Feature... The Pop Fashion World Of Frida Las Vegas
Motel Frida Las Vegas Glamour Kaftan Photographer: Charles Grant.
The unmistakable textiles of Frida Las Vegas feature in the upcoming exhibition New Exuberance Contemporary Australian Textile Design: Art Design Fashion, which presents the work of more than 20 textile creatives.
Words by Dr Sally Gray
Sally is a writer, curator, artist, concept developer, creative producer, advocate and teacher.
Adelaide-born Sydney artist and designer Stavroula Adameitis, aka Frida Las Vegas, refuses to be snobbish about notions of "good and bad taste", popular culture or visual excess. Her work actively embraces the popular, commercial imagery, which delighted her when growing up in suburban Adelaide in the 1980s and 1990s. She sees herself as a pop artist in the vein of Jeff Koons.
“Pop art is celebrating the mundane, the everyday," she says. Refusing “to see Australia as a cultural backwater”, she quotes and celebrates the visual icons of ordinary suburban life, inflected by American consumption patterns, especially those promulgated through television:
“I draw what I see, the Australia of bargain bins, op shops and The Bold and the Beautiful on television, Kerri- Anne and the Logies red carpet, the cheesy parts of middle Australian culture. This is not a nightmarish local landscape. We shouldn’t be cringing about popular Australian taste. What we should be crying about is the way Australia was founded.”
Frida Las Vegas is both the brand of Stavroula’s fashion, art and graphics output and a self-crafted digital and performative persona. “It’s more than a brand name," says Stavroula, “but it’s not an alter ego, Frida is not a character and not a drag persona. Maybe the name is a place-holder, an aka. The pronoun is ‘I’ not ‘she’."
Her printed unisex “Glamour Sacks and Kaftans” are designed, Stavroula says, so “anyone can wear them”, the garments are “truly democratic”, “suitable for any gender, height, shape, weight [size range 6 to 26] or religion." Garments are designed to be “like a canvas” to carry the always evolving graphics, which are in turn scaled to the size of the garment.
Frida Las Vegas operates as a made- to-order, direct-to-consumer, online business. Customers receive their order from a range of different graphic designs, and two garment- types (Glamour Sack or Kaftan) in their own size, in a three-to-four-week turnaround. Garments are made using direct-to-fabric printing at "Digital Fabrics" in Marrickville, Sydney. Stavroula does the hand-cutting and the garments are structured and hand-sewn by a freelance maker. The customer receives the completed order in a small, pink pizza box with some Frida Las Vegas gifts inside.
It was her experience in New York and London that turned Stavroula’s attention to what she’d left behind in Adelaide. Working as an intern with Patricia Field, of Sex and the City costume fame, and then with SuperSuper, the youth style magazine in London, she says she “realised that things were more exciting and original” back home. So began a fresh look at specificities of place, culture, experience and tradition, first in Adelaide and then Sydney. An embrace of the local became a passion, as she developed her graphic ideas based on local product labels — such as Passiona soft drinks, Chiko Rolls, Black and Gold sliced pineapple, and other popular riches of her suburban childhood. She inserts remembered delights from childhood into a desired — utopian, colourful and inclusive — present.
NEW EXUBERANCE Contemporary Australian Textile Design: art design fashion is showing at JamFactory Adelaide from 10 February - 16 April 2023 before touring to 14-venues across Australia until May 2026.
Mixed Lollies Glamour Sack. Photographer: Eamon Donnelly.