Writer

Dr Sally Gray’s research on art and fashion interfaces brings together postmodern historiography, queer theory and historical biography to bear on understanding of the materiality of objects. Gray has placed the making, wearing and aesthetics of clothing and adornment within specific urban subcultures of New York and Sydney. Her most recent work investigates aesthetic relationships between groups of creative practitioners and the global circulation of ideas of fashionability.

You might just wonder how Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin managed the feat of creating their globally marketable brand BAZMARK with just five films. An answer can be found by reading Friends, Fashion and Fabulousness: The Making of an Australian Style, by the cultural historian Sally Gray. In it she constructs a remarkable narrative of the processes by which a unique Australian exotic style was created in Sydney in the 1970s, the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Friends, Fashion and Fabulousness appears to be pink and slight and frivolous … But its weight is real and metaphoric - it has grace and gravitas. There is the scholarly seriousness, the rigour of the account itself, and Gray’s capacity to incorporate theory, for those who enjoy it, without deadening the text.