fashionable. “Let’s just say I’d never heard of Chanel,” she laughs. “I didn’t know about fashion designers, but I knew about clothing more from the perspective of dressing up and being transported in my mind to another place.”
Her collections exude that same sense of voyeurism and dreaming, taking inspiration from songs, artists, and sometimes history. Her first collection, Poetry, was an ode to Patti Smith songs, her second, Houses of the Holy to Led Zeppelin, while in 2010 The Raven took inspiration from Victorian mourning attire where widows were expected to wear black and stick to strict fabrics and styles but sought to be fashionable in the process. She hints that photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is the inspiration behind her next collection.
Emma started her own label as soon as she graduated from Metropolitan South Institute of TAFE. She hadn’t planned to be her own boss but there weren’t many other options available. “When I graduated in 2008, I was looking for a job in the industry, but good jobs are as rare as hen’s teeth,” Emma notes. “So many people graduate every year, but the positions available to graduates are like machinist or maybe junior pattern maker, if you’re lucky. But they’re very entry-level positions and often in production rather than design.”
In the back of her mind, she recalled her lecturers’ advice to first work on other labels and make mistakes with other people’s money, but Emma jumped the other way. “I decided to start the label and see how I went and at the time I was lucky enough to have a connection with Nat Denning who owns boutiques in Brisbane,” she says. Natalie pre-ordered the first season for her stores Fallow and Bessie Head, and two quality boutiques in Bondi also placed orders.
“It definitely gave me hope for the future,” Emma notes of those early clients. “If I hadn’t started out as strongly as I did, even though it was small potatoes, I don’t know what would have happened.” She recalls being amazed that her early stockists paid for pieces in advance, before the collection was even produced. “That was a sign for me that people believed in me.”
The Global Financial Crisis rolled into town just six months after Emma’s label hit the shelves. It was a major challenge. “It was a real barrier in terms of growth,” Emma says. “Nobody wanted to pick up new labels.”
Asked if she considered giving up when it got tough, Emma admits, “Yeah, I’ve had moments of going: ‘This is all too hard.’ And I have this vision of going to live on a desert island. But it’s not like I would get a job in government working nine to five. I don’t imagine doing anything else.”
When times are tough she stays motivated by distracting herself with a massage or a beach swim. “I’ll go and do something nice for myself, or I think about all the success I’ve had so far and I think no matter what is happening right now I know this feeling is going to pass or be resolved.”
Her biggest achievement is that she’s found her dream career. “I’m doing what I love and what I’ve always wanted to do. And for someone who is really self critical, which I am, the fact that I am doing this and following what is a crazy dream – that means more to me than anything else.”
Her newfound career is even sweeter because it took Emma a few false starts to find design. After high school she enrolled in art college, but was more interested in her friend’s degree in fashion. She started making clothes as a hobby to sell at the Fortitude Valley markets in 2002 and, by 2004, had started a three-year fashion diploma at Mt Gravatt. “I just felt this really strong pull towards it,” she says of the move to fashion. “Again, it was a hobby, something I did for pleasure, and so I didn’t have any concept then about what it would be like to have a business.”
Emma learnt the hard way that it’s damn tough. She works 12-hour days, often seven days per week. “The label is always 24/7,” she says. When the question of success pops up Emma hesitates, and then notes: “Personal fulfilment is what constitutes success for me so, yeah, I do consider myself a success, but only in my own eyes. I don’t really care what anyone else thinks.”
The words of wisdom she lives by are those her grandfather shared with her while she was in high school. “I was studying for exams and I was really exhausted and he said: ‘All you need to do is show up; the rest will take care of itself’. So when I’m really under the pump these days I just remember that.”
Asked what she loves about her job, Emma notes dreamily, “I feel like I am creating this thing; the label is my baby. I love that I’m doing what I wanted to be doing and I love the fact I work for myself. I love meeting people who inspire me. And I love doing research on a collection and looking at inspiring artworks and photo shoots and bits and pieces. That’s when I go back to when it was just a hobby.”
Interview by Frances Frangenheim
