Gold Coast glitz and grit meets high fashion in this new diva bible

Rose Pure’s Parasite Paradise is a love letter to her inner Queensland bogan.

Kat Rose works with Australia’s it-girls. Whether she’s shooting collections or runways for independent designers, styling music videos, tour wardrobes and album art for the hottest pop stars (Ninajirachi, Daine and Cherry Chola, to name a few),  or launching a collection with Melbourne designer Olivia Rowan, there are few corners of fashion untouched by Kat’s vision.

Now, the Sydney-based stylist and photographer, who operates under the moniker Rose Pure, has channelled a decade of hard work at the diva factory into her first book, Parasite Paradise. Kat celebrated its launch earlier this month with a party at Slip Gallery in Darlinghurst (complete with iconic Supre-inspired merch), and this Saturday, she’s bringing it interstate to the Out of Fashion Book Fair for Melbourne Fashion Week.

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Parasite Paradise contrasts a series of images taken in Surfers Paradise with a selection of Kat’s fashion work archive across Australia. Highlights include pouring “litres and litres” of slime into a blow-up pool for models to wrestle in, and taking her friends to an Ikea car park, squeezing them into latex and photographing them on motorbikes.

Dedicated to her grandmother, Gloria, “the original Goldie Girl”, the book explores Kat’s connection to the decrepit glamour of the famed Gold Coast strip, a place she spent time growing up in, that continues to fascinate her.

As a child, Kat was always “equally afraid and enamoured” by Surfers Paradise. “It was really dirty, dangerous, and felt so much bigger than me,” she says. “At the same time, that was contrasted with it being a place of glamour, fun, and opportunity.”

Hedonism, decrepitude, glitz and grit – the intense contrast of Surfers provided Kat fertile ground for the book. She’s drawn to juxtaposition as an extension of her inner world, catalysed by her experience of growing up in Queensland’s hinterland, wanting to work in fashion.

“I don’t come from money and didn’t have a lot of access to the fashion world, so it was like I was always playing dress up,” she tells me. “Even now, there are the two parts of me that feel very contrasted – the Queensland bogan with the high fashion job – and I think there’s so much fun in putting those things together.” 

While at first she felt pressure to memorialise all of her best work, as she pieced the project together, Kat realised Parasite Paradise was a world of its own, one that was uniquely hers. “The more I went through it, the more I realised I needed it to all make sense and be an accurate representation of my aesthetics and growing up in Queensland. Everything was selected around the theme of the book, which represents me more authentically than any other work I’ve done.”

Kat Rose at her book launch in Sydney.

“A lot of my teenage firsts happened in Surfers,” she says. “Jumping off the bridge at Tallebudgera, going to Pacific Fair to rack, going to my first club and learning to surf.”

In a conform-or-die industry, where the commercial is obsessed with limping behind Europe and the US, Kat confronts Australia’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies head-on. Through her lens, boardies, thongs, flippers and rashies become high fashion.

“It’s an interesting thing working in fashion and feeling like I’ve had to hide being from that place… When I tried to work in corporate fashion spaces, especially moving to Sydney, I felt like I had to really dial that back because everyone in the fashion space wants to look really expensive and minimal, which is so not me.”

Only now, later in life, is she embracing it. “I’ve realised if you’re not being authentic to your vision, it’s never going to work out anyway, so I’ve decided to just go with it. The Australian cringe shit is funny, and we should be using it — it’s so unique to anywhere else in the world.”

Ultimately, she’s serious about being playful, and maintaining a sense of humour in the self-serious fashion world.

Kat had always wanted to preserve her work in physical form, but it wasn’t until a trip to her hometown earlier this year that the idea took shape. “So much of what I do is just produced and posted online; as much as social media has been amazing for career opportunities and meeting new people, sharing work that way feels a little bit disconnected from my audience.”

“I’d always wanted to shoot a series in Surfers Paradise, and in April I went there and spent every day heading in by myself, walking around for hours and taking photos.” At the time, she was going through a “hectic” breakup.

“Breakups are the best time to create, and the book is the reason why I’m doing so well right now, because it gave me my passion and creativity back… You have to ask, Who am I? What do I actually like?’ and start from scratch again. This book is so personal because I went through that process of figuring out who I am and what my work is.”

Going home to Surfers Paradise during that time was part of the process. That included spending time with her grandma, Gloria, who’s pictured on the book’s opening pages, caressing a tattoo of three little pastel stars, one for each of her granddaughters. “She went and got them done when she was in her seventies, walking right into a bikie tattoo shop on the Gold Coast,” Kat laughs. “She’s fucking mad!”

As the Gold Coast changes, the book is also Kat’s bid to preserve and document the old world she once knew. “They’re knocking down a lot of the old buildings from the 70s and 80s and replacing them with new ones. Prices on the Gold Coast are nearly as expensive as Sydney and it’s been gentrified like crazy. It’s the land of fitness influencers and partying now.” 

Copies of Parasite Paradise will be available at the Out of Fashion Book Fair on Saturday, October 24. For more details, head here.