Kacey On Point

VAMFF National Designer Award winner Kacey/Devlin is the local label to watch this year. Here, its designer  talks femininity, forgoing a runway show and her obsession with kilts. 

- Grace O’neill

KACEY DEVLIN talks like a true creative. By which I mean she speaks in images and feelings instead of facts and figures, and a question rarely has a simple answer. For example, when I ask the designer what inspired her to start her label, Kacey/Devlin, three years ago, she speaks for five minutes about empowering modern women and “redefining the female form” through clothes. It all starts to border on the philosophical, but then she catches you off-guard with some real talk about the brand’s five-year plan or the importance of a consumer-facing business model.

That mix is what caught the eye of the judging panel at this year’s VAMFF National Designer Award (NDA), presented by David Jones, in which Devlin took out the coveted top prize. Among her prize pool was $15,000 cash, lookbook styling by BAZAAR and a runway show at Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival. Twenty-eight-year-old Devlin joins the ranks of the NDA’s impressive alumni, including Dion Lee, Romance Was Born and Toni Maticevski. “I was completely overwhelmed,” she admits.

It was actually the second time Devlin applied for the award, having lost out to Sydney label macgraw in 2016. Devlin says, “We had a lot to prove in terms of what we had done in the last 12 months. It took time to really solidify that relationship between the creative and the business, and this year was the time for the judges to see we had worked to resolve the two.”