110 Photos That Capture 13 Years Of Street Style At Australian Fashion Week

Street style is a focal point of any fashion week, no matter the city. While the runway trends aren’t likely to bubble up IRL until six months after a show, street style photographs offer us a glimpse of what the style set is wearing right now. With influences stemming from self-expression and subcultures, the outfits we see outside the show are often easier to recreate than runway trends, offering new outfit formulas, colour combinations, and a fresh approach to the upcoming season.

So, it’s easy to assume that street style has always been as critical to fashion week culture as the runway shows themselves. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the years before social media, fashion weeks were largely attended by industry professionals, like fashion editors and buyers, and the focus of fashion week was more literal: choosing what trends to centre a magazine around and clothes to stock in department stores. In the mid-noughties, that started to change, with a renewed interest in what models wore between shows (thus, birthing the “off-duty model” look) and the Internet offering an immediacy that hadn’t been seen before, through bloggers and later influencers posting from the shows (and outside the shows).

This was also the case for Australian Fashion Week (AFW), though it took a few more years to catch on. In 2013, two things happened to thrust street style to the forefront of the annual event. First, it marked AFW’s move from the Overseas Passenger Terminal in Circular Quay to Carriageworks, swapping the sparkling harbour and ambiguous city backdrops for the industrial brickwork and decided “cool factor” we now associate with AFW. It also marked the inception of fashion bloggers.

Of course, fashion bloggers existed before 2013, but it was in this year that they started gaining recognition in a more “legitimate” way, with brands extending invitations to shows to bloggers who had earned comparable audiences to glossy magazines. This was also just one year before a reality show literally called Fashion Bloggers was released on the Style Network (it moved to E! for its second season in 2015).

It follows then that faces like Margaret Zhang, Sara Donaldson, Amanda Shadforth, Kate Waterhouse, Zanita Whittington, and Nadia Fairfax (who came on for season two) were all regulars at Carriageworks and in street style galleries.

Ahead, we look back on the last 13 years of street style at Australian Fashion Week.