Meet Violet Town, the female-focused Melbourne streetwear label
IMAGE VIA @radio_grl/INSTAGRAM
WORDS BY CAIT EMMA BURKE
“Poetic and experimental graphics, in a world where cute and weird collide.”
Before launching her own label, graphic designer and artist Hayley Morris spent a significant chunk of her career creating more masculine-leaning work for labels like Los Angeles-based cult streetwear brand Brain Dead. While working for other brands, she’d procrastinate by creating graphics for what would eventually become Violet Town, her female-focused streetwear label.
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Based in Melbourne, Violet Town makes sweatshirts, T-shirts, trackpants, books and zines, all emblazoned with Hayley’s distinctive experimental-yet-cute graphics. Influenced by underground culture, nostalgia and her own lifelong obsession with fashion, her pieces are comfort-focused and effortlessly cool. Below, she shares the story of Violet Town and her thoughts on the current state of the Australian fashion industry.
Tell us about you. What’s your fashion background?
I currently work for myself designing graphics and visual material for mostly fashion/clothing brands. My favourite to design is repeat fabric patterns. When choosing a degree I was picking between fashion, fine art and graphic design.
I felt like graphic design was broad enough to cover all of those areas, whilst choosing electives in fine art, tackling the surface graphics area of fashion was the mission and now the achieved goal! I worked tirelessly in multiple internships and wild jobs to kind of perfect my rhythm and feel at peace with my pace and [the] position I’m in now.
How did the label get started? Talk us through the process and the challenges.
At the time I was doing a lot of more masculine style work for male-oriented brands, and Violet Town started as an outlet originally. At the time there were minimal affordable basic printed items in the world I was working in, and I just wanted to create a new language of my own. It was truly inevitable because I would procrastinate by making Violet Town graphics. So it was a lot of experimentation.
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The challenges of the logistics of timelining, investing money into something you don’t actually profit off at all as well, and then just literally doing every single component of the business myself except for some photography was a recipe for burnout, especially [because of] the content machine we live in more so now. Everything always goes wrong all the time (product-based businesses will know this) and you have to learn to take the L very fast and divert. That was the greatest skill I learned and still practice today. Sending out people’s orders is always the juice that keeps me going.
What were you trying to achieve from the project at the time? How has this evolved and what are you trying to communicate through the brand now?
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Initially, I wanted to create a voice that didn’t exist at the time and I did dream of having a company and self-sustaining business. I was incredibly determined to create a new brand story and I feel like I achieved that part (but not the profit part). COVID happened, then I worked at Brain Dead for two years and I didn’t have time or energy for my side projects during that time so I was paused on Violet Town.
When I came out of my Brain Dead chrysalis, I had severe burnout and I was more sure than ever that ‘cool’ wasn’t an aesthetic or an external thing, it was who you are inside, which made nothing matter when your job is so surface level (literally). Now I’m extremely solid in my happiness and Violet Town is purely a fun creative outlet and experimental space which was the authentic original form. I’m excited to delve into cut and sew in 2024, and I do still question what I’m building here sometimes. I think that’s a natural ebb and flow of critical creativity.
How would you describe your label to someone who’s never seen it before?
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Poetic and experimental graphics, in a world where cute and weird collide.
What are you most proud of in your work on your label?
Collaborating and community. There’s no independent growth without a community to reciprocate with.
What do you wish you knew when you started?
Nothing! Learning through self-experience is the most priceless gift you can give yourself. Failure is the greatest learning experience in the world. Without pain there is no growth so avoiding it is actually more detrimental in some cases. Learn your own limits through experience. Also going in blind is so fun because you are in the delulu state and it’s a good place to be in.
Who do you think is most exciting in Australian fashion right now?
I feel like the creative community has really diversified and grown massively. The landscape has changed and I am obsessed with that for younger people. I also think the Café Forgot-ification of independent/artistic labels has landed on our shores as well. It feels like an empowering time for people wanting to start their own ‘thing’ and be seen and heard and to go global.
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What about the Australian fashion industry needs to change?
It can be echo chamber-ish in Australia, by nature [of] being so far away from the rest of the planet, we don’t have access to the same music scenes, street culture, niche hobby pockets that New York, Tokyo [and] London have. There’s so many copycat things happening and it’s always on a delay and I’ve always noticed that.
The solution for that is for those individuals to travel and maybe visit a library… If anything should be designed today it is the designer themselves, cut yourself out of stone. The ones who truly stick to their authentic selves and have an unshakable and unique vision for their own world and interests always rise to the top.
Dream Australian
Go-to dinner party playlist?
I live in a tiny apartment so the dinner parties are minimal, but would fall into my Men I Trust, Beach House, Title Fight, Slowdive, Billy Idol, The Cure, The Strokes, lots of Crystal Castles, Heaven by Shygirl and Oklou realm.
Who is in your wardrobe right now?
Heavy vintage always. I am an eBay girl. Been an avid Etsy girl too since I was 12. Mercibeaucoup, Cop Copine, Vivienne Westwood bandanas always, Vintage studded Miu Miu handbags with the leather flowers – I have a few I rotate. I feel like they are me at age 14 in my deep indie sleaze identity. New items are Kiko, these insane Ramp Tramp Tramp Stamp jeans I got recently, and Acne Studios when I can afford it.
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I know how fashion works design-wise, it’s almost always heavily referenced from vintage sourcing. It is impossible to keep up financially with trends and I always opt to find the original reference on eBay. Like last season’s Miu Miu, Acne and Louis Vuitton worn leather aviator bomber jackets – I bought a vintage ’50s worn leather Avirex flight jacket on eBay [and it] looks exactly like stitch for stitch the same as the Louis Vuitton which came out after I purchased it, but a fraction of the price. Vintage items often hold their value and great style has nothing to do with money, never forget that!
How can we buy one of your pieces?
At violettown.net or flosskees.com.
Anything else to add?
Take risks!!!! You’ll never regret standing up for what you believe in, but you will always regret it when you don’t.
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