Within the fashion program at the School of Design, we always encourage students to consider the effects of fashion, its cultural application and cycle of beginnings.
This includes interrogating fashion’s origins and broadening the scope of what it means to be a designer and what it means for a designer to influence the way society likes to adorn itself.
One of the most intriguing producers of fashion is Sydney-based comic artist Louise Graber, whose comics have, for the last nine years, gradually influenced Sydney’s gothic subculture.
Graber cultivated her distinct illustrative style during her childhood where, while watching television, she began copying the ‘moving stained glass images.’ Later, in school, she drew animation-inspired cartoons of her friends in the margins of her books.
She continued her passion at art college where the genre was often criticised. While working for Countdown magazine in the 1980s, Graber became intrigued by pop and rock stars and the behaviour of fans. She received endless requests to draw a cartoon version of idols like Tom Cruise, Spandau Ballet or Madonna.
It is in this era of her life that she became enormously popular as a comic artist. In fact Countdown and its rival Smash Hits often argued for her employment. During her five-year stint at Countdown she refined her meticulous attention to the signifiers of fashion and to producing characters that have a chaotically activist, sub-cultural sense of themselves.
Throughout this time too, Graber began moving toward a physical style for herself. Half Japanese, with wild, black hair and large brown eyes, Graber favoured the gothic fashion of black material, fluorescent nails and crosses and chains. She frequented Sydney’s Club 77 and Newtown gothic underground clubs and established a reputation as a style social influencer, a reputation that continues today.
In 1997 Graber created a set of commix (so spelled for their x-rating category) called B.L.A.c.K, or Black Light Angels. It follows a group of musicians touring Australia with a vampire as the lead, a dingo and Tasmanian devil as band members.
The comics are only sold at comic conventions and sub-cultural manga and animation events like the Artists Alley at the Supanova Popular Culture Expo. Featured are grunge-style headpieces, textured trenchcoats and impeccable looking Cossack uniforms. Each character is deliberately androgynous, highly sexualised and perfectly styled.
Graber spends about two to three hours on a drawing, focusing on the feeling of the frame and paying the most priority to the details of the outfits. The drawings themselves are like fashion editorials and have been treated as such by Sydney’s gothic scene.
Goths frequently write to Graber and profess their love for a character, or ask her questions on the origins of her fashion ideas. Indeed, the intricate cloth patterns she interpolates between illustrations, the chain details and woollen sweaters, brings to mind a cross between Australian grunge, slick eighties pop fashion and Blade-Runner gothic style.
The characters themselves, vampires, mortals, fairies and hybrid animals, are comparable to the fantastic and fictitious lives of pop stars and epitomise the elite, immortal allure of gothic fantasy.Graber produced eleven issues of the Black Light Angels series. She continues to involve herself in influencing fashion’s underground both by wearing and overseeing the graphic branding of Sydney’s Serpentine fashion store in Enmore.
Her website depicts a few of her illustrations but it is her Black Light series which has recently and perhaps unwittingly emerged as Sydney’s pivotal guide to gothic street fashion.The above piece is part of a larger research project titled ‘Australian Gothic. Black Light Angels, Fashion and Subterranean Style’, which will be published in the Spring issue of the International Journal of Comic Art.