The Distance Between Bodies: Jordan Gogos and the Art of Unfastening Fashion at AFW 2026.

There was a point midway through Jordan Gogos’s Australian Fashion Week 2026 presentation when the garments stopped reading as garments altogether.

Models, orbiting slowly around a field of stark white Trojan horses, began fastening themselves to one another through buttons and Velcro systems. Sleeves became connective tissue. Jackets folded into temporary shelters. Bodies merged, separated, then recomposed themselves again. What had initially resembled a runway dissolved into something far stranger and far more affecting - a living experiment in attachment, improvisation and transformation.

By the end, the lingering question was not whether Gogos had staged one of the strongest presentations of the week. It was whether what unfolded inside UNSW Galleries had even belonged to the traditional language of fashion at all.

In a schedule increasingly dominated by polished restraint and algorithmically legible luxury, Gogos’s sixth consecutive AFW runway felt almost defiantly ungovernable. Not chaotic - his work has become far too formally assured for that - but emotionally and intellectually uncontained. While much contemporary fashion continues chasing refinement, Gogos remained interested in volatility: how clothing mutates through instinct, how objects carry memory, how tiny interventions can reorganise the emotional architecture of the body.

The collection revolved around an object so ordinary it is almost invisible: the button.

Before the runway commenced, Gogos’s voice reverberated through the gallery with a deceptively simple question: “What actually is a button?” Initially it landed with a kind of absurdist humour, almost too elementary to warrant contemplation. Yet as the collection unfolded, the provocation revealed itself as something far more precise. Here, the button was stripped of its utilitarian banality and reconsidered as an instrument of transformation - a minute architectural gesture capable of recalibrating silhouette, posture, identity and even social signalling through the smallest motion of the hand.

Buttoned incorrectly on purpose.

One misplaced fastening transformed flat textile planes into sculptural volume. A blazer shifted from conservative tailoring into something swollen and architectural. Garments folded, distorted and reconstituted themselves according to the wearer’s chosen points of connection. Within Gogos’s framework, the button ceased to function as a device of closure or order; instead, it became an agent of instability - a small but deliberate interruption capable of unsettling the assumed finality of form.

The recurring Trojan horse motif sharpened this idea further. Throughout the show, white horses stood like silent monuments among the models, reinforcing Gogos’s longstanding fascination with concealed transformation. The Trojan horse was never dangerous because it appeared threatening. It was dangerous precisely because it appeared harmless. Gogos recognised the same dormant potential inside domestic objects - buttons, tea towels, umbrellas, scraps of fabric - things dismissed as ordinary until they reorganised the space around them entirely.

And few designers working in Australia currently understood material resurrection as intuitively as Gogos did.

A discarded beach umbrella discovered beside a rubbish bin in Sifnos reappeared as an extraordinary sculptural dress. Greek handkerchiefs, floor mats and tea towels became richly textured eveningwear. His mother’s phone book was dismantled and reassembled into outerwear that carried with it the emotional sediment of family memory, transforming an otherwise ordinary domestic archive into something intimate, worn, and unexpectedly archival in its own right. These gestures transcended the increasingly exhausted language of “sustainability” that fashion so often deployed performatively. Gogos was not simply recycling materials; he was preserving their previous lives.

Everything on the runway appeared haunted by memory.

This emotional permeability remained one of Gogos’s greatest strengths as a designer. Childhood Greek school notes reading “Με λένε Ιορδάνη” (“My name is Jordan”) appeared transcribed into knitwear. Teddy bears emerged woven into sleeves. Hundreds of tactile beads recalled the wired toys found in paediatric waiting rooms. A fortune-cookie phrase discovered at a sushi restaurant in Greece - “Make decisions from the heart and use your head to make it work out” - appeared transformed into wearable philosophy.

In the hands of another designer, these gestures may well have collapsed into affectation, i.e. cleverness masquerading as intimacy, or irony deployed as a protective layer against emotional exposure. Gogos resisted that instinct entirely. He presented them with an almost startling earnestness, allowing sentiment, humour and vulnerability to exist without dilution or apology.

It was precisely this refusal to retreat into cynicism that gave the collection its peculiar emotional density.

Australian fashion has long existed within an aesthetic culture shaped by restraint, one where minimalism, functionality and understatement frequently operate less as conscious stylistic positions than as inherited behavioural codes. Excess is often treated with suspicion; theatricality softened before it can become sincerity. Gogos, however, appeared uninterested in negotiating with that inheritance. Gogos continued resisting that lineage entirely. His work embraced excess, sentimentality, theatricality and emotional exposure without apology. Raw seams remained visible. Construction methods were foregrounded rather than hidden. Industrial sewing machinery became part of the conceptual narrative rather than something concealed behind luxury polish.

Importantly, however, the collection no longer carried the nervous energy of an “emerging designer” attempting to prove originality. That chapter appeared definitively closed. What made this presentation so compelling was the sense that Gogos had finally stopped negotiating with external expectation altogether.

The shift was especially visible in the tailoring.

This season’s recurring blazer silhouette grounded the collection with surprising emotional clarity. Gogos spoke backstage about wanting garments that could provide “shelter” and solace, and the blazers reflected exactly that tension between structure and comfort. Some appeared fitted and precise; others expanded outward into cocoon-like coats. Traditional tailoring codes fractured under the pressure of Velcro systems, layered textiles and unexpected fastening placements. The garments retained wearability without surrendering experimentation.

That balance marked an important evolution in Gogos’s practice. Earlier collections sometimes overwhelmed through sheer conceptual intensity. Here, the ideas felt fully metabolised into the clothing itself.

The collaborative dimension of the presentation also remained central to its impact. Gogos continued treating fashion less as authorship than ecosystem. Artists, performers, curators and long-time collaborators circulated through the runway organically rather than ornamentally. Melbourne artist Troy Emery contributed sculptural surrealism. Kirsha Kaechele appeared in giant boots and witch-like silhouettes. Elaine George - the first First Nations model to appear on the cover of Vogue Australia in 1993 - closed the show in a painstakingly handcrafted rainbow look created with Nathaniel Youkhana, featuring a conical bra that reportedly required over 200 hours of labour.

George’s appearance carried particular resonance. Having returned to modelling in recent years while mentoring emerging Indigenous talent through BlakList, her presence transformed the finale into something intergenerational rather than merely nostalgic. Many of those same BlakList models also appeared throughout the show, reinforcing Gogos’s commitment to fashion as community-building rather than isolated image production.

What ultimately distinguished the presentation, however, was not its visual maximalism or even its craftsmanship - both exceptional - but its insistence on vulnerability in an industry increasingly addicted to control.

Fashion currently rewards polish, certainty and hyper-managed identities. Rather than constructing collections through rigid thematic logic, Gogos worked from intuition, allowing improvisation, emotional candour and instinctive tension to shape the final form. His garments openly revealed their processes, references and imperfections. They invited participation rather than passive consumption. Watching models fastening and unfastening themselves together backstage and on the runway, one sensed that Gogos was less interested in presenting finished objects than in staging transformation itself.

By the finale, the button no longer felt like a clever conceptual device. It had become the emotional thesis of the collection.

Small, domestic, almost forgettable - yet capable of reorganising an entire structure with one movement.

The Trojan horse, Jordan Gogos seemed to suggest, was never the horse.

It was the unnoticed mechanism hidden quietly inside it all along.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Iordanes Spyridon Gogos.