Wilhelmina McGuiness

Born and raised in Australia, I always grew up conscious of the many alarming problems in the fashion industry - environmental and moral - due to having a family background in fashion academia. Thus I was not hasty to enter into the industry at all, and up until 2022 I never planned to even go to fashion school. But it was a desire to gain skills in sewing, patternmaking, and embroidery - skills which are so lost and forgotten in my home country - that sent me to uni. I came with a desire to learn these age-old skills, to create clothes and garments with meaning and heart put into them. This motivation I hope to carry with me until the very end, because I firmly believe that the only way to really change the industry is to change our attitude and relationship to clothing. Clothing should not merely be trendy pieces of fabric to clothe our bodies with, clothing should be something valued, preserved, loved, passed down through generations - as it always was for all of human history, prior to the modern era. I hope that even though my contribution to the industry will be small in the grand scheme of things, I'll be able to help improve the state of the world we live in today, by changing perspectives on the things we consume and sell to others.