All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Chronic late starters will know A Place in the Sun: Down Under. It is a deeply inoffensive show about Brits who dream of a better life in Australia. “We’d love a pool,” one of them will tell the camera, with pure and enviable enthusiasm. “My husband is an electrician, and he’d get a job dead easy,” some other guest might say. Then, slowly but surely, the platitudes all pour out, like factor 50 smeared over singed British skin: “The lifestyle! The surfing! The… yeah, lifestyle!” Daytime TV just can’t help itself when editing a panoramic montage of the pastoral idylls down under.
And rightly so: it does sound lovely. Just last year, the United Nations’ World Happiness Index saw Australia come in at a smiley 12th place. That’s three spots ahead of the US, and seven in front of the eternally anaemic UK.
What the potential expats don’t often point to is the style. For that, you’d surely have to move to Paris and wear all black, or Milan and wear all black, or New York and wear all Carhartt. Not Australia. Because, for all of the nation’s draws, its fashion scene is a lonely tapdance compared with the stomping runways of the West. And that’s not exactly fair. Most guys are familiar with the bush-tinged luxury of RM Williams, an astonishing bootmaker that strives to be “crafted for life”. And Australia is the home to legendary merino wool farms, coveted (and invested in) by brands like Zegna and Loro Piana (the latter has even taken to calling this fabric “the gift of kings”, and there’s plenty of evidence to back up such classic Italian dramatics).
But the Aussie fashion industry’s isolation kinda makes sense. In a land so far away that its animals have evolved at a completely different rate to the rest of the world (ever seen anything that looks remotely like a koala bear? Me neither), the cultural melting pots are on different rings of the hob altogether. But as our great connectedness allows fashion to globalise, a handful of Australian brands are, finally, breaking through. Of course, there’s still the big wavy fits that are purpose-built for doughy boys with mullets (another big Australian export). But that promised land of visas and work-life balance is changing. You can still move for the surf. You can still move to make the daytime TV dreams a reality. But now, you can also move for the increasingly sick menswear.
Venroy
A louche level-up for classic Aussie beachwear
Sean Venturi logged into our Zoom call a day early by mistake. He’s been in New York, then Italy. Now he’s back in Sydney. His body clock is fried. But for the Bondi native – and so many other geographically marooned Australians – travel has become second nature, and it’s upon excessive air miles that he has built his label, Venroy.
It’s purpose-built for everyday fits. But Venroy is too advanced to be called an “essentials” brand. These limber clothes feel designed for guys who want to move incrementally into new prints, and gradients, and fabrics. And Venturi knows how big that demographic is. “Me and my high-school best friend both collected board shorts, and we sold about 60 pairs to local stores in Sydney,” he says. “That was the end of 2010. Then, the next year, we went on a trip with some mates to the US. I ended up staying in LA till 2014. We retailed in Fred Segal, Barneys, doing trade shows in Miami and New York. And we took that Australian, leisurely, travel-centric spirit, but positioned it in a high-end context.”
After fatigue with the bullish retail market, Venturi scaled back, and flew the 7,500 miles home to Sydney. He opened a store, and took his learnings from multiple continents back to a city that was changing rapidly. “Style has changed in Australia,” he says. “With everyone being so hypersensitive to the internet, it’s broadened our ability to dress. You go down to Bondi and everyone is wearing really good linen – so much more than they were.” Venroy peddles that too, alongside solid shirts with roomy shoulders and low-effort trousers designed to be worn almost anywhere. And as Australian menswear continues its advance, perhaps the rest of the world will start to look a lot more like the boys of Bondi.
P Johnson
Evergreen tailoring that stands toe-to-toe with Milan’s most storied ateliers
“In 2008, people’s jobs were unstable, and a certain type of menswear was reactivated because people were dressing better for job interviews,” says Thomas Bede Riley. “You notice it in times of economic vicissitude. You see a cycle of guys picking up their standard with tailoring.” He’s right. Most men are improved by a well-cut, slightly roomy suit. And funnily enough, Bede Riley is wearing that very thing (sage-green single-breasted, sky-blue shirt, precisely knotted tie) as he Zooms in from Windsor, a southeastern Melbourne suburb that looks a lot like the Space NK side of Shoreditch. It’s from here that he sells the stuff he’s wearing, under the clean, serif signage of P Johnson.
The brand was founded in 2008 by Bede Riley’s best friend Patrick (he whose name is above the door). The pair met while studying winemaking. After a stint making bespoke shirts at Emmett on Jermyn Street, Johnson used his experience to start the label. “In 2009, he said, ‘Come work with me. Get out of the Barossa Valley, it sucks,’” says Bede Riley.
Since then, P Johnson has grown into a brand that’s about “convincing people the value of dressing well in a non-threatening, quite gentle way.” And there’s much to like about a brand that solves not just an Australian issue but the universal question: where do you get a good suit? Its clothes skew neither PWC grad nor one-time wedding show pony. Instead, they’re well-made, unassuming, and easily pairable with other good things in your wardrobe. Think Drake’s, but without the insidery merch slant. Or maybe Brioni without the mega price tag.
There are showrooms in New York and London, and an atelier in Italy. P Johnson is a global brand. That keeps it tethered to the world beyond Australia. But for Bede Riley, his nation’s loneliness is a strength: “We’re isolated, so we’re not so affected by the scene elsewhere,” he says. “That lets us pick and choose what works well here. Hang on, what’s beautiful? Let’s just do what’s elegant, and let’s get it to the best place we can without being plugged into the normal fashion cycles of the northern hemisphere.”
Commas
Clothes for summer evenings at impossibly nice hotels
Whereas British-bought swimwear is granted parole for about two weeks of the year, its Australian equivalent is free year-round. It is also vital when some of the world’s best beaches are on your doorstep. And yet despite its importance, Richard Jarman felt failed by swimwear. “I couldn’t find the pieces I wanted, because at the time, it felt very disconnected from your wardrobe,” he says. “You could find clothes that represented you, then you had these bright, crazy swim trunks. You’d go to the beach and it didn’t reflect who you were.”
So he made his own, and Commas was born in 2017. But to simply call it a swimwear brand is unfair. The label, which Jarman runs with wife Emma, feels like the high-spec go-to of willowy couples that book month-long stays at romantic, crumbling, exclusive resorts on Porquerolles Island. The shirts wrap around. The trousers pool expertly. Everything seems to come in a very expensive shade of greige. “I guess I was designing for myself,” says Jarman. “And I kept going, and going. I wanted the soft tailoring, and I wanted something that suits the life here. I swim every morning, and we enjoy the climate as much as we can.”
Commas is less a swimwear brand than a lifestyle one, then. And so covetable is this lifestyle that the label has scored fans across the world – even in places where the rain is horizontal and the vitamin D deficiency is endemic. “Ultimately, I was making Commas for me,” says Jarman. He sits beneath a peaceful but impressive canvas of tobacco-coloured brushstrokes. His eggshell tunic shirt is slouchy, but polished. His laptop camera is blessed with clear morning light. It all kinda looks like an accidental Commas advert – and it’s a very persuasive pitch.
Butter Goods
Australian skatewear from the world’s most isolated metropolis
The Butter Goods origin story sounds like a vintage Harmony Korine film, but maybe a bit less gnarly. It begins with a group of skaters with a shared love of The Culture: a nebulous, hard-to-define ether that’s been cultivated and protected by those who made it special. Garth Mariano and Matt Evans, the brand’s cofounders, are two defenders of the faith. “The nucleus started around a time when there were lots of good Australian brands like Juice Ematic, Spire, XCN; all these local brands that were a good rep of our skating. And they kind of started disappearing as we got older,” says Mariano, who, like most skaters of his gen, balances a flannel shirt over one shoulder while holding a toddler on the other. “We thought it’d be a great chance to come up with our own. So in 2008, I was studying graphic design and working at a skate shop, and that was a perfect melting pot to launch a brand.”
Sixteen years later, Butter Goods is a cult skatewear label. But unlike the clean workwear of its contemporaries, the brand is almost Nickelodeon in its approach. Graphics are tripped out. There’s something fun and acid-housey about the hoodies and jackets; a visit to the menswear ayahuasca retreat of Brain Dead, the Californian design collective that dances to a similar (but not identical) beat. “We came up at the perfect time, as all these apps like Facebook and Instagram were taking off. It made it possible for us to run a company from the middle of nowhere,” says Mariano. “We’re doing more sales internationally than we do from our base in Perth.” It’s a place known as “the most isolated big city in the world”. Which, again, feels irresistibly Korine-esque. But with growing repeat orders on UK grail mecca End Clothing, and an undying hunger for all things skate, Butter Goods is a universal picture.
Models: Tissa at Kult Models Sydney; Robby at Priscillas Model Management
