Behind the scenes of Baaqiy’s Melbourne Fashion Week prep

“I want the audience to feel a sense of wonderment.”

Behind the glitz and glamour of every Fashion Week runway, you’ll find months of unseen work. Countless hours of care go into each show, and it all ends almost as soon as it begins. That time often goes unrecognised, but we think the process is as beautiful as the result.

For designer Baaqiy, who is returning for another Melbourne Fashion Week, the past several months have involved exciting new artist collaborations, meticulous hand-sewing while rewatching the entire Breaking Bad series and, like the rest of us, playing Tinashe’s Popstar on repeat.

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But the journey to the designer’s “strongest body of work yet” wasn’t always easy. “I really struggled coming up with the looks for the collection; I was experiencing artist block and fatigue from doing three back-to-back runway shows,” she shares. “There were moments while working on the pieces when I truly didn’t like how they were looking, but I kept telling myself to trust the process.”

Designing the seven pieces debuting in the Sculpture Garden Epilogue: The Egg collection meant exploring a totally new set of techniques: smocking, foiling, creating gravity-defying structures. Each look should evoke “a sense of wonderment” and invite the audience into a world of Baaqiy’s making, one shaped by memories of both trauma and resilience.  

This year, Baaqiy will showcase at the Closing Runway: Wear The Moment on Sunday night. In the days leading up to The Egg’s runway debut, she shares a peek into her creative process.

These are sketches of some of the new and past looks from Sculpture Garden. The final design rarely looks like its initial sketches because I’m constantly changing and improving things, realising some shapes aren’t possible or finding I haven’t acquired the skills to make them yet.

There are two looks featuring the smocking technique. The six rows of two-centimetre squares indicate where I’ll be hand-stitching to ensure that I’m not missing any rows. 

I was looking for a mirror-like silver fabric but couldn’t find any I liked. So I decided to foil my own fabric. I have done foiling before, but it was just putting gold leaf on a fabric, nothing like this, where I had to use specialised glue and lots of heat!

There are about 450 eyelet holes in this coat. It features Baaqiy’s signature cocoon sleeves and the foiling technique. Some of the looks in this collection are more ready-to-wear and some are more avant-garde.

The central look of this collection: The Egg as it was being made. The structure is built by stitching encased wires and gathered bridal tulles, hand-stitched to the structure, layer by layer. I mostly work in the kitchen, garage and my bedroom.

Smocking is a new technique I am exploring, particularly the spine smocking technique. It involves drawing six lines of squares, drawing arrows to indicate the direction for stitching and then basically hours and hours of hand-sewing until I achieve the desired length.

The understructure of this spine gown is quite elaborate, as it is a strapless dress and has to sit on the body without slipping. I took a snapshot of the gown’s interlining structure before adding the linings.

Personally, while I think the gown itself is beautiful and well constructed, it does give me an eerie, unsettling vibe because of the exposed ribs and spine running along the back of the dress.

The Closing Runway: Wear The Moment is part of Melbourne Fashion Week, which runs from 19-25 October.