Iordanes Spyridon Gogos (Q4798)
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Iordanes Spyridon Gogos is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Iordanes Spyridon Gogos |
Iordanes Spyridon Gogos is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Elaine George, the first-ever First Nations model to appear on the cover of Vogue Australia, opened the Iordanos Spyridon Gogos resort show, walking dramatically down the runway in a sleeveless dress pieced together from rectangular pieces of fabric in various shades of goldenrod, some of them heavily embellished. The reaction from the crowd was audibly joyous.It was a fitting introduction to Jordan Gogos’s latest collection, which was anchored in many icons of Australian fashion. Among them is Akira Isogawa, a frequent collaborator of Gogos’s known for exquisite embroidery rendered in both subtle and maximalist ways. Here that included a layered chiffon gown embroidered with a note written by Gogos’s grandfather, who the brand is named after. “I found my Pappou’s lotto numbers in a Greek cookbook, and Akira beaded them,” he explained in his studio the day before his show. “He was always like, ‘If I win the lottery, I’ll buy you this; because when you are Greek and in a suburban household a lot of your relationships are about the things they want to give you. He kept the same numbers his whole life.”Gogos also joined forces with Jenny Banister, recreating a series of her “punk” dresses from the 1970s, one of which was made from geometric pieces of fabric held together by zip ties. And because you “can’t research Jenny without Linda,” as he put it, he dove into Linda Jackson’s archives, unearthing the designer’s treasures in the process; most notably a box of her brand labels, which he sewed one by one into a sleeveless gown with an all-over ruffled trim. A spectacular knee-length dress with dramatic sleeves had individual tiny squares of Jackson’s vintage fabrics—floral prints, tribal prints, bold solids—all sewn-on in origami shapes, coming together to create a sort of walking reference library.Gogos’s fashion label is, in effect, an art project. Pieces are one-of-a-kind, labored over individually until he deems them done, and are not for commercial reproduction. He only just recently started selling some of his archival pieces, and is “very careful,” about who he sells to. “I formally document who has it, where it is, where they’re wearing it.”“My customers are collectors who usually buy with the intention of donating to an institution one day,” he explained. “The dynamics of working with Akira, the pieces made from Linda’s archive—these are things that can never be replicated again.
” Their value lies beyond the usual parts and labor, but into the history they both resurface and build upon.
17 May 2024
Less conventional collection than creative cosmos, Sydney wunderkind Jordan Gogos’s Tuesday-night show made for a lot to take in. Happily Vogue Australia’s Alice Birrell had put in the hard yards in advance to contextualize his collaborative collection with Akira Isogawa, a designer who was on the roster for this city’s first-ever fashion week back in 1996.Even without the Disaronno-amped jet-lag you suspected that this show felt like inhabiting someone else’s fever dream: gratifyingly the designer kind of concurred. Gogos explained that he has a recurring nightmare of running and being unable to stop—reflected in the film projected at the back of the Carriageworks space—and added: “I needed to do something with it and channel it into this very physical materiality.”That constantly in motion creative anxiety manifested itself into 40 highly built pieces of costume—this was a collection sure to woo curators more than consumers—all of which had been bespokenly shaped to accentuate the cast of local characters who walked. There were vamps, warriors, satyrs, sirens, seers, and more, all clad in detail-heaped, myriad-stitched, hand-fashioned assemblages. To rhythmic blasts of ’90s hardcore and in walks that ranged from stomp to shimmy they negotiated a runway heaped with mountain ranges of upcycling and Gogos-signifying wooden trojan horses. Some also wore goth teddy bears—an Isogawa motif—strapped to their backs or medieval, extreme tsarouchi.It’s human nature to categorize the new against the known. To these fresh eyes elements of Gogos’s practice seemed not unadjacent to others including Rei Kawakubo, Vivienne Westwood, and Matty Bovan. And there was a whiff of Sibling too. This is not to say the Gogos cosmos felt derivative, but to suggest that the elements of abstraction, punk, and DIY all at play here seemed to sit squarely in the tradition of fashion carnival. Or as the OG Australian fashion designer Jenny Kee sat next to me made sure to emphasize: “Darl, he’s an artist.”
17 May 2023
Jordan Gogos’s cacophonous, technicolor runway-as-party was as good an introduction to the designer’s world as possible. The Parson’s graduate’s sophomore presentation took his work up several notches, with production values to match. A set of monumental proportions, every inch covered in dayglo art, and a high BPM soundtrack backed the procession of wildly imaginative forms, or ‘wearables’ as he calls his clothes, on a melting pot of personalities. Friends and collaborators and Australian fashion icons were enlisted as models. Artist and designer Jenny Kee of Flamingo Park fame walked in reworked versions of her own creations.With the backing of one of Sydney’s major museums, the Powerhouse, Gogos has been able to polish his raw talent. Chosen for the Powerhouse’s designer residency program, he finds himself at the center of a cultural institution without having commercialized his first collection. “I can’t believe in less than a year, we’re in a museum,” he said, alluding to his circumventing of the traditional fashion path and his break, Trojan horse-like, into the industry. His message: in a year he is inside the castle. “We’ve overtaken,” he said.That horse has become a motif, appearing here on prints, bags, and resin coins the size of dinner plates made by local creative Anna Pogossova. In a lineup of inventive silhouettes, including petal-like peplums framing hips, panniers in fabric felted from scratch, virago sleeves, elaborate millinery, and one confection that served as a wearable vase for live and faux flowers, each creation outdid the next. Though there’s a craft feel, jaw-dropping amounts of work and detail go into each piece. One patchworked hat alone has 1.8 million stitches in it, taking weeks to sew. “We went through 85 needles in one day,” Gogos said.The layers here are dizzying, and to achieve them he racked up 60 collaborators, among them the indigenous art center Pormpuraaw. It’s entirely intentional on Gogos’s part. “I do want people to start being a bit more critically engaged in what’s existing around us. I don’t want them to look at a piece straightaway and go, ‘I absolutely understand that piece of art.’”It’s part of an agitation for a renewal of Australian creativity, one based on communal creation, not competition, and questioning ideas around authorship in the pursuit of making something original.
Inviting established labels like Albus Lumen or Youkhana to take part in this collection, he sees himself as the person who unpicks existing ideas, rethreading them into his brand to unleash a new feeling. In the Iliad, a gargantuan horse was offered to bypass the gatekeepers. Here the subterfuge is unapologetic, a dazzling phantasmagoria forged through connection. To the whoops and cheers of showgoers enjoying the spectacle, he’s rushed the walls and getting comfortable.
13 May 2022