A Melbourne designer who started hand-sewing dresses during Covid-19 lockdowns has won Australia’s National Designer award, the most established prize in Australian fashion. “I’m not exaggerating when I say I really was not expecting this tonight,” Amy Lawrence said of her win.
Lawrence started creating highly detailed, labour-intensive dresses from home after completing her bachelor of fashion design at RMIT in 2020. In 2022 she began selling her creations. At the time she told Fashion Journal: “I’m not too sure if I consider what I’m doing as a commercially viable label at this point.” A year later she officially founded her label. “But really, I’ve been making non-stop for the last 10 years,” she said. “This feels like the culmination of a lot of hard work.”
Lawrence still sews and hand-finishes every piece in her Melbourne home studio, drafting patterns on the living room table and sewing dresses in the front room. Each garment is made to order, with customers waiting approximately six weeks for their purchase to arrive. “There’s something lovely about someone placing an order and me making a dress just for them,” she said.
Using mostly undyed silks, all of Lawrence’s designs feature seams sewn with an embroidery technique called a fagoting stitch, which creates a small, decorative gap between each piece of fabric in a garment. She taught herself this stitch style by reading early 20th century home dressmaking manuals.
Caroline Ralphsmith, the chief executive of Melbourne fashion festival and co-judge of the award, praised Lawrence’s ultra-slow approach to fashion. She said judges had some concern about the designer’s ability to commercialise her work, “but that paled in comparison to everything else”.
“She is so extraordinary in terms of the craft she brings to her work,” Ralphsmith said. “The handiwork is just mind-blowing … and they look amazing on.”
Part of Melbourne fashion festival, the National Design award is open to emerging designers within the first five years of their business. Winners receive a business development package, including a cash prize of $20,000. Lawrence said her prize money would probably go towards working with a local factory to create small production runs of her designs, which she hopes to sell wholesale.
The Melbourne designer Saskia Baur-Schmid of Hyph-n, a label focused on zero-waste pattern cutting which manufactures in Ballarat, received an honourable mention for sustainability, with a cash prize of $10,000.
Both 2024’s and 2023’s design award winners – the canvas bag brand Haulier and the sweater brand Best Jumpers – have a highly commercial approach to fashion. Ralphsmith said the choice to award a designer whose work is more artful than marketable was not “entirely an accident”. This year the judging criteria was more heavily weighted towards innovation and creativity, she said.
Lawrence is the first designer in 29 years to receive her award in public. Previously, the award ceremony was an industry-only event. For 2025 Melbourne fashion festival hosted a consumer-facing runway show featuring the award’s 10 finalists, in front of a sell-out crowd of 1,500 on Tuesday night.
In addition to working on her own label, Lawrence spent close to five years working first as an intern then later as a production coordinator for Maticevski. That label’s designer, Toni Maticevski, won the National Designer award (then called the New Designer award), in 2002. “That is beautiful, isn’t it?” Ralphsmith said of this connection. “They’re both beautiful makers.”
