By the time we sit down to talk, Paris Jade Burrows is surprisingly calm.
“I’m actually not stressed,” she laughs. “Everything’s pretty much done. We had the lookbook shoot last week, so I just had the two finale looks to do… which are actually the first two looks for the next show. So I’m like, oh, I’m done now.”
It’s a very Paris way to frame it: her second-ever runway outing, The Void, isn’t a sealed chapter, it’s a hinge between what came before and what’s coming next.
Her debut collection, It’s Real If It Bleeds, was a ten-week sprint into couture. Thirty looks built at breakneck speed by a self-taught designer with a theatre kid’s stamina and a taste for the grotesquely beautiful. It set a tone for Paris: political, darkly funny, and unafraid to treat fashion as both costume and critique.
This new show is different. Technically, The Void is Paris’s first “ready-to-wear” collection. In reality, it’s more complicated, and more interesting, than that.
Ready-to-wear, but make it intimate
On paper, “ready-to-wear” sounds like a pivot to the commercial end of the pool. Paris is acutely aware of what people expect from that phrase.
“I feel like people probably have more of an idea of what ready-to-wear consists of,” she says. “But even my version of ready-to-wear is still really personal to me.”
Personal here means made-to-order, not mass-produced. No offshore production run. No mystery factory. Just Paris, a handful of interns, and garments that pass through her hands from bolt to final stitch. “I pretty much make everything from scratch,” she explains. “I hand-dye everything. I sew everything… It’s literally just me.”
Custom fit isn’t an add-on, it’s the baseline. It’s Paris’s theatre brain bleeding into fashion: that intimate triangle between designer, maker, and wearer that’s so normal in costume, but increasingly rare in ready-to-wear.
“If people want things custom fit to their measurements, we’re more than willing to do that,” Paris says. “Doing a standard size 12 versus a custom size 12 with minor alterations doesn’t really make much of a difference. But I would feel so much better giving someone something that is so much more personalised… I wanted to bring couture back to Australia in an accessible market. Or as accessible as possible. That relationship between the wearer and the designer and the maker is something I experience a lot doing costume design, but I feel like it is really lacking in fashion. With this ready-to-wear line, I want to push that even further.”
From couture to everyday costume
Part of what makes The Void such a compelling collection is the way it cannibalises and refines Paris’s earlier work.
“The pieces… some of them are variations of things from the last show,” she explains. “And some of the pieces are the beginnings of things for the next couture show.”
After The Void, Paris’s next major design arc draws reference from the artist Gustave Doré and his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. Artworks blending themes of religion, hellscapes, and all the political mess that comes with them. This ready-to-wear collection sits in the middle of that larger story: a highlight reel of what was and what’s coming, edited for daily life. Paris explains “there was a skirt people really liked [in the first collection], the X-ray pencil skirt,but because I made it out of some non-conventional fabrics, it wasn’t extremely wearable. So I’ve done a new version that is significantly more wearable. It’s not as sheer, and it’s something people can definitely wear.”
The same goes with another cult favourite from It’s Real If It Bleeds – a ruffled slip dress that looked like it had been buried underground for a century.
“It was supposed to look like it had been under the soil for 100 years, and people really liked it, but they didn’t want it to look like it had been in the dirt for 100 years,” she laughs. “So we’ve made a black and a white version.”
Visually, The Void is tight: everything in black or cream, building what Paris describes as “a succinct wardrobe” or, more accurately, a uniform. “I want all my clothes to be like everyday costumes,” she says. “People can dress up in some sort of Victorian fashion-y sort of way.”
That idea of “everyday costume” is baked into her own life. Paris has always dressed like a character: The Veronicas, Hannah Montana, Lady Gaga. Now, it’s less cosplay and more armour. “A lot of people do dress like that. They put clothes on as kind of an armour to the outside world. And like, why not become a characterised version of yourself in the best way?”
For this show, she imagines one recurring character in particular: “A sensual Victorian woman who’s on her deathbed… but maybe she’s a ghost. Maybe she’s like a little Victorian ghost that’s haunting this house that we’re doing the show at.”
It’s glam, grotesque and a little bit silly… and that tension is the point. Paris’s work is political and historically referential, but there’s always a cheeky wink hiding in the lace.
“I think a lot of that comes from what I consume,” she says, rattling off the live-action Scooby-Doo (her all-time favourite movie), Ken Russell’s The Devils, and, of course, Lady Gaga and FKA twigs as some of her favourite influences. Religion, sex, camp, blasphemy all filtering through.
“I love the dark comedy of it,” she says of The Devils. “I think that’s also why I like the devil so much [as a concept], because it is like taking the piss out of religion… I don’t think religion is necessarily the worst thing in the world, but sometimes I feel like it does create a lot of the political problems in this world. I feel like the only reason we have war is because of religion, for the most part.” All of these references and ideas don’t arrive in the show as literal slogans. Instead, Paris bakes them into the silhouettes and fabrics of her pieces.
A haunted collection needs a haunted house
If the clothes feel like relics from another era dragged into the present, the venue for The Void doubles down on that energy. This second show for 2025 is staged inside an Australian Art Nouveau, Federation-style home in Sydney’s north. Think painted ceilings, detailed mouldings, stained glass windows and an intimacy that feels more séance than your standard runway. “You’ll see it on the day,” Paris says. “Downstairs, all the walls are painted, the ceiling’s painted, all the molding… it’s gorgeous. It’s such a gorgeous house.”
She wanted the soundtrack to honour that space without overwhelming it. Instead of a big cinematic score or a playlist full of Gaga deep cuts, she’s chosen a Franz Liszt piano sonata written for Dante’s Inferno – a subtle nod to the Doré-inspired couture show that’s already gestating.
“I wanted it to be a classical song,” she explains, “but I didn’t want it to be a big orchestra, I wanted it to be really small, because the setting’s really intimate. So it’s the piano sonata, and I feel like that’s appropriate.”
Theatre kids and doing it anyway
Part of what sets Paris apart as a designer is the way she sits slightly sideways to the traditional fashion pipeline. She’s self-taught. She comes from theatre, not fashion school. And she’s not particularly invested in waiting for the industry to validate her.
“I feel like I have so much more to prove,” she says. “Not only to myself, but also to the Australian fashion landscape. I come from a very non-conventional background. I taught myself how to sew. I work in a very non-conventional way. But it works really well for me.”
When we talk about Australian Fashion Week and other big dates in the industry’s calendar, Paris is indifferent. “I’ll apply,” she shrugs, “but if they say no, I don’t care. I don’t have to be on schedule. I’m gonna do a show whether they want me or not.”
Having spent years putting on theatre shows “almost every month”, the logistics of a runway don’t intimidate her. “For me to put on a show, it was not a big deal,” she says. “I brought in some of my theatre friends, we did the show, and I’m sorry, that was more organised than any backstage of any fashion show that I’ve ever been to.”
It’s classic Paris: a little savage, very funny, and completely unbothered by the rules of an industry she’s already quietly outmanoeuvring.
The Void doesn’t feel like a collection that wants to slot neatly into a retail calendar, despite its marked pivot from the couture of Paris’s earlier work. It feels like a diary entry written in black ink and cream thread; a series of everyday costumes for Victorian ghosts, theatre kids, religious dropouts, and anyone who’s ever treated getting dressed like building a character.
It’s ready-to-wear, technically. But it’s also an invitation to know who made your clothes, to remember them the way Paris remembers hers, and to step out into the world as a slightly more haunted, more heightened version of yourself.
Why not, as Paris says, become a characterised version of yourself… in the best way?
