Alix Higgins

In other creative fields, it’s known as ‘sequel syndrome’ — when a second book, movie or other work fails to replicate the success of its predecessor. In the fashion world, the same concept applies: the pressure of producing a second collection after a highly acclaimed debut can leave some designers paralysed with fear. 

Not so for designer Alix Higgins, whose second outing at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week (AAFW) this year left the media fawning.

“I didn’t feel any of that. It was really good in the sense that a lot of the guesswork about how to put a show together was gone,” says Higgins, a graduate of the UTS Bachelor of Design in Fashion and Textiles who first appeared at AAFW in 2022.

“Instead, I felt like I could relax.”

The result was Delectable Earth Shudder, a futuristic collection inspired in part by the dark, muddy forest scene in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. 

While it was still recognisably Alix Higgins — bold textiles featuring written messages directly on the fabric — it opened the door to a new era of his eponymous brand, one in which he’s ready to make his voice heard.

“With this collection, I was feeling a kind of creative frustration. I had my first show and the press and the sales — everything was positive,” says Higgins, who was subsequently nominated for Emerging Designer of the Year in the 2022 Australian Fashion Laureate awards.

“In the year since my first show, I’ve met with a lot of people on the business side of fashion and found myself butting heads with them.”

The advice he received in those meetings was often focused on perfecting a generic commercial formula for his brand — scaling the business, manufacturing in China, producing in vast quantities, focusing on the bottom line — but they left him feeling empty. 

“It just deadened the excitement for me. I wanted to make a collection that was more like, ‘Listen to me!’ and to remind myself of what I love and drown out those external voices,” he says. 

Eschewing expectations about what he should do next has become a defining feature of the always-evolving Alix Higgins brand. After years of doing made-to-order pieces, he’s now expanding into the ready-to-wear market.

But he’s doing it his way, which means small production runs, small re-stocks, and a commitment to sustainable ways of working. He’ll do two collections a year, six months apart, and continue stocking his pieces in a limited selection of independent boutiques that share his values. 

“I can’t take grand risks on making thousands of pieces, and I don’t need to when my production is local,” Higgins says.

I just want to keep it small.

He’s also combining his creative work with his role as a tutor in the UTS Bachelor of Fashion and Textiles course. It’s a way of deploying his creativity beyond the studio, and it’s also an opportunity to re-live his own UTS experience, from which he graduated back in 2015. 

Even now, he looks back on those years as being formative to the designer he has since become. 

“I really found myself creatively and I still find that I visit a lot of seeds of ideas that were planted back then,” he says of his degree. 

“I really learnt how to be a designer and how to value my own voice and understand myself.”

Now, it seems, Alix Higgins is using that same distinctive voice to carve out a niche in the industry — and he’s helping the next generation of fashion leaders to do the same.