Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 13 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Fashion design is an art like any other … but serious critique is scarce, as is space to publish it.
The rise of social media has turned up the volume of talk about fashion, but is it reduced too often to ‘I like it’ (or the opposite)? What are the benefits of slowing down the discussion, to make considered assessments and arguments – in writing – rather than just sharing images with a thumbs-up or down?
With Janice Breen Burns (Voxfrock), Paris-based journalist Dana Thomas (Harper’s Bazaar, Paris), host Danielle Whitfield (NGV) and Briony Wright (i-D).
Presented in partnership with Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program’s Fashion Writing Series 2015.
Featuring
Dana Thomas
Dana Thomas is the author of the new double-biography Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, both published by The Penguin Press. She is a contributing editor for T: The New York Times Style magazine as well as a regular contributor to Architectural Digest. She began her career writing for the Style section of the Washington Post in Washington, D.C. and from 1995 to 2011, she served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris.
She has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, WSJ, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest and Elle Decor, and was the European editor of Condé Nast Portfolio.
Thomas is a member of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris and the Overseas Press Club. She taught journalism at The American University of Paris from 1996 to 1999. In 1987, she received the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation Scholarship and the Ellis Haller Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism. She lives in Paris.
Janice Breen Burns
Veteran journalist Janice Breen Burns is editor of Voxfrock, the fashion and pop culture blogzine she founded in 2013. For 19 years she was a renowned columnist, features writer, news reporter and fashion editor for Melbourne’s Age newspaper as it evolved from print to multi-platform news source.
In the 1980s, Janice was features writer and fashion editor for The Sun (now the Herald Sun) and women’s editor of the Geelong Advertiser.
For 30 years, she has judged Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival ‘fashions on the field’ series as well as various fashion and design industry and student competitions.
For her deep industry knowledge and experience, she is frequently invited to comment for print, online, radio and television broadcasts on fashion related news. Janice is known to write and comment on fashion in a realistic way.
She was a founding member of the Victorian Government’s committee to address the impact of media on body image.
In 2011, Janice was inducted into the Stonnington Fashion Hall of Fame and in 2013 appointed to the board of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, a not-for-profit public event that attracts more than 350 thousand participants every year.
Janice is listed from the inaugural issue of Who’s Who of Australian Women and holds a Bachelor of Arts and Graduate Certificate from the University of Melbourne. She lives in Melbourne and is happily married with three children.
Danielle Whitfield
Danielle Whitfield is a writer and curator in the Fashion and Textiles Department at the National Gallery of Victoria. She has also published widely on the history of Australian fashion and contemporary design, including catalogue essays, scholarly articles (Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion) and book chapters (Australian Fashion Unstitched: The Last 60 Years), and was a contributing arts and fashion writer for Fashion Trend magazine.
Since 2001, when she joined the NGV, she has curated numerous exhibitions including Katie Pye; Clothes for Modern Lovers (2007), The Cecily and Colin Rigg Award 2003 (Textiles) and 2007 (Jewellery) with her colleagues, Black in Fashion: Mourning to Night (2008) and ManStyle (2011) and most recently, Fashion Detective (2014).