Image: Theresa Harrison

House of Fast Fashun

Fast Fashun

Fast Fashun is a queer art collective from Melbourne, focused on the climate emergency. The collective uses art therapy, improvisational theatre, and visual art making to create durational interactive installations where audiences come face-to-face with the waste produced by the fast fashion industry.

Fast Fashun has received recognition from the 2021 Green Room Awards for Contemporary and Experimental Performance and was a finalist in the Midsumma Australia Post Art Award in 2022. The collective is available to be programmed within festivals and events. Projects can be tailored to suit different scale events and age groups.

The collective comprises Tenfingerz, Famous Artist Sebastian Berto, Luna Aquatica, and Sarah Seahorse. The artists have been collaborating on projects for the past decade, using their combined skillset to create art that is a tool for social change.

Sebastian Berto, a graphic designer, illustrator, performer, and art-therapist with a BA in Animation and Interactive Media, has facilitated interactive art spaces at the NGV. Tenfingerz, a multi-disciplinary artist and creative producer, creates unique live-art experiences that invite audience engagement through long-form immersive work, satire, and writing.

Luna Aquatica and Sarah Seahorse create fantastical displays of wearable art, large-scale soft fabrication, body puppetry, and provocative performance, using recycled media and found objects. They are two-time award winners at the international World of Wearable Art Awards and hold degrees in Youth work and Community Development, Community Theatre and Costume Design, with vast experience in community art making and the costume and theatre industries.

The collective’s work has been described as ‘a mad, technicolour, subversive and enlightened spectacle that Leigh Bowery would have been proud of’. Fast Fashun’s unique approach to addressing the impact of fast fashion and empowering audience’s creativity is a testament to the power of art in effecting social change.

    ABOUT THE PROJECT

    The House of Fast Fashun is an interactive and durational performance where audiences become the fashion designer, maker, and catwalk model.

    Fashion houses are where designers and their teams create collections of work. They are synonymous with expression, creativity, collaboration and community. We lampoon the idea and create a temporary sculpture in the shape of a house out of clothing and textile waste. The house forms the centrepiece of the installation then the performance happens around it.

    An audience member comes to the house, is welcomed by the host and invited to explore the piles of clothing waste that surround it. Artists are busy rummaging through the pile alongside the audience or beginning their creations on the tables.

    Audiences are asked to make something new from the waste – a haute couture look for the runway. The runway happens every hour on the hour – hence the name Fast Fashun. With time against them a frenzy of making starts to unfold.

    There is a low barrier of entry to creating an outfit. Pinning things together with safety pins is encouraged, but sewing machines are available and the artists are on hand to help.

    The host calls the time: ‘Fifteen minutes until showtime’, ‘Ten minutes’, ‘Five’ – ‘Tools down’. All audience members who will be modelling their creation are asked to head inside the house. The rest of the audience sits on the benches that line the runway in front of the house, ready to view the fashion show.

    The music starts and the first model bursts out of the door of house onto the catwalk. Audiences cheer. The model struts down the runway showcasing what they have just created. Participants of all ages and abilities take to the runway. Everyone is celebrated.

    It then all starts again. ‘Fifty minutes til the next runway!’

    Session Times
    PROFILE: Here’s What We Made
    Thursday 8 June

    CONTACT

    Teneille Clerke
    tenfingerzproductions@gmail.com