Local making and the quiet strength of South Australian fashion

The Knowledge Behind the Garment

Turn a garment inside out and its making becomes legible: the finish of a seam, the density of a stitch, the care taken in places the wearer may never look. The inside of a garment is where an industry keeps its knowledge

South Australian fashion holds a great deal of that knowledge, and much of it sits with makers: pattern makers, machinists, seamstresses, cutters and small manufacturers whose skill turns a designer’s intention into something that can be worn. The Deloitte Access Economics analysis of the state’s creative businesses defines the fashion grouping around exactly this activity, the design and production of clothing, footwear and accessories, and the distribution of locally designed goods through South Australian businesses. By that measure, fashion value added rose from an estimated $200 million to $218 million between the 2014 to 2015 and 2017 to 2018 financial years, growing at around three per cent a year in real terms, well ahead of the 1.2 per cent recorded across the creative industries as a whole.

The Value of Making Locally

The question of local making opens onto something larger. Production held close to the studio is a form of intimacy: between designer and maker, between garment and wearer, between a label and the place it comes from. When the machinist works a short drive from the designer, a toile can be adjusted in conversation, a sleeve refined before a run, and every finished piece carries the confidence of shared standards. Wearers sense that proximity too. Consumers are increasingly concerned with giving an identity to who made their clothes, and with understanding the ethics of the supply chains behind them.

Building a More Circular Fashion Industry

Circular practice deepens the same relation. Through the Circular Fashion Initiative, supported by Green Industries SA, SAFIA has offered sustainability training to designers and is building an ongoing training package in sustainable production. Each designer who learns to design for repair, reuse and material recovery adds capability to the whole industry, and each local maker who can work with those methods strengthens the case for producing here.

The work ahead gathers around three priorities. The first is access: improving the routes by which small businesses reach manufacturing solutions, so that a label ready to scale can find the hands to help it grow. The second is skills: building workforce development and education pathways that honour making as a career of its own, and that bring experienced makers into conversation with the students who will follow them. The third is evidence: gathering the data that allows government and investors to see production capacity as critical infrastructure for a creative industry. SAFIA membership, now open, is how practitioners add their voice and their knowledge to that work.

Turn the garment back the right way and the seams disappear into the silhouette. The knowledge remains, held in the stitching. Keeping that knowledge in South Australia, passing it from experienced hands to new ones and building the capacity that lets our labels grow at home, is some of the most valuable work ahead of us.

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