‘Sublime silliness’ is at the heart of Brisbane sister label Bulley Bulley
“This brand is about our relationship as sisters and our love of being silly together.”
Sisters have a complex relationship with clothes. There’s the fighting over clothes, the joint purchasing of clothes, the stealing of clothes, the borrowing of clothes and quickly putting them back before the other notices. Growing up with a sister often means you have a partner when you’re experimenting with unusual styling choices and playing dress-ups.
For Meanjin (Brisbane) sisters Kiara and Bianca Bulley, growing out of these childhood activities never felt like an option. The pair channelled their love of clothes into university degrees and later, careers. But even in the professional world of design and costuming, the Bulley sisters never lost their childlike imagination.
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Their label Bulley Bulley is the accumulation of their loves – costume design, fashion history and silliness. Playful corsets, ruffled dresses and patterned shirts make up part of their repertoire. Here, we sit down with the sisters to hear more about their sibling bond and what it’s been like breaking into the industry in Brisbane.
Tell us about you. What’s your fashion background?
We both studied fashion at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I think we were the first set of siblings to go through the course. It was inevitable we would end up starting a brand together. After graduating, we both spent some time working in costume, working for the ballet, opera and theatre, as well as some major film and TV shows. We’re lucky we’ve had the opportunity to just jump between the worlds of fashion and costume, getting experience and inspiration from both.
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Kiara also ended up teaching the fashion course at QUT for several years, both as a tutor and lecturer. Today you will find Bianca working as the Head Pattern Cutter at Opera Queensland, while Kiara handles the day-to-day running of Bulley Bulley.
How did the label get started? Talk us through the process and the challenges.
A couple of our beautiful friends (Thea and Linda from the brand TLC) were hosting a pop-up in a tiny shop space in one of the many ageing shopping arcades [in] Brisbane. After coming in to visit, Linda asked if we would make some of the bloomer-style ruffled pants Kiara had been wearing – one of the other shoppers ordered a pair on the spot. From there the brand started fairly organically.
We have a very close-knit community of designers and retailers in Brissy who have offered us a lot of support, encouragement and opportunities to sell or showcase our work. It’s been really beautiful, not only to see independent fashion designers and retailers growing together in our city, but to also be a part of this vibrant community.
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Where did the name come from?
Our names, of course! Bulley hasn’t always been the easiest name to bear. We both got our fair share of being bullied for being Bulleys in school.
We wanted [our label] to be as much [of] ourselves as possible. This brand is about our relationship as sisters; our love of being silly together, our shared nostalgia for costume box dress-ups and the never-ending discussions of how the past and the future collide in the aesthetics of fashion. With the brand, we’re sharing ourselves, so of course we needed to use our names.
How would you describe your brand to someone who’s never seen it before?
Our go-to descriptor of the brand has always been ‘silly’. Bulley Bulley is silly because it’s playful. We pull a lot of inspiration from our work in the costume industry and our love of historic clothing. If you loved dress-ups as a kid, if you love the inherently ridiculous artifacts of fashion history, like ruffles and poufs and corsets, you will probably love our clothes.
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We always start the design process with a fashion history book in hand and the question ‘ugly or beautiful?’ on our tongues. Fashion history is a deep well to dive into for any designer, and as we explore it we look for any elements that sit between that binary of ugly and beautiful.
In our designs, we’re always looking for the sublime – a collar that is just a bit too big, all the pads and bumps and boning that radically change body silhouettes, seemingly superfluous details that exist just for aesthetics – this is what we like to sink our teeth into.
What are you most proud of in your work on your brand?
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Everything is handmade [and made] to order [from] our home studio. You will find evidence of that nuanced detail in our clothes [through] handpainted fabrics, embroidered collars [and] in-house dying [and] bleaching. We love being able to make made-to-order clothes. It’s a move we think more emerging brands are trying out and is such a unique experience for customers.
We think the made-to-order model changes our relationship [with] clothes. Fashion desperately needs to slow down and we all need to change our consuming habits. For a customer to commit to a made-to-order garment, they’re committing to wait[ing], to the anticipation of something made just for them. We want people to build committed emotional connections with our clothes.
What do you wish you had known when you started?
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We still wish we had better business skills. Running a small business is full of big and little challenges we have been learning about as we go. Being a good designer is just the tip of the iceberg. Our biggest challenge at the moment is growing our brand from a side hustle into something that can become our full-time focus. We’re always asking ourselves how we get Bulley Bulley to a place where it’s paying our rent and feeding us.
What about the Australian fashion scene needs to change?
We believe there needs to be more support and funding opportunities for young designers. We want to see more emerging designers on fashion week mainstage runways, we want to see more government funding and more media focus on young designers doing new and challenging work. There needs to be more support for new trade and local manufacturing.
We also want to see more people turning their backs on fast fashion. Retail habits simply need to change. We need to start seeing clothes as valuable and labour-intensive artifacts. We believe that clothes wearers need to be able to see the labour that goes into manufacturing clothes, and to make that labour visible, we need to bring it closer to home.
How can we buy one of your pieces?
You can buy our work through our website or if you are in Meanjin, you can drop into one of our amazing stockists, Practice Studio in South Brisbane or Open House in West End.
Get among Bulley Bulley here.
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