Between running his self titled label and teaching at Central Institute, Garth Cook doesn’t have much time on his hands, but that didn’t stop him from recently showcasing his AW12 collection at LMFF; and now he’s preparing for a solo show at Perth Fashion Week, which is coming up later this month. Garth was refreshingly candid and had some really interesting things to say when I interviewed him for X-Press Magazine, so I thought I’d share the story with you guys ahead of inevitably blogging about his show in a few weeks.
The inaugural Perth Fashion Week is fast approaching, and established Perth designer Garth Cook is counting down the days to his standalone show on Friday, April 20, at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. Though he’s currently full of enthusiasm for his forthcoming Spring/Summer 2012/13 collection, six months ago it was a different story entirely…
“I went to London in October last year because my partner had been based there for about eight months for work… When I went over to London I was thinking that with the way retail and the brand was going I didn’t feel satisfied and decided that I’d had enough and didn’t want to do it anymore. And then I discovered the reason why I felt like that was because I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, I was trying to please far too many people,” Cook explains of his rocky end to 2011.
“It’s not that people were telling me what to do, it’s that I felt I had to do certain things to please people. So I felt like I had all these expectations on me and I had to compete with really big brands and do massive ranges and really low price points but what it came down to was that I can’t do that – the way my business is structured, because I’m pretty much a one man band, I could not work like a big company can, I just don’t have the money to do that.”
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