Hung-over, guzzling pineapple juice and smoking a rolled cigarette.
It’s hard to imagine that such a talented local designer comes in such a down to earth, quirky, jeans-and-top kind of package. Anna Jacoba Hohnen is the recent raw talent to explode out of Curtin University, and her innovative visions are already making waves in the local Perth scene.
After just wrapping up her degree and a hugely successful line for the 2012 Curtin Graduation Show – Arcadia, the young talent is planning on moving over East to pursue a career saturated in Japanese inspired yet sustainable clothing.
Previously studying civil engineering, the budding designer seeks beauty in construction elements – ‘I love the Japanese aesthetic in fashion, I love black and the drapery and the cloth. I love the way it’s more about wrapping the body and using the body as a pole to hold it up. It’s all about the fashion instead of accentuating the body’s assets,’ explained Hohnen.
The environmentally friendly designer gets her kicks out of blending natural fibres and reducing cloth wastage – ‘I’m working with a square of fabric so there is no cloth wastage. I think every designers need to move in that direction, landfill is just becoming ridiculous with this fast fashion industry, it’s just this buying something new every week and chucking out the old.’
Hohnen promises that future designs will carry the same themes as her recent line, which featured at both the 2012 Perth Fashion Festival and Arcadia. The designer described the darkness in her work – ‘Western aesthetic looks to the light for beauty, where as the Eastern looks to the dark, so it’s all about the beauty in shadows. I like to think that’s definitely how I see beauty in things; I like people’s flaws rather than their perfections. I like the little bit weird, the avant-garde’.
Nadine Walker
