For a newcomer to the country, Australian fashion can be quite confusing.
When I first arrived from Romania, with my most precious trendy clothes carefully folded in my suitcase, I was shocked to see how differently everyone dressed here.
In a letter to my mother, I unloaded my shock at the casual dress code - as if I was penning a Letter to the Editor. "Australians don’t care about how they look!"
I wrote of my university classmates, who wore tracksuit pants and something called Ugg boots – a very suitable name in my opinion.
The supermarket, I told her, was another site of style apathy. The high street was no better.
Australians seemed so comfortable in whatever they wore, not bothered by fashion trends or rules.
What I didn't get was - Australians seemed so comfortable in whatever they wore, not bothered by fashion trends or rules. And to a young woman coming from Eastern Europe, this was a new and somewhat confronting outlook.
Back at my new Melbourne home, I stared at my Romanian-bought clothes: the two pairs of elegant white trousers, a white down-feather coat fit for a Swiss ski resort, several pairs of thorny heels, the studded clutches.
Wearing them in Australia suddenly felt over the top, contrived, bringing attention to the fact that I wasn’t from here. That I didn’t know the rules.
In the years that followed, I longed for my fashion friends back home, who would never have stepped out of the house without a well-thought out ensemble. But I also desperately longed to fit in. As a newcomer, how could I communicate my ‘cool’ to these people who didn’t seem to care about any fashion at all?
Writer Antoanela Safca in her first months in Australia Source: Supplied
Thus began my ‘experimental phase’. I bypassed the completely impractical Melbourne winter uniform – rubber thongs matched with a heavy woolly scarf – but I gave the Uggs a chance. I softened. And in turn, I accepted the fact that they were oh-so-cosy, and surprisingly practical. (But still truly, truly ugly) Off-trend, off-season clothes eventually grew acceptable. Slowly, something started to shift in the way I thought about clothes.
When the pressure of dressing to impress began to lift, I was suddenly free to figure out what I really liked and what story I wanted my clothes to tell.
Among the many polyester mistakes, I started coming across gems that gave me that warm fuzzy feeling of being just the right thing. Some are still with me after many years. The pair of laced grey brogues that went with everything, though my mother insisted I couldn’t wear them while visiting Romania – ‘too scoffed, you’re not a pauper!’ The navy lose-fitting pinafore that made me look like a pregnant 60s housewife and a schoolgirl at the same time. I wore it day tripping in Victoria, at a macaroon-making workshop, on the plane to Europe, to a birthday party. Versatility and durability are now key selection criteria for any clothes that makes it into my wardrobe.
These days, I think of my style emerging from all this Australian fashion-freedom experimenting as quirky, colourful - big on print clashes, on any clashes. One of my best friends describes it as ‘nana-like’, ‘Romanian fashion from back in the day: long skirts, sensible shoes’.
Writer Antoanela Safca, today. Source: Supplied
I suppose there is truth in that. Comfort has also made it to the top of my list of fashion requirements. Another friend describes my style as, ‘You can tell you think about what clothes would make you happy, and when someone sees you, it makes them happy, too'.
I think these descriptions would have floored me if they came years ago, when I was living in Romania. Now they make me chuckle. They confirm that my freewheeling fashion compass is a part of my identity that's welcome here, whatever direction it may take me.
Fifteen years after landing in Melbourne, with my suitcase full of branded fashion statements no one else cared about, clothes matter to me just as much. I can now see that Australian fashion -- at its best -- is about being comfortable in your skin, in your environment, doing what you love in clothes you chose for your own reasons.
I get it.
Make no mistaking, I still overthink it. I still open my overflowing wardrobe and think, “I have nothing to wear!’ I still get the layering wrong for Melbourne weather, though that has improved somewhat. But I now have that distinct, hard-to-pin-down feeling that my individual style belongs here, in this wonderful mish-mash, Australian Babel tower of styles.
