Cameron Hill

When Cameron Hill was invited to show her work in the NextGen showcase at the 2023 Afterpay Australian Fashion Week (AAFW), she did what any emerging fashion designer would do: she quit her job and committed herself full-time to cementing her place in the Australian fashion industry. 

“I had just five months to design a 12-look collection,” says Hill, a knitwear designer and graduate of the UTS Fashion and Textiles program.

There are few more prestigious opportunities for up-and-coming Aussie designers than NextGen. Selection for the showcase, which is sponsored by DHL, comes with more than $100,000 in funding to support production of an AAFW runway show, plus photography, a global livestream and international shipping credits. 

For Hill, the experience was a steep learning curve: previously, the only collection she’d ever designed was for the UTS Honours program, and she’d had a full year to put it together. 

“It all speaks to the idea of how a garment feels on the body, the wearability of it, the softness, the drape,” she says of that collection’s aesthetic, which has since become the trademark Cameron Hill style. 

“Materials that are more organic, less synthetic, just sit really beautifully – it’s all about this softness, this cocoon-ness, this drape-ness that I’ve always focused on.” 

Finding global inspiration

Back then, Hill was just finding her feet as a knitwear specialist, having first discovered her passion for the craft during a Global Studio subject in Kullu, India back in 2019. Global Studios are a standout feature of many UTS Design degrees: students are transported all over the world to immerse themselves in global design cultures and gain an international perspective on their work. 

In Kullu, Hill spent three weeks learning intricate hand-knitting and weaving techniques from local artisans. She also learnt how to colour fabrics using natural products like indigo dye, eucalyptus, clay and beetroot powder. 

“It was like two or three straight days of sitting on a wooden loom and weaving a five-metre piece, which was really beautiful,” she says 

“You’re taking yarn and using this machinery to create it into a really beautiful fabric, and you can incorporate all these different designs.

“That really sparked me — it made me realise wow, I’ve just weaved five metres of an original design that I’ve made and put so much thought and care and time into. And so I took that into my honours project and recreated that sort of feel.” 

Now, with a May 2023 deadline looming for her AAFW collection, Hill fell back on what she’d learnt at UTS to start designing the most important pieces of her career. 

“I started by curating my mood board imagery, so thinking about colour, texture, mood and creating my visual representation of what I wanted my collection to evoke,” she says. 

“From there, I started researching lace knitwear, so thinking about what fibres I wanted to look at.” 

The resulting collection, which was made almost entirely of natural fibres like organic cotton, merino wool, silk and mohair, announced Hill’s arrival on the Australian fashion scene. And arrive she has: Vogue Australia described the combination of bralettes, skirts, dresses and jumpers with leg warmers and woollen bonnets as “dreamy and believable”.

What's ahead

Since then, Net-a-Porter has reached out to request a lookbook, she’s starting work on a runway show in collaboration with Nike x Ultra Football, and her Instagram DMs are going off with requests from stylists and creatives looking to get their hands on her work. 

But before Hill throws herself into the next phase of her design career — a fully-fledged label, more industry experience, making new work, building her collaborations — she first wants to pause, to take a breath, to savour the experience that’s brought her to this moment in time.

“I don’t have certain expectations or certain goals right now,” she says. 

“I’m really just going with the flow.”