Realising that the conventional fashion system does not need to be adhered so strictly, and branching from the disciple of what has been best known as ‘pret-a-porter’, FFixxed proposes a transmogrified landscape that not encompasses the utility of clothes, but the notion of function and purpose of other possible uses that gives another dimension to fabric and the design of our living space.

Having met each other in Berlin, practicing visual artist Kain Picken and Fiona Lau who studied the BA program of Fashion Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne (RMIT) co-joined to establish their umbrella practice known as ‘FFixxed’ in 2008. Engaged with an wholly artistic sensibility and the production of clothes, both Fiona and Kain have pushed to banish the simplistic approach of a rotating fashion collection. Rather, the 1960’s period of ‘Return to the Land’ and the adaptation of existing functions such as scarves, a shopping bag, the visual and visceral response to sewing fabrics has stemmed FFixxed’s working methodology.

Citing like-minded designers including Austrian partnership Wendy & Jim, Slow and Steady Wins The Race from New York and the well-renown Paris Berlin collaboration between Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag of BLESS it bares truth that the constant aim is not to reinvent the wheel and neither to create with a means to an end. FFixxed as an Australian collaborative duo are decidedly conscious to challenge the existing application of design, primarily and evidently through fashion.

Now mobile established in the Chinese city of Shenzhen north of Hong Kong, the urban industrialised metropolis will also be keen to test all facets of FFixxed’s contemporary practice. Cultures In Between speaks to both Kain and Fiona to ask them their working process and discover the sense of a Far East base: