Sydney doesn’t need another fashion week—at least, not the kind we’ve seen before. After the dust of this year’s AFW settled, one message rang loud: Australian fashion doesn’t just need a runway. It needs a movement.
Enter MODA Designer: the once-underground event helmed by multidisciplinary arts community Love Shy Art Club (or simply, Love Shy). Last weekend, it returned to Machine Hall—spitting fire and fabric all over the venue’s industrial belly. Last year at its inaugural event, the night felt like a revelation. This year, it feels like a revolution.
Highlighting the intrinsic connection between music, art and fashion is the aim of the game for Love Shy founder Adam Dive, who says that
“Events designed with consideration and value for those 3 disciplines and how they link together seem to be few and far between,” says Love Shy founder Adam Dive. “I go to events and it’s like—there’s art here, and music over there, and that’s great. Here it’s woven into the very fabric of the event. It doesn’t exist without one or the other”.
He’s not wrong. What MODA nails is integration, not compartmentalisation. “Music is a powerful tool” he continues. “We know the audience, and we know what we’re doing. MODA is all about platforming grassroots designers, we need to ensure we can cover as much of the cost as possible (the last two editions have been $0 to participate). If we can support them through the strength of music, it makes for an overall more entertaining and more accessible event for all”.
With a whopping ten designers packed into a single night, MODA was a feast for Sydney’s fashion obsessives. Backstage was a symphony of contained chaos—models, makeup artists, and designers moved in sync to the bass-heavy sets pumping through the walls.
FIVE BY FLYNN, GEMDADDYSLIM, GIOVANNA DE PONTES, GRAVEYLANE, PHACOSTE, SHES A DESIGNER, REAL PARENT X INJURY PRESENT: THE BRAIN, SDBR (SWEET DREAMS BITTER REALITY), TASMAN BANKS, and WEIRD WORLD ORDER each raced to dress their models between runs. But beneath the pressure, you could feel the camaraderie. Designers supported each other between changes, passing pins, zipping backs, hyping one another up.
What’s rare about MODA is how convincingly it puts community at its centre, without ever diluting its extremely cool edge. There’s no hierarchy here. Designers sit in the front row for other designers and DJs cheer from the sidelines. Models walk and then dance, and then walk again. And somewhere in the middle of it all, you feel it: that quiet, electric hum of something real being built from the ground up.
By the time the event closed, the dance floor had bled into the runway and back again. There were no barriers at MODA Designer, just bodies in flow.
Undeniably, the night’s sonic landscape was the pulse that linked the event together, with deep club cuts and glitchy experimental drops that felt like the future chewing up the past and spitting out something better. With five stunning sets from CEE VEE B2B WELLER, CONSPIRACY CREW, D.A.U.G B2B DAYZZI, GUMM, and TISHA, as well as incredible projection art splayed across Machine Hall’s towering cement walls, the connection between creative mediums was not only clear but all-consuming to the senses.
Machine Hall, with its cavernous ceilings and brutalist steel bones, is the perfect container for a night like this. It holds and amplifies the electric, slightly feral energy of the space… And by the time the first model hits the runway, the room glows with a kind of collective intention: we’re not just here to watch. We’re here to witness.
If fashion really is a mirror of the culture that surrounds it, then MODA Designer is reflecting something honest, vital, and deeply necessary: a culture that uplifts the outsider, that prioritises collaboration over clout, that understands the power of showing up, dressing up, and standing together in the full glory of your own weird, wonderful truth.
MODA isn’t the future of fashion. It’s the now. And it’s happening, loudly and brilliantly, right here in Australia.
