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The hopes of Fiji’s fledgling fashion industry rest on the slim shoulders of a 25-year-old from the village of Muaninuku called Laisiasa Raibevu Davetawalu.
The young designer has done what many people in the Pacific country have dreamed of, but never had the chance to do.
Sponsored by the entire fashion community in Fiji, who recognized his promise and raised money for his fashion school fees, he has completed training at the Tafe NSW Fashion Design Studio in Australia., making him one of the few Fijian designers to have had access to professional training.
The strength of his final graduate collection, a sensitive summer womenswear wardrobe with nuances of Fijian design traditions, landed him in the pages of Vogue Australia and a job as a junior garment technician at Zimmermann, one of the labels most successful fashion in Australia.
“I am proud of my heritage and want to represent Fiji on the world fashion stage,” he says.
Alongside his work at Zimmermann, Davetawalu has his own label Elaradi – a play on his initials, LRD.
In May, he brought an expanded version of his Sydney graduate collection to Suva for the closing show of Fiji Fashion Week, where he was greeted by cheering, well-wishers and supporters.
“Lai showed promise from the moment he debuted his first collection as a student designer,” says Hosanna Kabakoro, a fellow designer who does the resort. wear it under the brand name Duatani, Fijian for “something different”.
“Promise is something we see a lot of here, but rarely gets the opportunity to grow beyond that potential.”
And it grew, showing diaphanous chiffon, intricate corsets and hand-knotted dresses that would look at home on a yacht anywhere from Ibiza to Barbados.
“He may be our first Fijian designer who really appeals to a general overseas market,” says Kabakoro.
Davetawalu’s the designs made subtle nods to Fijian cultural influences. A fringed, plunging neckline dress shot for Australian Vogue’s annual portfolio of young fashion graduates to watch, with intricate hand knotting that took four months to complete. It was the antithesis of fast fashion.
For the Fijians, the knots and hems in the dress were imitations witcha hand-woven rope made from coconut fiber used in fishing nets, canoes and traditional architecture.
Other pieces, flowing silk chiffons, appeared to be subservient to traditional Indian dress, commonly seen throughout Fiji, due to the large Indo-Fijian population.
Not so long ago Davetawalu was sketching designs and reading fashion magazines while the other boys played rugby at Queen Victoria School, a rural boarding school for boys known as a bastion of indigenous masculinity that has produced many iTaukei (indigenous Fijian) leaders.
“I was bullied a lot because I’m gay,” says Davetawalu. “They were like, ‘Why are you always designing dresses? Why not do something manly?’ One morning I ran away and never came back.”
Davetawalu took a two-hour bus from rural Lawaki to downtown Suva, where he went to find the Fiji Fashion Week office, which had advertised a student design competition.
He entered the race, but did not win. With the support of his relatives, Davetawalu found a local school to go to and later presented his first full-length collection.
A number of fashion industry insiders, including Christine Evans, an Australian designer based in Suva, and Ellen Whippy-Knight, the indomitable founder of Fiji Fashion Week, noticed Davetawalu’s talent and took her under their wing. theirs.
Veteran Australian fashion educator Nicholas Huxley, who first met Davetawalu when he ran a mentorship program in Suva, calls her “the real deal”.
“He’s quite extraordinary and has an innate ability to see beyond the normal idea of putting a garment on a body,” he says.
Whippy-Knight aims to put fashion at the forefront of the cultural conversation in Fiji. She has pushed for local fashion education and other initiatives to benefit the industry, such as the creation of a fashion council, an incubator for young designers and greater state support.
It has been organizing annual runway shows since 2007 as a platform for emerging designers like Davetawalu to showcase their craft and find buyers. As a result, a number of local designers – such as Samson Lee, Moira Solvalu and Michael Mausio, who all specialize in bold prints – have gone from showing at Fiji Fashion Week with no formal design training to developing sustainable businesses. although small. .
The country’s fashion scene has also emerged as a safe space for LGBTQI+ people to find community and express themselves without fear of retribution.
Indigenous color prints are what make Fijian fashion unique. For Fijian and Pacific Island wearers, they signify culture, identity and belonging, but local designers have had less success adapting these prints for Fiji’s tourist market, which welcomes close to a million tourists each year.
Prints hold global potential; that has already been exploited by foreigners. A decade ago, sportswear giant Nike teased a line of printed women’s leggings inspired by Fijian, Samoan and Maori tattoo designs; and in 2013, the now-defunct New York womenswear brand Nanette Lepore was criticized for cultural appropriation after using a Fijian masi design (and mislabeling it as ‘Aztec’). Both companies withdrew these products in response to protests from Pacific communities.
For Davetawalu, the road from student designer to young professional who dreams of one day owning his own label has not been easy.
There was the matter of paying for design school as an international student in Australia, which cost 70,000 Australian dollars. The Fijian fashion community got involved: Whippy-Knight provided Lai with a place to stay in her home in Sydney, while the Fijian Fashion Foundation held annual fundraisers to pay his school fees, raising approximately A$15,000 in year over four years.
Today, he is one of the few Fijians with formal training in fashion design. This is despite a local FJ100m (US$50m) garment manufacturing industry which produces general clothing from sportswear to uniforms for Australia and New Zealand.
A number of Fiji-based factories also produce fashion clothing for brands such as Kookai, the trend-oriented women’s brand co-owned by a Fijian-Australian; Bimbi and Roy, a women’s intimates brand founded by two Australian sisters who were partly raised in Fiji; and Scanlan and Theodore, an established high-end womenswear brand with over a dozen boutiques in Australia.
Despite local fashion manufacturing capabilities, there is a deep disconnect between the clothing industry and the fledgling fashion design industry in Fiji. The latter faces a number of constraints, including lack of access to formal education and training, incubation and mentoring, quality tissue and funding, as well as greater state support of the industry.
“Our people are naturally creative,” says Whippy-Knight. “We have a strong tradition of craft and making things with our hands. A proper fashion school for Fijian and Pacific designers is what we need.”
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