California Dreamers

Two digital-savvy Australian designers take on the world from a new, shared base in LA. Banjo & Matilda’s Belynda Macpherson and Shoes of Prey’s Jodie Fox talk synergies and sisterhood with Jessica Matthews.

If you drop by the sleek Los Angeles headquarters of custom-footwear company Shoes of Prey on a Friday night, there’s a good chance the staff will be having an LAN party. “That stands for Local Area Network party,” explains Jodie Fox, Shoes of Prey’s co-founder and chief creative officer, “where engineers and some of the team will hook up their computers to play games with each other in the office. So they’ll do that and I’ll have the alternative activity, which is just to download a whole lot of fashion movies so the rest of us can watch those.”

It’s a fitting pastime for employees in an office that houses two Australian labels at the forefront of fashion and technology — the other being cult woollens brand Banjo & Matilda, which occupies a “pocket of cashmere”, as Fox calls it, alongside her brand.