Alix Higgins set out to break a habit of organizing collections under one theme. “I wanted to shake that off a little bit and go back to this way of working from before, which is sort of intuitive and emotional,” he said. A words person—jumbles of them have been a scattered throughout his collections—Higgins came across the phrase “goodbye cowboy” reading Honour Levy’s My First Book. “It’s this very meaningful thing of yearning, but also it’s kind of meaningless and silly,” he noted.
Leaning into ambiguity, he applied the expression in a cyan blue sans serif to a gray v-neck knit that was layered over a red ruffled collar and paired with printed board shorts, surfer-style. It also appeared on a t-shirt in clip-art font, over a fluted silk chiffon skirt cut on the bias with a hat fit for a romantic drifter. Rash-shirts and tanks were a through line to his early days of working in gradient stretch fabric, but in bold athletic primaries. A business shirt and tie were paired with oversized cotton shorts. Levy’s book contains ideas about existing in the internet age and identities, real and projected. Higgins said he wanted to take tropes and collapse them all into one, so these disparate elements, and dress codes, were clashed and mixed.
In addition to words, he zeroed in on symbols. Stars on boxy t-shirts and trailing skirts coud be astrological, patriotic, or merely decorative. “I wanted to keep some things for the people who come to the shop and they look up close and there are these small fragments of text, but it’s maybe not so much for everyone.” That intimacy with the garments has been something that his followers connect with, even more so now that he has his own store in Sydney’s Chinatown.
Higgins describes himself as pragmatic, and commercially-minded and so he has added black—a color he’s not all that comfortable with—at the behest of clients. This collection gives his fans more of what they know with a sprinkling of newness. The print at first glance could be the underside of a brewing storm cloud, or smoke, or the rose that it actually is. The most important thing for Higgins is that there’s always room to decide for yourself.
