There was a lot going on at Iordanes Spyridon Gogos’ resort 2025 show, even before the show started. Attendees bumping in saw Carriageworks’ halls converted into a trippy carpeted playground, while a camera crew filming Binge’s The Real Housewives of Sydney—positioned to watch its cast member, Caroline Gaultier, walk the runway—was a fly on the wall.
This kind of zany sensory overload is to be expected from Jordan Gogos, the multidisciplinary creative and artist who’s paved his way as one of the most experimental new Australian designers. His fourth show continued his frenetic mishmash of intricate handmade art worn on the body, through a lens of queer glamour and popular culture—hence the Housewives appearance, local drag queens Hollywould Star and Hannah Conda among the runway arsenal, and thumping versions of ‘Fireflies’ and ‘I Need a Hero’ on the soundtrack. “If it makes me run on the street, it gets shortlisted for the soundtrack,” he says backstage.
Raised in the Sutherland Shire before studying at Parsons in New York, Gogos is an aberration from most brands priming their businesses for ready-to-wear success; his clothes are designed with museums and archival collectors in mind, but that isn’t to say the fantasy is inaccessible. Take his teddy bear handbag made in collaboration with Isogawa for last year’s show, famously worn by Jennifer Coolidge, which retails for about $800.
Between the set, and the looks, it wasn’t difficult to spot this season’s inspiration: rugs. The heavy, thick texture of a wool carpet was the start and end point for Gogos’ collection, adding another dimension to clothes that already envelop the body. You could feel it ricochet in garments made with remnants of carpets (one whole dress was made from carpet), as well as pieces that texturally evoked rugs on the runway.
There was deeper meaning behind model Elaine George (below left) being the show’s opening model. George, Vogue Australia’s first First Nations cover star, mentored budding Indigenous models Hayley Mulardy and Calli-Rose Woods through the BlakList talent agency’s Next Gen program. Both hail from Western Australia, and their appearances on the Iordanes Spyridon Gogos runway were their first major modelling jobs in Sydney. “The hustle to get funding and bridge rural talent in any capacity into Sydney for fashion week is such a big deal… [BlakList founder TJ Cowlishaw] is so considerate of the future of fashion and how models are going to segue into these major platforms,” Gogos notes.
This kind of meaningful collaboration is crucial for Gogos and was writ large in his show; Akira Isogawa, a returning collaborator, made a handful of looks this time around. There was also a new cook in the ISG kitchen this season: iconic designer Linda Jackson allowed him into her archive to reimagine her artworks in whichever way he wanted. For Gogos, it was the perfect assignment.
“She’s an untapped library of Australian fashion… the way she’s dynamized collaboration in her history and establishing fashion-art culture in her history has been so significant,” he says. The garment worn by Hannah Conda revived Jackson’s textiles, sourced on a visit to her archive in Mudgee, through an origami-reminiscent design to show as many of the prints as possible.
Gogos may be the glue, but the picture is much larger than he is; at the end of the show, Jackson, George and Isogawa accompanied him to take his bow, while the design collaborators in his studio exited with the models. With an unwavering vision, Gogos has proven his intentions are iron-clad: to create the kind of beauty that lingers long on the mind, eschewing ideas of high and low culture—this time, a confluence of art, Australian fashion history, and reality TV—for something you can’t help but enjoy.
Next week, he’s headed to Greece to show his work in his ancestral homeland. Four years in, Gogos is hard at work cementing his name in the Australian fashion lexicon. But anywhere he’s disrupting, he’s content.
