Stitching modern Australia: a conversation with a textile designer

In a sunlit studio in Melbourne's inner north, surrounded by bolts of hand-dyed linen and baskets of naturally coloured yarn, fashion designer Elke Maynard begins the interview with a confession. "I never set out to make clothing," she laughs, smoothing a piece of indigo-dyed cotton between her fingers. "I started weaving because I wanted something my grandmother couldn't buy in a shop."

For nearly a decade, Maynard has quietly built a reputation as one of Australia's most thoughtful practitioners of cloth-first design. Her work sits at the meeting point of garment construction and fine art, blending hand-stitched embroidery with constructed silhouettes that move comfortably between gallery walls and the studios of clients who crave garments with a backstory.

The studio she shares with two collaborators feels more like a living room than a workshop. A loom used for sampling warp threads hums softly in the corner, and visitors are often greeted with tea before business is discussed.

Maynard's practice sits within a broader conversation about what Australian fashion can become when makers prioritise materials, time, and place over speed. Her studio offers a glimpse of that future, stitched one garment at a time.

Roots in regional weaving

Maynard grew up in a small town in regional Victoria, where her grandmother kept a wooden loom on the back verandah. Weekend visits meant long hours spent watching indigo dye baths bubble and skeins of wool dry in the sun, and those afternoons seeded a fascination with fibre that has shaped everything since.

Formal training later took her to a textile course in Melbourne, where she became absorbed in the way surface and structure could behave like architecture. Pattern-making felt less like maths and more like storytelling, and she approached every new garment as a small biography.

Family heritage remains a quiet undercurrent in the practice. Many pieces feature motifs drawn from her grandmother's embroidery samplers, reinterpreted through contemporary draping techniques that feel current rather than nostalgic.

Sourcing fibres close to home

Sustainability is woven into every stage of the work, though Maynard resists the language of trend cycles. Most of her wool comes from growers across the New England tablelands and the Western District, favouring fleece from small regenerative farms that publish their grazing data.

She also works with remnants rescued from Melbourne's garment district mills, where offcuts from local manufacturers would otherwise be landfilled. The bolts are small and irregular, which forces the design process to adapt. "Constraint is a kind of collaborator," she explains. "If the fabric tells me there are only two metres, I have to listen."

Dye work happens in the studio using botanicals sourced from urban foragers and a few trusted suppliers. Native plants such as wattle and eucalyptus feature prominently, producing soft sandstones and gentle greens that complement the studio's muted palette.

The slow process of making

Ask about her design process and Maynard steers the conversation toward slowness. Sketches happen in pencil on paper, often in cafes in Fitzroy and Carlton, before ideas move to the cutting table. There, calico mock-ups are stitched by hand before any final fabric is touched.

Embroidered details can take weeks. A single jacket might carry hundreds of French knots or chain stitches, applied in long meditative sessions that Maynard describes as her closest daily ritual. The work rewards patience, and clients typically wait several months between commission and delivery.

She maintains a small team of makers, each with specialisations ranging from hand-finishing to loom weaving. The studio also welcomes a handful of interns each season, many of them recent graduates from institutions such as RMIT and the Whitehouse Institute of Design.

Honouring Country through cloth

A recurring theme is the way Indigenous textile traditions continue to shape Maynard's understanding of Australian cloth. She speaks openly about acknowledging Country before each studio session, and about the responsibility she feels as a non-Indigenous maker working with materials drawn from this landscape.

The designer has developed long relationships with several First Nations artists, and credits them with deepening her approach to natural dye and stitch. Recent collections have featured collaborative panels developed with fibre artists from Arnhem Land and the APY Lands, with shared proceeds flowing back to those artists and their communities.

These collaborations have become a defining feature of recent work, and they inform the growing humility Maynard brings to her own practice. "The land teaches me how to use what grows here," she says. "I try to listen more than I speak."

Teaching, workshops and the next generation

Maynard's reach extends well beyond the runway. Twice a year she runs intensive workshops through a shared space in Collingwood, teaching small groups the basics of hand embroidery, natural dye, and simple pattern-making. The sessions fill quickly, attracting hobbyists, emerging designers, and curious professionals from other fields.

She is also a regular speaker at creative industry gatherings, from independent maker markets like Finders Keepers to student-led events at university design schools. Mentoring emerging makers has become central to how she defines success, and she is open about her belief that a healthier Australian fashion sector depends on collaboration rather than competition.

The studio currently incubates two young designers developing their own small labels under Maynard's guidance. Both have been given space to use the equipment, photograph garments on location around Sydney Harbour, and learn the less glamorous sides of running a creative business.

Looking toward Sydney Fashion Week and beyond

With Australian Fashion Week approaching in Sydney, Maynard is preparing a small presentation that pairs finished garments with raw textile studies. The aim is to give audiences a window into the unseen layers of fabric, stitch and dye that shape each piece, and to push back against the trend toward disposable collections.

"My hope," she says, "is that people walk away remembering the hands that made the work." She envisions a future in which Australian fashion leans further into regional fibre economies, fewer seasons, and longer relationships between makers and wearers.

When asked what comes next, she points toward a basket of unfinished embroidery destined for an evening coat. "Always another stitch," she says.

Smart and Becker Creative regularly opens its doors to designers, makers and curious visitors who want to see cloth being made at its most elemental. Book a place at the next textile workshop, drop in for an open studio afternoon, or reach out to discuss a private commission. The studio welcomes everyone who believes that well-made cloth still has something to teach us.