Top image: photography by Clark Franklyn, fashion by Laetitia Mannessier; all clothing by Ex Infinitas SS18

Raised in what he describes as “a very bogan town” near Melbourne, Australia, designer Lukas Vincent grew up surrounded by beer-swilling surfers and bad-taste fashions – “think men in tracksuit pants, flip-flops and ‘wife beater’ singlets”. But in a weird twist of fate, these dudes have now become a muse of sorts for the designer. Having worked across jobs in New York and Paris, Vincent returned home in 2002 to start his own brand Ex Infinitas – splicing slacker surf culture with high-end luxury fashion to create what he describes as “suburban surf dandy.”

Alex James Taylor: What made you drop out of your university fashion design course at the age of nineteen?
Lukas Vincent: I think that schools often push university as the only option and it’s not right for everyone. I’d see a lot of post-grad students who had finished their degree and it being like two or three years after and they still hadn’t got a job yet. So I thought to myself, “This is so much hard work, and if they still haven’t got a job, why am I doing this?” It was a bit of a revelation for me, and around that same time I happened to meet quite a successful Australian designer called Bettina Liano at a club and I thought, “OK, I need to work with this woman.” It was a meeting that felt very fated and very honest. She asked me what I was doing and I told her that I was at university but I hated it and she said, “Why don’t you come work for me?” It was as simple as that. The next week I was in her office, I had a very casual interview and then I started working for her two days a week doing visual merchandising, which I had never done before, but it just felt like something that I really wanted to do. From there it evolved into lots of different things. Looking back now I just think how lucky I am for that kind of opportunity. I think a lot of universityeducated fashion students are maybe more educated about fashion in general, but maybe ignorance is bliss in some ways and I’m able to have more of an open mind when it comes to creating.

Alex: So you were working on womenswear at Bettina Liano?
Lukas: Yeah, at the time she was more of a cult denim brand. When I was there I went from being a visual merchandiser two days a week to doing accessory development, PR and marketing, design and styling, I’d sit in all the sales meetings and I’d go to the fabric appointments, so I was really a bit of a right-hand man to Bettina for quite a long time. Alex: So you got to see all the different aspects of how a fashion brand operates. Lukas: Exactly, which was so wild. A lot of the time it was very much behind the scenes too, I’d go to a lot of her family gatherings and be in a lot of meetings that the majority of the staff wouldn’t, so I had a really firm understanding after five or six years of being there. It was a time when Australian fashion was having a bit of a moment too, with the likes of Ksubi and sass & bide and all those brands that have since faded away into the background. For me it was definitely a really fun time in Australian fashion, which is why when I came back from New York and saw the state of the industry, in a way, I was a little bit like, “Oh, is this it now? Is this as good as it gets?” I felt like there was nothing really exciting going on. Alex: Did you feel obligated to come back and try to re-energise the Australian fashion scene and push it forward? Lukas: It’s funny because that was never really my intention, but then I started to think about what the rest of the world would want to see from an Australian brand, it started to become very clear that I needed to use our culture but twist it into something exciting and fresh. It’s interesting because I think that’s also why the brand and is embraced more internationally than here in Australia – mainly in terms of retail – I always say that you can’t be a prophet in your own town. I feel like I can’t sell back to Australia the same thing that they see around them everyday, because I think for them it’s very polarising, they either love it or they hate it. It’s very embedded in the Australian psyche to look to overseas for inspiration or for what you want to buy, many people here will covet high-end European brands like Gucci or Prada, so I made a very conscious decision not to follow that path and to really focus on Australian culture.

Alex: What was the Australian fashion scene like when you were a teenager?
Lukas: Oh god [laughs]. I’m from – and I’m actually still here at the moment although I’m about to move to Paris – a suburb called Baxter, which even if you looked it up online [laughs] you probably wouldn’t find all that much because there isn’t that much here. It’s a very suburban country town about five or ten minutes from the beach. There’s definitely no fashion here at all, it’s actually the anthesis of fashion, because even when I went to school, this part of the world is more known for low-level taste and bogan culture. I look out the window and there’s like guys walking along in their short shorts, their ‘wife-beater’ singlets and a six-pack of beer, and that’s at like three in the afternoon. It’s a funny thing because obviously I’m from here and it’s a part of me, but now I’ve lived in New York and I’m moving to Paris, it’s very surreal to be here doing this.

Alex: It’s funny because across the fashion world there’s this shift happening where designers are looking to street culture for inspiration and specifically groups of people usually associated with bad taste. In the UK you have chav culture and in Paris you have brands like Vetements creating ‘ugly’ fashion, so what you’re doing with bogan culture is on that same level.
Lukas: It’s interesting, with this decade and era I don’t think it’s quite as clear-cut as the moods, themes and aesthetics of the 80s and 90s – maybe that’s just because we don’t have the luxury of hindsight quite yet – but this moment in time seems to be about bringing everything back to base and focusing on a more personal narrative, something a little bit more homegrown. There’s a very real approach now, it’s not so much about John Galliano theatrics, it’s more about very real and street-level stories.

Alex: Fashion is always a reflection of current affairs, and within the last twenty years the world has been in such a state of flux; we’ve had the global recession, crazy politics with people like Trump and Putin, terrorism, the growth of the internet, instant news and social media. I wonder if subconsciously we’re perhaps wanting to focus on the smaller aspects of life from a personal viewpoint in order to really get to grips with where we are right now.
Lukas: Exactly, I think so too. At the end of the day you can only really relate everything back to yourself and that’s also when I thought about starting this brand and I thought about whether it’d be menswear or womenswear, there was always that understanding of being able to relate menswear back to myself and have a more personal attachment to it.

Alex: Outside of Australia, in places such as New York, Paris and London, do people immediately get Ex Infinitas and this Australian aesthetic you’re riffing on?
Lukas: Yeah, absolutely.

Alex: I suppose it’s a bit exotic to us because you rarely get Australian brands making it over here.
Lukas: That’s the thing, and rarely do people make that 24 hour plane journey over here, and so what we have automatically becomes the commodity because half the time people just don’t want to get on the fucking flight to get here [laughs]. So you can sort of use that sense of mystery to formulate the aesthetic. Of course, when you say “Australia” to any of the buyers, their minds automatically go to blonde hair, surfers, Bondi Beach and other very cliché things. So for me, it was a matter of, “OK, if they want to see that, I’m going to give it to them in a way that is more based around art and tailoring and surf,” because we don’t necessarily have a history in fashion, it’s very recent, and I think that surf as an industry and a culture probably stems back a little bit further than our fashion industry. But it’s one thing that goes a little bit unnoticed, particularly in the creative sense, which is why, for me, it was so important to reference that culture. My dad’s a surfer, my uncle’s a surfer, I was until I got a life and got a job [laughs], but I think creatively it’s been a very interesting and relevant thing to play with. Skateboarding obviously has a very important part in fashion at the moment and I think surfing does too, but it’s interesting that surfers – and I’ve been having this conversation with a lot of them recently to figure out the answer – aren’t as in tune with fashion as skateboarders are, surfers don’t have that same vibe, they don’t tend to care about fashion as much.

Alex: Do you think that’s perhaps to do with the easy-living, hippy, ‘reject the mainstream’ culture that is wrapped up in the surf lifestyle? And also, they’re out in the ocean of course, whereas skaters are in the cities amongst the people.
Lukas: One hundred percent. So that makes my job a little bit difficult because people may say that what I’m doing doesn’t even look surf, but it was never my intention to create surf clothing in such a cliché way, it’s more about the colour or the detail or prints, and just the spirit of surf, but for 2018. The problem is, a lot of the surfers now who are at the head of Quiksilver or some of these other big brands, they’re people that haven’t really moved with the generations, they just keep thinking that kids these days are going to want to wear what they were wearing back in the day, and they haven’t really adapted. Which is why these brands aren’t doing particularly well right now, they’re just riding this lull, and that’s where I step in to shake it up a little bit [laughs].

Alex: What was the starting point behind your SS18 collection?
Lukas: The starting point for SS18 was really Terence McKenna, who is a very famous psychonaut who has done a lot of investigative research on psychedelics, particularly DMT and LSD. It was someone who was introduced to me by my dad, who was also the person who gave me my first ecstasy pill when I was like sixteen [laughs]. So when he showed me Terence, I was just starting Ex Infinitas and I was using DMT and that was really the basis of this collection: how to communicate that message through the vehicle of fashion. I thought it was the right time to touch on that subject because spirituality has become more and more prevalent as we move forward and I have noticed it start to filter in through other brands too, people are talking about astrology and psychedelic drugs a lot more.

Alex: Again it’s that idea of escapism, but this time it’s on the complete opposite level, here people are looking further afield for answers.
Lukas: Exactly, and in terms of surfing, it’s a very spiritual and holistic sport, there’s certainly a sense of escapism in that culture – it’s the whole reason why they don’t want to get a job [laughs].

Alex: And surfing actually has an astrological aspect to it, as the moon influences the waves.
Lukas: That’s it. My dad is an astrologist so that’s something I learnt at a very young age when my mum was telling him to stop brainwashing me with all this hippy stuff [laughs].

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