Passion for fashion pays off

チャーリーズウィドウ

Getting the sack from her first full time job as a graphic designer was the best thing that could have happened to Lang Leav. Not the fashion designer, illustrator and poet though so at the time in Cabramatta, where Leav lives with her parents in a modest cottage, having a solid job with prospects in everything.
In 2004, she was three month into a job designer packaging for products such as toilet paper when she was fired for being "too independent". "I was really upset initially",she says. Then her father handed her a scrap of paper. On it he had written : "Where the hills and streams end and there seems no road beyond, amidst the shading willows and blooming flowers, another village appears".
 Leav printed a teddy bear with an empty eye socker onto a Bonds singlet put it on eBay and was stunned when it sold for about $50. With that confidence boost, she put together a T-shirt collection under the Akina label, entered the Qantas Spirint of Youth Awards in 2005, and won category. 
The $10.000 prize allowed her to travel to Japan and included a mentorship with fashion designer Petter Morrisey. He wrote a reference for a Leav when she succssesfully applied last year for a $25.000 Churchill Fellowship. she left in July for for six week in Japan studying Tokyo's Harajuku girls, whose kooky streetwear and wild make-up is inspired by everything from anime characters to Goth brides. She also tookwith her a collection for Akina fashions to investigate how Australian label can make inroads into the lucrative Japanese market. "Japanese schoolgirl are speeding $US2.5 billion annually on clothing and accesories," she says. "It's a cool market to get into".

Leav also planned to doorknock publishers to show off her tiny, handmade books off illustrated poetry. While still at Cabramatta High, "I started writting poems for friends for Valentine's Day or for their boyfriends," says Leav, "and people would pay me to do it. I had a real repolution "She sold out her first two limited edition books and is working on a third. "I'm shelling them online to my fan base."
It all has been quite a leap for someone who was born in a Thai refugee camp after her parents fied Cambodia during the regin of the Khmer Rouge. Leav arrived with her family when she was a baby Her steamstress mother worked day and night makeing clothes. "I grew up in a sweetshop in Cabramatta," says Leav.

The last that hewill ever know,is poisoned lipsand Mistletoe. 

 

Akina artist Lang Leav was invited to participate in the landmark 

show, alongside contemporary greats such as Gary Baseman, 

Luke Cheuh, Shag, Nouar, Glenn Barr and Tara McPherson.