Caroline Reznik

In May 2023, as fashion designer and UTS graduate Caroline Reznik stood backstage at her debut Afterpay Australian Fashion Week (AAFW) show, she couldn’t wrap her head around the idea the audience was there to see her work.

“The idea that people were coming to see it, and see it in a new way outside of social media, wasn’t something that hit me until they arrived,” she says. 

If Caroline was experiencing a disconnect between the online and the physical, it’s because her eponymous label was conceived in solitude and brought to life almost entirely in the digital realm. 

An honours student in the UTS Bachelor of Design in Fashion and Textiles, she was just a week into her degree when COVID-19 shutdowns sent the UTS campus into lockdown. 

In the months that followed, she created her final-year collection alone from her bedroom on the Central Coast, using herself as a mannequin and shooting her work using her iPhone camera on a timer. 

Fighting stereotypes

Since then, Caroline has built her label via social media, posting images of tutus, dresses, bodysuits and boleros that have been frayed, tanned, shredded and distressed in her trademark ‘balletcore’ style.

“My work is about translating a theoretical understanding of movement into new methodologies through the use of cloth on the body,” she says. 

Her work feels ethereal and almost not of this world, reflecting Caroline’s own history as a former dancer — but until she started at UTS, she hadn’t realised how much she wanted to use her creative process to push back against the unrealistic standards of the dance world. 

“The world of ballet is so particular, and there are certain stereotypes and standards that you have to meet in order to be the perfect ballet dancer,” she says. 

One of the things that really sits within my mind and how I create now is what I discovered at UTS, which was how to rebel against those norms.

The degree taught her to look for beauty in unexpected places — designs that stopped short of perfection, or that took an idea and ran not towards convention but away from it. 

Crucially, Caroline says, it challenged her to stay curious. 

“The course was about innovation, curiosity, research; it was about thinking and mulling things over and continually exploring,” she says. 

“My work today definitely leverages off everything I learnt and discovered about myself and what I wanted to create at UTS. That was really quite a revolutionary period for me as a designer.” 

Celebrity collaborations

And it’s clearly hitting a nerve: in the three years since graduating from UTS, in addition to her first AAFW show, Caroline has had her first celebrity collaborations (Rosalia, Cardi B, Doja Cat), her first in-person celebrity collaboration (she flew out to LA to help create Doja Cat’s entire 2022 Coachella look), and her first Kardashian collaboration (Kendall Jenner, who wore a pair of Caroline Reznik leather pants, also at Coachella 2022).

She’s also been interviewed by fashion bible Vogue Australia, as well as Grazia and CoolPrettyCool, among others; sold two capsule collections; and embarked on her first trip to Europe to meet prospective buyers and retailers for wholesale pieces. 

So hungry is the fashion industry for all things Caroline Reznik that she’s even received more than one offer to purchase her graduate collection — her first foray into what has now become a label the world can’t get enough of. 

But, while she’s happy to lend the pieces out, she’s too attached to them, and to the memories of her time at UTS, to hand them over permanently.

“It doesn’t matter what price point it’s at,” Caroline says. 

“I just cannot let those pieces go.”