Centre for Fashion

Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences director Rose Hiscock at the Recollect: Underwear exhibition at Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Source: News Corp Australia.

Glynis Traill-Nash, Centre for Fashion marks industry coming of age, The Australian, 11 July 2015

Rose Hiscock puts the impetus for the new Centre for Fashion down to a single word: confidence. It’s that confidence that has prompted her to amp things up at the Centre’s home, the recently branded Museum of Arts and Sciences.

The museum, which covers several locations including Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, where the Centre will be housed, has one of our largest fashion collections — everything from garments and prototypes, through to photography — so Hiscock felt it was time to make it a destination in its own right.

The timing for the Centre for Fashion is fortuitous, given the Australian Fashion Chamber, a representative body for designers, is in its early stages, driven byVogueAustralia editor Edwina McCann. And Australian Fashion Week recently held its 20th iteration. A sense of a coming of age surrounds the industry.

“It’s around confidence,” Hiscock tells Life. “It’s certainly around confidence for us — it’s us as a museum saying we’ve got this museum, we should be a player in this and should be standing up for this. I’ve never worked on a project where people have fallen behind it so well. In this event, we’ve had everyone saying ‘Yes, this is great’, from Edwina and the chamber through to individual designers, academics, through to organisations like Destination NSW. So there really is a strong sense that this is the right moment for us.”