Fashion

The latest runway show by Australian designer Alix Higgins stirred accusations of cultural appropriation – and debate over the line between tribute and exploitation in the industry. By Lucianne Tonti.

Alix Higgins’s artistic license in Fashion Week

Credit: New Moon.

The show notes left on each seat at Alix Higgins’s Australian Fashion Week runway in Sydney’s Carriageworks this month read: “Thank you to Ann Shoebridge for the wonderful crowns in silk, they make me
feel like I am 10 years old, which was sort of the point.”

The crowns in question were colourful fabric headbands some of the models wore across their foreheads, with several feather-shaped spikes sticking up into the air. They were the creation of Shoebridge, a local Sydney milliner and friend of Higgins’s – who told Harper’s Bazaar Australia that Peter Pan was one of his references.

Along with white and red face paint worn by nine of the 39 models, the crowns in Higgins’s Resort 26 collection drew the ire of the online platform Missing Perspectives:

“Where is the line of cultural appropriation?... the styling being very reminiscent of Native American culture. The headpieces look awfully similar to war bonnets, the eye makeup looking like Native body painting.”

Given that fashion is self-referential and trend-based, and the business model of increasingly popular fast fashion is built on derivative designs, reckonings over exploitation and cultural appropriation in the industry are inevitable.

Cultural appropriation signals a dissonance between the way cultural products are valued and the way people from those cultures are valued, says Shameem Black, an associate professor in the School of Culture, History & Language at the Australian National University. “[It] tends to emerge when people from the culture in question have experienced discrimination, racism, oppression or even violence,” she says.

Not everyone considers the term “cultural appropriation” helpful. A typical defence for questionable usage is to say it is a sign of appreciation, and Minh-Ha T. Pham, a professor of media studies at the Pratt Institute in New York, says this can obscure the inequality underlying the relationship between an appropriator and an exploited culture. In a 2017 article published by Michigan State University Press, she advocated for the term “racial plagiarism” instead.

“In the fashion context, racial plagiarism occurs when a designer copies racial and indigenous styles, forms, practices, and knowledges without permission and without giving adequate (or any) attribution to the source model and community,” Pham wrote.

Designer Liandra Gaykamangu, a Yolŋu woman from north-east Arnhem Land, says racial plagiarism is a powerful description, because “it reframes the issue as one of exploitation and erasure, rather than harmless borrowing”. Naming the problem isn’t enough, however, unless it leads to “deeper engagement, listening and action”.

Though Missing Perspectives found a sympathetic audience among its followers, the suggestion that Higgins had culturally appropriated from Native Americans was largely ignored. Except for Fashion Journal, no other media raised it. The collection received glowing reviews, with former Vogue India editor Megha Kapoor describing it as one of the most relevant collections of this season.

“I can only speak from my perspective, but I was immediately taken back to imagery from the book Where the Wild Things Are,” she says. Fashion industry insiders would have recognised the make-up as a nod to Nicolas Ghesquière’s Autumn/Winter 2007 Balenciaga show, she adds.

Given the convoluted origin of certain motifs, says Kapoor, accusations of cultural appropriation should be made with caution.

“Have First Nation American communities been consulted? Do they share these concerns?” asks Kapoor. “It’s a serious slander and can often be bandied around too carelessly, which in the end undermines the ongoing and very real instances of appropriation and discrimination.”

When asked by The Saturday Paper, Missing Perspectives declined to comment on whether any Native American people had been consulted about its assessment of the show.

It’s not hard to find egregious examples of racial plagiarism in the industry – three arose in 2017. Marc Jacobs sent white models wearing coloured dreadlocks down the runway at New York Fashion Week. The Victoria’s Secret show “Nomadic Adventures” included several looks derived from Native American dress, including a white feather war bonnet. French luxury house Chanel’s Spring/Summer accessories collection included a boomerang labelled with its logo and priced at almost $2000.

Higgins’s critics aren’t equating his show with these events – no one is suggesting his clothing designs were appropriated. However, the indirect references to Native American culture arose from stories laden with racist tropes, says Harriette Richards, a senior lecturer in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University.

“He’s referenced Peter Pan and folkloric traditions, which have nostalgic representations of this fantasy history – or this fantasy of Native American culture,” she says.

“These stories were of their time but depict what we see in 2025 as very racist stereotypes. Since the references [in the Higgins show] come through those stories, if we compare it to other more blatant examples, that’s where I think the challenge to define it comes in.”

Higgins declined to comment on the cultural appropriation allegations but shared a list of references for The Needle collection: “I am always inspired by Angela Carter’s fairytales,” he wrote. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon and Titania. This season more specifically Baron Adolph de Meyer’s work, Nijinsky as the Faun… Kids’ costumes of knights, kings, queens, fairies, jesters and kids’ face paint – stars, swords, shields, masks and crowns. Florence Welch.”

The 31-year-old Sydney-based designer, who was presenting at AFW for the fourth time, draws partly on his childhood memories of play: one of the prints in this collection is a replica of his grandmother’s rug. As his list shows, he also has a fascination with folklore and fantasy. When I interviewed him for this paper in 2023, we discussed witches and the medieval fiefdom in Ottessa Moshfegh’s book Lapvona. William Blake’s work was an inspiration; he incorporates his own poetry into digital prints. This season some of them read: holy fool, God, fairytale.

As a white queer person whose surname has Gaelic origins, Higgins draws on his own lineage. In an interview with Vogue Australia he also cites the British folk horror film The Wicker Man. It’s set on a fictional Scottish Island called Summerisle and is about the disappearance of a teenage girl in a pagan community that practises rituals such as maypole dancing. One look on the runway this year is an aqua mesh singlet dress covered in colourful ribbons and accessorised with a white crown.

With this reference, his show also highlights a loss: how the connection to the natural world has largely been erased in Western Anglo culture. The scientific revolution that ended in the 1700s recontextualised widespread pagan traditions and led subsequent generations to abandon seasonal celebrations based around the solstices and the equinox, such as May Day and other harvest rituals that had been observed in Europe for centuries. A similar loss is apparent in the failure of Australia’s colonisers to learn from the Indigenous connection to Country.

“Folklore is passed down through oral traditions and the replication of rituals,” says Richards. “These are British or Celtic historical stories, but when they include outdated references that’s where the problem comes in.”

As literacy about inequality, racism and exploitation grows, debates over how to protect against cultural appropriation and racial plagiarism are welcome, especially in Australia, as home to the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth.

“Indigenous Australia is very complex and from the desert to the sea there are varying ways our culture is represented that is specific to a location, culture and people,” Liandra Gaykamangu says. “Real change in the industry means more than just featuring Indigenous culture – it means creating systems that protect, credit and empower Indigenous creators.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Something borrowed".

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