It’s a chilly Wednesday night in May, but the temperature inside Sydney’s Metro Theatre couldn’t be higher as a hush falls over the crowd.
Hundreds of impeccably dressed spectators – from aspiring designers to family members, artists to industry insiders – have packed the venue to watch a fashion show from Iranian-Australian designer Shiva Yousefpour’s brand Shiyo, and they’re expecting more than your average catwalk.
From a balcony overlooking the stage, Australian singer-songwriter Deena Lynch, or Jaguar Jonze as she is more commonly known, writhes and roars to mark the runway’s opening.
The smoky-eyed models then emerge, strutting down a narrow stage that is flanked by old TV sets before making their way through the crowd and slinking up the steps, clad in black leather, clouds of silver organza, distressed shirting and origami-like armour. It’s hard to know where to look with so much going on. Audience members crane their necks left, right, up and down so as not to miss a minute of the action.
“It felt unreal,” Yousefpour says of watching her collection Alchemy coming to life. A “post-apocalyptic” meditation on “survival, resilience and beauty after destruction”, the show amalgamated two previous collections that had been shown at Melbourne Fashion Festival and Australian Fashion Week in 2025.
Yousefpour is among six designers showing at Wings Independent Fashion Festival this year, which, since its 2025 debut, has expanded to a month-long event.
Founded by Korean-Australian designer Alvi Chung and creative strategist Dan Neeson, Wings is an alternative to Australian Fashion Week that spotlights emerging local talent.
“Alvi and Dan are the best, most beautiful souls I ever met,” Yousefpour says. “They made everything happen really smoothly – it was one of the easiest runways I’ve done.”
Design is in her blood. Yousefpour’s father was the first fashion designer in Iran to make suiting for women before switching to children’s clothing after the revolution.
“He’s very proud,” she says, lamenting the past six months marred by stress over the war in the Middle East (most of her family remain in Tehran).
Yousefpour arrived in Australia over a decade ago, studying at TAFE’s renowned Fashion Design Studio that gave Dion Lee and Nicky Zimmermann their start, among others.
She did work experience with pioneering Australian fashion designer Akira Isogawa (another TAFE alumnus) and Sydney brand Nicol & Ford, and has won the National Wool Museum’s Sustainable Fashion Prize.
Indeed, sustainability is central to Yousefpour’s work, which marries Japanese craftsmanship with reclaimed materials and upcycling techniques.
It was Isogawa who first taught her techniques such as no-waste pattern making.
On the back of last year’s success, Wings expanded this year with the support of the Metro Theatre’s residency program A.i.R and Metro Social, backed by the Australian government’s Live Music Australia program. It also called on student volunteers from the Fashion Institute and the National Fashion College and models from Not!ced Agency. Chung and Neeson partnered with cultural agency Arts-Matter too, photo agency Getty Images and the alcoholic beverage brand Jack Daniels.
Not!ced has further sponsored two designer grants that will be announced at the festival’s end.
Other designers on the roster are swimwear label Lanterna, by Carolina Lanterna; Melbourne brand BAAQIY by Baaqiy Ghazali; Brisbane’s Pigsuit, by Rhiannon Daly; Sydney label Réseau; and Chung’s label Speed.
Neeson says they prioritised female designers, but focused less on industry status and more on designers with a shared “willingness to push boundaries and create immersive experiences.”
In the experimental, interdisciplinary spirit of the festival – inspired by a 1997 performance by Vivienne Westwood and The Prodigy on MTV – this year it platformed a host of musical and artistic acts, including MUNGMUNG, POLTERGEIST 9000, AGONY, ARKETEK and Skye Gellmann.
Neeson says Wings’ goal is rebuilding Sydney’s cultural livelihood following the hit it took from lockout laws, while creating opportunities for emerging talent beyond “Fashion Week’s more corporate and commercial structures.”
“We wanted to build a next generation of culture that is safe, creative, supportive and sustainable enough to feed back into Sydney’s nighttime and cultural economies until those systems start running themselves again,” he says.
Like last year, this year’s festival created around 800 paid creative roles, with over 1000 involved across the season, says Neeson.
He’s buoyed by the sold-out response to the festival, attended by a group who may not traditionally attend fashion events.
“Our crowd is predominantly non-white, with a significant share drawn from Sydney’s Greater Western suburbs, and what we represent on the runway is the diasporic, mostly non-white future face of fashion that the mainstream is not prioritising.”
Yousefpour, who does fashion full-time alongside her side hustle as a DJ, says “we need more initiatives like Wings to support new designers.
“Especially the ones who are doing sustainable collections, and the ones who push boundaries or are thinking out of the box.”
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