I recently interviewed Mr Hinny Tran, one of the creative minds behind Fred Hates Fashion, for an editorial in The Fashion Advocate magazine. Aptly included in the issue entitled, UTOPIA, Hinny’s editorial was an in-depth one, delving deep into the way he personally engages with ‘fashion’.
Hinny is a Creative Director, a pop artist entrepreneur, and he engages with fashion through the art form of film. His work with fashion films is entrancing, engrossing and confronting, to say the least, and I can never seem to stop at just one, but it is his work with the greater team of Fred Hates Fashion that is breathtaking.
What started as a means to buck the system grew to become his greatest passion, and from small beginnings with a hand-held camera, Hinny slowly paved his own path and built his own dream team with Fred Hates Fashion, which is now in it’s third consecutive year of events. The Fred Hates Fashion event brings together art, film, music and fashion, and it is driven by collaboration, through both traditional and unconventional means. A small group of hand-picked emerging and established designers work with the best emerging directors and the best music composers, taking on the challenge of creating their own fashion films, culminating in one runway presentation. Each of the teams work without the knowledge of what the other is doing, and whilst there is a healthy level of competition and a sense of mystery, they all work towards the same creative goal with the same collaborative values in mind.
With a focused team and an unadulterated passion for fashion, the 2015 Melbourne Spring Fashion Week Fred Hates Fashion show was destined for success, and that’s exactly what it was. Alabama Blonde, Gabrielle Brown, Jasmine Alexa, Vincent Li and Yesterday’s Virgins were presented on an elevated stage some twenty meters long, in a moodily-light, expansive open hanger at Docklands Studios. Following the premier of their individual fashion films, each independent label took to the catwalk, supported by it’s own emotionally connected soundtrack, and it’s own creatively synced hair and make-up styling. Theatre-meets-music gig-meets-runway; the Fred Hates Fashion 2015 show was of epic proportions and every bit as amazing, and better, as years before.
Eden Swan opened with glowing dildos, a sexual music assault and male dancers wearing dresses. Famous for confronting the typical fashion ideals, the Fred Hates Fashion team did a damn good job of it this year. The collections from Alabama Blonde, Yesterday’s Virgins and Vincent Li could have walked straight off the catwalk from Berlin Alternative Fashion Week, and Gabrielle Brown and Jasmine Alexa were just as impressive, though in a more conventional and wearable way. The Fred Hates Fashion team turned their intrinsic love of all things distinctive and unusual, beautiful and rare, into an unmatchable experience, delivering their own mesmerizing, entrancing, thought provoking, interpretation of fashion. If there’s only one fashion event each year that you commit yourself to, Fred Hates Fashion should be it.
Follow the Fred Hates Fashion journey here.
The Fashion Advocate x
