Eastern Market
Mention the words ‘cutting-edge clothing’ and Australia is not the first place that comes to mind. Australian men are long perceived to be a bunch of easygoing beachgoers with a certain disdain for fashion. Roam its streets and one might see office workers in tired grey suits, or blue collar workers in singlets and Stubbies shorts, or even young men in tight jeans with a perturbing resemblance to wild-haired Ksubi clones. Yet there is a clothing store in Melbourne that goes above and beyond these stereotypes, slicing through the platitudinous fashion retail wasteland with a blade of passion, cutting straight to the core of what’s valuable; connecting with people and using clothing as a medium to change their lives. Scoute spoke with Eastern Market’s co-owner Stephen McGlashan.
So how did it all begin?
Well, the shop opened in September 2006, so Eastern Market is just over two and a half years old. My life partner and business partner, Lucinia Pinto, and I are the proprietors and we do the buying as well as work in the shop alongside our staff. Lucinia is very much the figurehead for the store, her reputation and career in Melbourne fashion retail were well established before she and I ever met. So, Eastern Market was a fresh idea after a break from the other stores, a more personal retail statement for Lucinia, and a collaboration between us.
The store has a real strength in womenswear and a strong growth in menswear. There is no clearly defined demographic for us, it seems that the people we attract feel about clothing design the same way they feel about architecture, music, literature, film or art. They are not necessarily pretentious people or self-indulgent, they are often self-styling people who want to project a unique aspect of themselves via clothing. Or perhaps they are people who sometimes require our assistance to create a new look. One thing is for sure, they come to the store to find something different. They are usually quieter people, whether they be a film star or a student who’s just sold a kidney. People seem to like the store’s location and discretion, the fact that they cannot be seen – it feels very private. As there is limited space, we have to make very focused decisions about which collections we represent, and we have a preference for those that wish to be exclusive to the store within Australia. Australia is very big on a map, but it is a very, very small market. Our clients come from all over the country. We have some clients who fly in specifically to buy from the new collections – sometimes we discover they have had a taxi waiting outside all the time. We shall never get used to it, we were both raised as poor Catholics.
Tell more about yourself and how you got involved in clothing.
I was born in England, grew up in New Zealand, and moved to Melbourne nearly fifteen years ago. I have an arts and film background, and have several times in a previous life collided with the fashion retail industry. My first introduction to clothing was the hand-me-down clothing from my brothers and sisters, I knew nothing about purchasing new clothes until I was in my late teens, early twenties. When I was a boy our family used to visit the Birthright clothing dispensary in Auckland, New Zealand – it was a charity that dispensed second hand clothes to single-parent families. I remember what seemed to be a vast room filled with shelves and racks stuffed with wrinkled clothing – like some Christian Boltanski installation. My mother used to select the clothing which was made freely available to us by this organization. I was raised on Op Shops and Salvation Army stores, and I still enjoy that smell of second-hand clothing – of lives lived, of histories wondered at, treasures to be found. Now when I look around at Eastern Market, I see something like that again, but it is Paul Harnden and it’s new, and the prices have gone up a bit.
During my last years at school I discovered the clothing I wanted to wear. My favourite bands were Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Magazine, Wire, and anything remotely German or by Bowie or Eno. In 1980 I discovered Joy Division, and suddenly I was wearing slim black shirts with the collar done up, and grey suit trousers from an op-shop – I used to pin them into stove pipes and take them to a tailor who sewed up the legs for me and cut off the excess on the inside. So when this look keeps coming ’round I feel a grumpy deja vu. In my last year of school I wore this as a uniform, with a dark fitted blazer and a shaved head; my mother used to see me, give a mock salute and cry, “Fasciste!” I look in the mirror now, wearing head-to-toe Carol Christian Poell, and the silhouette is more sophisticated but the essence hasn’t changed.
Although I work in the shop several days a week and can be seen there, my main role is becoming the behind the scenes person which I enjoy – the area I most enjoy is developing the brand of the store. This, like everything else, is a work in progress and will develop over the lifetime of the shop. I also handle a lot of the admin and the international sales – we are getting a lot of enquiries and have developed some good customers worldwide, mainly in menswear, as men tend to hunt things down via email or the internet. Our women customers are much more interested in the idea of an establishment, a place to come to away from the rat race.
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The location of the shop is quite interesting and has some history to it, I believe.
Yes, it’s very discrete, housed in a former Catholic chapel which was once attached to an adjacent convent run by Josephite nuns. The nuns used to care for unmarried pregnant women in former times when pregnancy outside wedlock was taboo; the chapel was a private place for their prayers and there was no public access to the space whatsoever. The floor area is quite small, barely 100 square meters if you count the mezzanine upstairs, but it has an eight meter ceiling so it has very vertical dimensions. There is something about the dimensions that give the space an aura of calm and uplift, and the fact that there is no frontage or view to the street gives a sense of sanctuary. When we walk into the store in the morning we always have a sense of gladness when entering this space – it is hard to describe. It was already a commercial showroom but we removed almost everything that had been built, preferring to work from a blank slate.
All the fittings we designed are made of steel – we wanted these to feel like installations in the space. I drew them up and Gordon Byrne, our steel guy, with a lot of huffing and puffing, built them. The rotating copper changing rooms were a challenge but they work beautifully and we call them ‘the confessionals”. They look like something from an old French brewery. I have to say I was slightly disappointed when we first hung the clothes, as it seemed to soften the hard-core brutality of the fittings. But a balance was established.
Wow, it almost sounds like a labour of love.
Lucinia and I share a love of creating environments together. In a sense, Eastern Market is an environment rather than strictly a retail space. It doesn’t present like a shop, it doesn’t present like a gallery – it seems kind of unique. Some people walk in and fall in love with it – one of our first customers stood there and inexplicably burst into tears. Some walk in and are totally mystified. Perhaps because as a potential customer it is impossible to enter the space and remain anonymous – in a sense you have to engage with us – so we tend to attract brave individuals, which is good, because we have the clothes for brave individuals. There is nothing about the shop that attracts a herd mentality – so it is niche market, low traffic, very high value.
When we first opened we would find our customers walking up and down trying to find a shopfront, even though there is a sign on the chapel building – but I am happy to say it doesn’t stand out. As the word spread there was no problem finding the place and the store is really attracting its true audience now. After two and half years we have a much better idea of our developing identity, and the collections we represent and want to represent tend to have one thing in common – the clothing has a transformational power. So in fact we are not necessarily interested in collections that are similar in ethos or appearance, but in entire looks that are defined by their polarities. For instance, Paul Harnden, and Carol Christian Poell.
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When you speak of the transformational power of clothing I am reminded of a quote from Wim Wenders on first wearing clothes by Yohji Yamamoto, a revelation that I have personally experienced and cannot forget. How do you see it?
By transformation I mean, yes, the ability to put an outfit on and to see a new or different essence of oneself accessed through the medium of clothing design. Of course, superficially, this is something that occurs in three dimensions upon the structure of a body, in front of a mirror. But a real transformation can occur when a reaction occurs within the wearer – and there is a modification, a new proposal outlined, perhaps a new way of seeing oneself – an external and internal revelation might be set in motion, which ultimately might occur with some emotional force and/or an altered psychology. Perhaps this could be described as a metamorphosis, even a transfiguration. So it can actually lead to a change in behavior on the part of the wearer, and perception on the part of the wearer’s audience. When this moment occurs with a customer in the store we tend to get quietly excited, because suddenly we, the designer and the wearer seem to have arrived at a point of unison in which everything that was intended is being expressed.
Now, human beings come in all shapes and sizes, all volumes – we feel we are very ‘imperfect’ creatures which is possibly why we are constantly drawn to this idea of the opportunity for transformation. So, although we are a very niche store, we wish to be able to offer this sense of transformation to as wide a variety of people as possible, simply because people come to us from all walks of life.
Tell me about your own personal experience with transformation in regards to Carol Christian Poell.
Yes, I have had one of those experiences myself when trying on a Poell black suit and shoes. It’s hard to describe where the effect comes from; the austere, sexless silhouette, the footwear which look and feel more like rumpled hooves. As a result you’ve taken on a sort of controlled menace, so that when you walk down the street in your finery you notice people may glance sideways at you, they start to keep their distance. Of course, you are just strolling to the shops to buy a little piece of quiche lorraine for lunch, but you have taken on a cloak of psychological violence that is inherent in the designer’s work. This is amplified by the limited movements that the construction of the silhouette allows; it is tight and controlling, with a stiff, upright verticality – this produces the kind of gait and movement in you that one would associate with Nosferatu.
Actually, there is a lot of fascist tension in Poell’s garments – they almost challenge you to wear them, and you can choose to wear and keep them in the pristine condition in which they are produced and delivered. Personally, I tend to like the fight that occurs between me and the garment that ultimately leads to the slow destruction of the garment on my body. This is when I think the garments really come into their own; when they are well-worn, when the tape is cracking, or the seams splitting, and it all starts to get that sense of vagabond decay – and you have singlehandedly conquered Fascism. Of course if you want the full transformation, you would wear CCP gloves, shoes and a bag with your suit. It’s the leather accessories which manifest a sense of organic horror developing at your extremities. It is interesting to me how Poell seems to view the human trunk as a zone of clinical asexuality, and the extremities as zones that are abject, sinful, sexualised, diseased. This all sounds repulsive, but it is actually fascinating, and I have to confess to having woken up at night thinking about these things, in the same way that a work of art, or a film, or a piece of literature might jangle my senses.
The thing about Poell is that he delivers it all with such a macabre wit. The sense of cheek and playfulness in his work is really appealing, though you’re never quite certain whether his things are deadly serious or deadly funny, because at times he seems to have summoned up all the horror of humanity with a mere rack of clothing. You know, I come from a heritage where my mother’s first ball gown was stitched up by my grandmother from the floral curtains in their house, so on any day that I glance down now and realise I look like a tramp but I’m wearing thousands worth of Poell garments, I think either I have got rocks in my goddam head, or my mind is being invaded by an Austrian vampire.
What other designers do you carry?
At the moment, we also represent Paul Harnden, Label Under Construction, If Six Was Nine, Issey Miyake, Sara Lanzi, Volga Volga – and Guidi, Marsell, Sak, Christian Peau – and Werkstatt Munchen, Ugo Cacciatori, plus some very interesting Melbourne jewelry and accessory designers, Polly Vanderglas and Roxanne Watts. We are adding some Julius soon because we saw in it a potential for women as much as men. I say ‘at the moment’ because stores, like human beings, take on lives of their own and the opportunity for metamorphosis of a store over its lifetime should always be kept in consideration. Eastern Market is only two and a half years old, so as a conduit for other people’s ‘metamorphosis’, we feel we have not yet arrived at a golden ratio between whom we serve and whom we represent. I feel we are a few years away from that, because it takes time to develop relationships with suppliers, it takes time to develop relationships with customers… and actually it takes time to understand the clothing, the ideas, the volumes, and whom it best suits. And indeed, having begun it, it takes time to understand one’s own store as an entity, as an identity – all of those things are becoming a lot clearer now but in essence they will always remain a work in progress.
All of these things are constantly in a state of flux, so in fact a golden ratio is possibly never achieved, but that is what one is always striving toward. Of course, we are never happy – much like the designers we represent: we always feel they are irked by some aspect of their own work, and season by season they redevelop things in increments to try to perfect what pleases/displeases them. Well, Lucinia and I are the same; it is this constant desire to have everything working in perfect concert that drives us towards the possibly unattainable.
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Many of the designers you represent are focused on creating hand-made artisanal garments with a very specific aesthetic. Clothes, rather than fashion. How important is this to you?
Fashion is a word that does not easily come out of our mouths. Although on our website we describe ourselves as a ‘fashion shop’, it has merely been a shorthand for internet visitors so immediately they understand we stock clothing and accessories, but in the near future you will see me adjust it to ‘clothing design shop’ or similar. Fashion to us seems to be something that happens somewhere else in another market, it is this thing that turns over constantly and is afflicted with too many instantaneous (and instantaneously passé) attitudes. We have this real trouble with seasons and this constant requirement to order anew every six months – why the fuck should we? We are trying to train our suppliers to slow it down and concentrate on timelessness, but still too many of them are caught up in this cyclical regurgitation by necessity – not that of the consumer but the factory; we understand their cyclical need but it’s actually fucking bullshit when it doesn’t produce top shelf ideas.
Designers and their production houses need to understand that the six month cycle no longer fits the retail cycle – the whole pattern has disintegrated. All we know is that we need to represent pieces/ideas/collections that excite people’s imagination within a space that becomes a second home to them. Timelessness: I mean, if pieces from Carol Christian Poell’s SS07 collection are still sold to all corners of the world, why should anyone else’s work fall short of this mark? Why shouldn’t clothing last this long on the shelf, why can’t it? It can, and any designer who doesn’t aspire to the same kind of longevity and sell-through as Poell is lazy. To be honest when I saw the 09 CCP collection I realized this guy and his studio must be suicidal workaholics because the ideas, the detail in every piece, the presentation, the concept and the argument were just absolutely stunning – intellectual fashion delivered with a visceral punch, so much so that it simply wiped the floor with most things I had just seen in Paris.
The other designer I can see out there who is hitting the mark in menswear is Maurizio Altieri, and the fact that he isn’t producing Avantindietro seems to be the perfect statement; why would you throw pearls before swine when you know the machinery of fashion can’t digest your work? I’ve had the privilege of seeing the development of this collection, from breathtaking computer drawings to physical samples developed over time. It’s a 21st Century nomadic wardrobe rendered in blacks, much to Maurizio’s own personal tastes and physical requirements. It is possibly his own preferred wardrobe for wandering the globe. The fact that it hasn’t been produced or distributed in its entirety only heightens its power for me, it is perhaps one of the greatest arguments for wearing clothes, or perhaps for not wearing or selling them, that I have ever experienced. I guess the simple answer is we are really into clothes and this power they can have. Fashion is fucked, that whole cycle eats itself before it can even be produced now, so why produce it? That is the question every designer needs to be asking themselves. Why?
That’s a great question you raise. Speaking of Maurizio Altieri, some of the designers you represent were involved in the now defunct Carpe Diem. In recent years there has been a proliferation of offshoots, with some arguing that these new labels are over-saturating this niche market. What do you make of this?
Well, you know, my understanding of Carpe Diem is pretty simplistic: it was Maurizio Altieri, working first with Luca Laurini, then with Sara Lanzi and Maurizio Amadei. That was the core group, no? And when I think of Carpe Diem and its design language, I think only of those designers, and the Altieri imprimatura, the rigid dogma that defined it. And of course, yes, there were others, now apparently many, swirling in and around this collective over the course of its existence. The thing is, the people who were important at Carpe Diem never want to speak about it, they have moved on. In a way, they seem haunted, if not somewhat traumatised by the CDiem experience and its associations – it’s like a bruise. And in each one’s personality there appears to reside a bruised artist, poet, painter, architect, mathematician – all trying to come to a purity or a silence that calms the civil war within themselves. No doubt some of this internal war was ignited by Altieri; maybe he was the enfant terrible of clothing design that suddenly made Margiela look soft by the late 90s?
It is possibly true that if you spent enough time rubbing shoulders with Maurizio Altieri, if you got caught up in the CDiem swirl, that you are going to come away feeling renewed, jangled and intellectually inebriated. So for this second and third wave of people appearing who had an association with Carpe Diem, I can fully understand the impulse. And why not put it on your CV? I mean, I would probably tattoo it on my forehead. And as a buyer, yes, to read Carpe Diem on someone’s CV, it is enough to make you want to trawl the back alleys and showrooms of the Marais in zero degrees, coughing your lungs out.
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But there are several things happening here. Firstly, Carpe Diem garments were made to a standard associated with the finest bespoke clothing, they’re kind of tailored/constructed to an indestructible degree. So any new collection that wishes to invoke the resonance of Carpe Diem is holding themselves up to these withering standards of construction. Secondly, new designers that are now spruiking an association with Carpe Diem have themselves entered into the design language of Carpe Diem (amongst others), and personally from what I have seen I find it hard to accept that the language and architecture is their own. But, you know, everyone starts somewhere; Dior came out of Piguet, Cardin out of Dior, blah blah blah and designers develop an individual voice over time. So, time is required to see where these designers get to in order to create a language that can be called their own. So we watch them, but we don’t necessarily rush to stock them. Which brings us to whether, as a store, you are interested in stocking designers who have an association or a language that is currently redolent of another past collection, or designers who have actually gone on to develop a singular voice of their own.
But we are talking about menswear here in general, and menswear in this strand of the market is a strange beast at the moment. There is a lot of ferment, a lot of names coming up, a lot of fuzzing of ideas and sameness and androgyny, and I have to say I am looking at it all with an increasingly cold eye. It’s really obvious that Carpe Diem has had a profound effect on this particular area of menswear; it’s like a note struck in music – there’s an attack, a sustain and a decay. And for CDiem the decay we are experiencing is really long and still going. In fact, the resonance and reverberation of the note is growing in volume well after the demise, and it’s becoming quite shrill, with everyone trying to harmonise and sing along like the note is theirs to sing, but to my ears it’s starting to sound like distortion.
But there is demand for this other stuff: you know, Altieri has created a kind of vacuum by having Avantindietro in a kind of stasis. But Maurizio doesn’t produce, either because he is not satisfied with elements of the production, or perhaps his own design. He’s not the sort to produce things just because the trough is looking empty for consumers. So Avantindietro is this thing that I have seen as a collection, a system of clothing made up of samples, but it has not surfaced as a complete, produced statement in anyone’s store, and probably never will. Actually, because there has been a rush of hot air into this vacuum, it’s not unlikely he would wander away and do something else.
But back to your question, in terms of there being an “over-saturation” of a particular market, yeah, all I can say is that the people I have mentioned so far seem to have set the benchmark, and there are many others now wishing to aspire to it – in a very limited market.
Where do you see yourself and Eastern Market in a few years time?
Ha, ha, that’s a good question at the moment, because most retailers we know are thinking about committing suicide or running away to Jamaica. Look, in a few years we’d like to feel that in our chapel store we have achieved a kind of golden ratio of collections that suggests exactly what that store can be about. I’d like to think that by then, we’d be opening another store that suggested something different again, something that extends the Eastern Market vocabulary we have already developed.
Interviewed by Brian Chung.