Have you ever been to a fashion show? From our experience they roughly break down into two basic models (a) another reason to get drunk (b) a commercial showcase of bland wear. Well a group of graduating students from Colour Cosmetica are saying shit to these stayed and stale models, and have set about the task of creating a night of resplendent decadence where fashion is the art and Foie Gras, caviar and Veuve Clicquot the norm. Well, maybe that’s not all in the budget for the wildly ambitious foursome; Kristina Persichini, Suzi Nemeth, Monica Tietjens and Klara van Pelt and their event Bare Canvas at Adelaide Town Hall on June 27th. Sick of the same-old same-old, the girls have decided that they’re gonna throw some sort of apocalyptic party of tsarist-extravagance, centred around the idea (as we see it) that Adelaide’s not as lame as you think. We caught up with them in the depths of their scheming to steal a few ideas on how they plan to do it…

What is Bare Canvas?
The idea of Bare Canvas is to take a mainstream garment, a plain old garment and make it into something else, much more intricate and beautiful, a sort of customising process.

What sort of hours are you putting in to make the event happen?
Obviously we’ve got to be business-minded half the time and creative-minded half the time and we’re finding it difficult to determine how much time to put into both. We’re finding sometimes that we’ve forgotten to do some of the creative stuff because we’ve been focusing on the organisation of the event. We’re all putting in four days a week at Colour Cosmetica but it doesn’t stop when you go to bed even. It’s like a full time job and then we’ve all got part-time jobs to pay the bills.

What’s involved with having it at the Town Hall? What sort of hoops did you have to jump through?
Lots. We had to experience a change in venue. We were originally going to have it at the Wine Centre but due to costs we had to shift ideas on what we wanted. We looked at alternatives like the Queens Theatre as well. So now we’re at the Town Hall and basically trying to combine different areas physically when you’re at the Town Hall, things like lighting, is quite a challenge in meeting their requirements. We were relying quite a lot on sponsorships, like Novatech for stuff like lighting but obviously they can’t give it all to us for free, so we’ve got costs to cover on almost everything. That’s been our major battle because we’re totally self-funded. It’s not going to be a for-profit event. It’s very much going to have to pay for itself. We hope it’s going to pay for itself...

So what can people expect?
We want it to be a total experience, so it’s not just a fashion parade. We’re putting out all our story boards, so that people can see where the creations have come from and get inside our heads. There’s going to be food and drink, it’s a completely catered for event because we want people to make a night out of it. We’re trying to inspire people, make them think about fashion perhaps a bit differently.

Tickets to the Bare Canvas event at Town Hall are $80 and includes catering (aka booze and hors d’oeuvres) We highly recommend you get all dolled up and come get frisky with a bunch of, what we can only assume, will be good looking people.