Lee Mathews, like many designers, has long struggled with how a garment might look on a hanger or in a photo, versus how it actually looks on the body. It was the idea behind her ‘runway’ lookbook this season, which was mocked up inside a warehouse space near her inner-Sydney studio. Rather than a typical look book, it shows models walking along wearing her breezy summer dresses, which will be available in stores come January.
“We’ve talked about this idea forever,” Mathews said on an unseasonably warm day. It’s shaping up to be a hot summer in Australia, following a globally concerning pattern, and it’s likely there’ll be high demand for the kinds of airy, investment summer dresses the designer has skillfully honed after 27 years in business. Mathews has been on a nostalgic streak for the past few collections, and recalled a recent resale partnership with Australian recycled fashion chain SWOP which put the past into perspective. “We went to Brisbane, and the whole front of the store was old things of ours,” she said. Some of the garments were two decades old; “it was such a shock, because SWOP is such a contemporary environment, a cool store, and all that stuff looked like it could be in any collection we did now,” she said, apparently surprised by the hip cognoscenti who covet her dresses and blouses.
Mathews was equally caught off-guard by the throughline between her old work’s sensibilities and how she feels right now. “It was the weirdest thing, I had one of those moments where you just think, ‘why erase to make something brand-new, when there’s still so many lovely things that only ever had one outing?” So she revisited that throwback feeling. Walking down the ‘runway’ were iterations of her classic cotton dresses, a relatively understated color palette, with yellow and soft blues, and lace dresses, a frequent request from customers in her boutiques. “People say to me in the store, ‘I love that lace slip that you used to do, you need to do them again!’ And I’m like, ‘which one?’ There were so many,” said Mathews.
Mathews’s work is consistent, although this collection’s palette was less vibrant than other recent ones, and utility trumped trends this time around. “You’ll be able to wear the pieces with anything, from any other collection, because they all come from the same source,” she said. Naturally, there were alterations—hindsight is 20/20, and Mathews she isn’t immune to the desire to improve things for their second outing. “You’re taking something from the past, sticking it in there and going, ‘you know what, if we just change that sleeve and update that collar, that’s a great thing.’ And then on you go.”
