Abbey Hoy

As a teenager visiting her mother’s home country of Malta, Abbey Hoy found herself transfixed by a woman making lace on the side of the road. 

“We were in Gozo at the time, which is a small island off of the mainland, and there was a woman creating bobbin lace — it’s called bizzilla in Maltese, and it’s made using a bunch of bobbins to create this beautiful textile,” says Abbey, a final-year honours student in the UTS Bachelor of Design in Fashion and Textiles.

Eight years later, that fleeting moment in time sat at the core of Abbey’s honours year project. The 20-piece fashion collection, which was presented at the UTS Fashion & Textiles Honours 2024 Graduate Showcase in November this year, put a contemporary spin on ancient textile techniques such as lacemaking, leatherwork, and weaving.

Many of the pieces have been produced in collaboration with other artists, including Maltese lacemaker Marikami Lace, Sydney-based tattoo artist Chalida Tattoo, and Ex Materia, a sustainable weaving studio based at UTS. A sponsorship with leather designer Julio Valdēs also taught Abbey the fundamentals of working with leather. 

“Marikami made some lace for me in Malta — she made bizzilla — and then I interpreted that further by collaborating with Chalida Tattoo, who’s tattooing some of my leather pieces using motifs from Maltese culture,” she says.  

“With Ex Materia, we’ve worked together to create some woven textiles using Nordic floor looms, and they’ve done a lot in teaching me the anthropological and really human aspects of textile making.”

A unique design sensibility

Collectively, the work is a snapshot of Abbey’s distinctive design approach, which sits at the intersection of art and wearable design. But, while her style might feel fully formed now, it took a while for her to find her creative voice. 

She says the early stages of her degree focused on fundamental skills development, including printmaking, patternmaking, illustration and machine knitting. While she loved the learning, it wasn’t until a series of studio subjects in her third year that she figured out how to put it all together and bring her ideas to life. 

“In the first three years, I was learning the skills that ultimately allowed me to take on this collection with such confidence, but there was a lot of trial and error involved,” Abbey says.

"The third-year studios were much more about application of those skills and about learning when to say, this is the brief, but this is how I'm envisioning it, and this is how I want to challenge what I'm being told to do."

That was the moment where I thought, I'm not just doing this project to fulfill the criteria; I’m also doing it to prove to myself what kind of designer I want to be. It was instrumental in forming what has now become my brand.

Finding her place in the fashion world 

While Abbey was finalising her collection in anticipation of the UTS Fashion & Textiles Honours 2024 Graduate Showcase, where students exhibited their final-year projects to an audience of industry leaders, she was already thinking about her next steps towards a fashion design career.

“There’s already an undercurrent of interest in my work — I keep my socials up to date and I’ve had stylists reaching out and photographers reaching out, so that’s been a good indicator that what I’m doing is finding its audience,” she says. 

“I really want to start building a brand and to find myself as a designer while I’m still young. I would love for people to turn around and say, ‘This is art, but I can see myself wearing it’.”

You can view more of Abbey's work on her Instagram here.