The National Gallery of Australia and Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum are great places to view art. But they’re not your usual fashion stockists. Both, however, are where you can go to find pieces from Iordanes Spyridon Gogos, the art-meets-fashion label of 29-year-old Jordan Gogos.
Yesterday, Gogos put on his fourth consecutive Australian Fashion Week (AFW) show. The Greek-Australian designer is a rare case in Australian fashion: he wound up on the schedule by accident. After studying industrial design (with one fashion class, on denim) at Parsons, Gogos had done the set design for Vogue Australia’s Creativity Issue cover when AFW invited him to do a runway show in 2021. He couldn’t say no.
Since, he’s taken off, garnering fashion and art industry attention for his larger-than-life, sculptural garments, on which bright, patterned fabrics are woven together with such force that he’s almost broken many a sewing machine. The National Gallery focuses on work that crosses the bounds between art and fashion. “Jordan’s work does this perfectly,” says Simeran Maxwell, associate curator of Australian Art. “I was drawn to his boundary-pushing work in felting and embroidery.” Plastic surgeon and contemporary art collector Dr Terry Wu owns look 32 from Gogos’s Resort 2024 collection. This season, Wu walked in Gogos’s show.
The support of galleries and collectors, Gogos says, is how he stays afloat. He doesn’t get how others do it. “I would never be able to run a business from selling a shirt and making $100 profit,” he says. “I don’t know how people do it. I worked out that, for the amount I make from one piece, I’d have to sell like 120 T-shirts.” Iordanes Spyridon Gogos runway pieces sell for a minimum of AU $7,500, and AU $15,000 for a full set.
It’s a twist on a challenge many designers face. Where many yearn to create more avant-garde, conceptual pieces — but need to make tees and tanks to bring in cash — Gogos has carved out a niche that enables him to support a fashion business with garments that wind up in galleries.
Five years in, the self-funded brand is making revenues upwards of AU $250,000 a year, and growth has been steady, he says, after hitting its stride in year three. Now, Gogos is figuring out how to continue to develop his art-fashion practice, while elevating his name as a capital-F fashion designer.
