Wings Independent Fashion Festival Returns to Sydney
Words by Lameah Nayeem
Image courtesy of Speed
Revolt, upheaval, the birth of something new. It’s been almost a year since duo Alvi Chung and Dan Neeson sent tremors across the Sydney fashion scene with WINGS, an independent alternative to Australian Fashion Week designed to spotlight emerging talent with a flair for the outré. In 2025, the pair debuted WINGS at the Plaza Hotel in a medley of chainmail, electric guitar, and diverse silhouettes. This year, they’re taking over Metro Social in a month-long residency, staging off-schedule runway presentations each Wednesday. The programme marks the latest iteration of their ongoing mission to foreground a fashion, art, and nightlife culture that feels distinctly, even stubbornly, Australian. As Neeson notes, “Every designer on this line-up could have a career in London or New York tomorrow. Instead they’re staying here, building here, fostering a scene that is uniquely Australian and internationally compelling.”
The independent runway was conceived largely in response to the structural shifts within Australian Fashion Week, namely its pivot towards more commercially viable design, which has left smaller, experimental labels on the fringe. In its place, Chung and Neeson present a counter-offer that privileges risk, subculture, and experimentation. This year’s lineup gathers a new vanguard poised to enter Sydney’s underground circuit, including Speed — Chung’s own label — A-D Atelier, Baaqiy, Lanterna, Pigsuit, Réseau, and Shiyo, alongside live performance and music.
First to present on May 6 will be Alvi Chung’s Speed. Last year, her Phantom Revolt collection traversed menswear and womenswear, disrupting formal dress codes through the interruption of street-style signatures. The emphasis was on rupture: a dismantling of pre-established codes propelled by a distinctly punk ethos. This year, Hypnosis turns inward, plunging into the subconscious. “Hypnosis began from a feeling that contemporary life has become a kind of everyday trance, where pressure is so constant it almost becomes invisible,” Chung tells A-M Journal. “I wanted to create a modern metropolitan fable where time softens rather than accelerates, and where tailoring, repetition and restraint become quiet forms of psychological power. The collection draws from cinematic art deco interiors, nocturnal city glamour, and surreal dream logic, imagining a world where the tick has disappeared and movement begins to drift somewhere more inward, seductive and unresolved.” As with earlier collections — including her 2024 Resort offering Electric Suns — one can expect experimental silhouettes and sculptural draping threaded with subcultural references.
Her final look promises to be a technical and design feat. In collaboration with SteamPOP, Chung describes using mathematical principles in her construction: “Made from joining many regular heptagons (seven-sided polygons), this piece can never be regular, edge-to-edge tessellation. It can never be flat.” Going off the technical prowess we’ve previously seen from Chung, including her 2024 resort collection Electric Suns, it promises to be a graduation into more architectural territory.
Also on the schedule, Baaqiy operates with a similarly insurgent impulse. Their previous looks read as optical illusions, arriving in a coalescence of spliced prints, volatile colour combinations and silhouettes refusing to sit still on the body. Baaqiy Ghazali, the designer behind Baaqiy, says, “The emerging designer community is what’s keeping the industry going. We band together, organise our own shows and pop-ups outside the official calendar. This is my introduction to the Sydney audience, and I’m showing up ready.”
Réseau, by contrast, leans into a darker register, though no less theatrical. Rooted in both romantic and gothic registers, the label mobilises seduction as aesthetic. Corsetry appears as a central motif. Fabrics pierced with grommets and decorated in feathers cling and constrict. For Réseau, WINGS fills a definitive gap in Sydney’s fashion scene: “What we need now are spaces that let work stay authentic, expressive and unapologetic, without the pressure of fitting into a commercial mould. That kind of space is rare.”
Image courtesy Réseau
Pigsuit, who will be closing out the month, commands attention through its sleek ferality. Mongolian furs and diamante-encrusted fabrics command attention, while piercing prints and collide with sheer textures, spike-up hair and arresting eyeliner. Māori designer Rhiannon Daly at the helm of Pigsuit highlights the necessity of bridging gaps for underground designers: “There is a meaningful difference between exposure and opportunity. The fashion industry gives emerging designers plenty of the first and almost none of the second. PIGSUIT is an underground label with a strong point of view, a niche creative direction and real constraints. I need collaborators who are opening doors, not guarding them.”
As Sydney kicks into gear for its month of fashion, Chung and Neeson's WINGS stands as a necessary pulse point. As Neeson states, “Sydney’s nightlife is finally showing signs of life again, and if WINGS can help that rebuild, it feels something close to a moral duty. One I couldn’t be happier to oblige.”