Heavy, circular and embedded in the pavement Hattam says, ‘It sat between the decorative and the brutally municipal, an accidental ornament stamped into the street.’ It was a passage to the underworld, a painting on the ground and a shield for the common, holding the absurd tension of being both overlooked and essential. In that object lived the spirit of the work: resilient in identity, defiantly practical yet strangely beautiful.
From this starting point, Hattam says a cast of figures emerged, unified not by uniformity but by strangeness.
Each garment preserved the peccadilloes of its wearer through stodgy cloth and prosaic construction. The fabrics were honest and down to earth using materials like workwear cottons and dense wools making each piece feel almost historically working-class in their weight and silhouette. Yet across these sturdy surfaces burst jolts of awkward, almost confrontational colour. The mundane was brutally decorated, while the ordinary was allowed to shimmer.
The influence of Australian figurative painters Arthur Boyd and Sydney Nolan reverberated throughout the collection. Their bold and sometimes uneasy palettes, their layering of mythic or psychological charge onto everyday landscapes informing the visual language. They understood that the meeting of the domestic and the imaginative could incite an absurd beauty. In the garments, colour did not politely enhance form; it disrupted it. Prints overlaid practicality as surfaces told stories that did not fully resolve.
At the centre of Hattam’s collection sat the McGuffin hat acting as a catalyst, like an appendage to the coat much like a keystone crown. Detached from its expected function it became symbolic rather than practical. It lent character before being absorbed into the architecture of the garment itself. Hats grew into collars, merged with shoulders and hovered as sculptural afterthoughts. They were less accessory than idea: a suggestion of identity waiting to be filled.
Other elements carried similar tensions. Parachute fabrics overlaid subdued tailoring introducing a quiet drama and a sense of suspended movement. A length of fire hose, unapologetic in its industrial directness was allowed to revel in its functionality, speaking plainly while existing in an unfamiliar context. Each component questioned its own purpose. Nothing was included purely for fact or function as everything participated in a retelling.
The collection unfolded like a palimpsest and in Hattam’s world memories and stories are reshaped with each iteration, accumulating new plots and private meanings. It was guided less by strict narrative than by an elusive understanding of personal lore, place, image and emotion. The Australian landscape, vast and particular lingered in the subconscious with its light, its strangeness and its distance. As the only Australian in the 2026 MA course at Central Saint Martins, the sensation of being both participant and outsider sharpened the desire to create work anchored in something deeply personal yet universally legible.
Ultimately, Hattam’s garments spoke about individuality. The same coat might be worn by many, but each body carry’s a distinct interpretation of identity. Clothes became municipal structures in their own right and felt shared, necessary and yet capable of brilliant deviation. The collection suggested that even the most prosaic surfaces could hold myth and that even a manhole cover you pass by everyday could be hiding a crown.
Graduating from RMIT in Melbourne in 2024 and completing an MA at Central Saint Martins in 2026, the work was shown during London Fashion Week and recognised with the L’Oréal Professionnel Scholarship. At twenty-four Hattam is stepping toward a fashion industry much like approaching another kind of underworld. ‘It feels daunting,’ he says, ‘immense, and charged with possibility.’
In this collection beauty is found in unlikely places, pushing for change where it is needed and to create garments that think outside the expected frame while remaining grounded in honesty and purpose. Something the fashion industry needs now. Clay Hattam is a young fashion star in the making and one to watch.
