Where have all the designers gone? Australia’s fashion brain drain

‘[Australia] can have a fantastic industry,’ says Natalia Grzybowski from swim and resort fashion brand Bondi Born. ‘So I’m always going to encourage people to stay.’ Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

When he was studying fashion at RMIT in Melbourne, Vlad Kanevsky thought international runway shows looked like a “fever dream”. Now, as a senior designer at Thom Browne in New York, with a decade of experience in the industry, he says: “Things that didn’t seem possible in Australia have become a reality.”

Kanevsky is part of a generation of Australian fashion designers whose careers reveal a hard truth about the local industry: while it can produce world-class talent, it does not always have the scale to employ them.