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Three headless mannequins stand in Christopher Esber’s beautiful Sydney studio (white room, high ceilings, huge windows). One is wearing a black bodice featuring Esber’s trademark plunging roller-coaster neckline; one a swoop of finely draped bronze jersey; and one a bikini-strap dress of folded fabric with the sheen of leather. They stand clustered together, as if congratulating each other on their joint sartorial excellence. A fourth – naked, her white torso bare – stands a little apart and turned slightly away, rejected by the cool gang. Even for mannequins, fashion is a brutal world.
Christopher Esber, however – tall, softly spoken, and at the very top of the Australian fashion tree – seems resolutely non-brutal. “I always felt very comfortable and safe with him,” says close friend and LA-based stylist Ilona Hamer, who met him almost 20 years ago, when she was a young editor at Vogue Australia and he was a recent graduate of Sydney’s Fashion Design Studio (FDS). “That was his energy: kind, gentle, a little bit shy.”
Australian model and actor Gemma Ward, who has worked with (and worn) Esber for years, agrees. “He is the sweetest, loveliest person,” she enthuses.
But you underestimate him at your peril. “He’s got balls,” says Hamer. “That’s the flipside of the reserve and the gentleness: the ability to know when the moment is right and to really go for it. He’s very much in command now.”
Since he founded his eponymous brand in 2010, Esber has moved, slowly but surely, up the precarious slopes of global fashion, from his first collection at Australian Fashion Week, when his luxe fabric was Bunnings flyscreen mesh and his atelier was the garage of his mum’s and dad’s house, to his current position as one of just 76 brands worldwide – and only two from Australia (the other is Zimmermann) – with an official “on-schedule” catwalk show at Paris Fashion Week. He’s gone from getting his mother to embroider beads in front of Murder She Wrote (“do you really need all these beads, Chris?“) to an international staff of 35. These days, a full-price Christopher Esber garment will set you back anywhere from $800 to $1800, and you can buy it at any one of some 150 stockists worldwide, including Harrods, Selfridges, Bergdorf Goodman, Printemps, Mytheresa and Net-a-Porter.
Model and actor Gemma Ward has worked with Esber – and worn his label – for years.Credit: Getty Images
In less than a month, Esber sets off for his fourth Paris show: a 17,000-kilometre pilgrimage, at the end of which is another white room, this one containing a catwalk and the most powerful fashion opinion-makers on Earth. Given all this, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t expecting something pretty extraordinary in his studio. Surely there’ll be piles of garments lying around, I think; maybe models with prominent clavicles trying things on; assistants running around with dresses draped over their arms. Perhaps even the designer himself, surrounded by a blizzard of tissue paper, tossing his head and shouting.
Instead, there’s just Esber in his trademark blue jeans, black shoes and carefully ironed black shirt, all alone except for the mannequins, surrounded by white winter light and an atmosphere of total calm. None of the garments for Paris are finished yet: not the samples, not the prototypes, nothing. Which actually makes this serene man, standing in this peaceful space, the most extraordinary image of all.
Fascinated by fashion
In person, Christopher Esber, 38, does have a “safe” feeling about him, which is an unusual quality to describe: a combination, perhaps, of being a good listener, and both firm and entirely non-combative in conversation. “Mmm,” he says when he obviously disagrees with you, clasping his long-fingered hands. He is, quietly, funny – but so quietly it’s easy to miss: a little aside about being a grown-up beginner at tennis; a tiny eye-roll looking back at his serious student self. “I used to think, ‘Go out, or finish the dress?’ And the dress usually won.”
He can’t remember a time when he wasn’t fascinated by fashion. “I was quite a loner – there was a big age gap between me and my siblings [an older brother and sister], so there was a kind of only-child vibe. I was in my own head a lot, creating my own world.” Esber grew up in Merrylands in Western Sydney, where the local newsagent, for some inexplicably brilliant reason, carried Italian Vogue. In 1990s suburbia, those magazines must have seemed like transmissions from another galaxy. “They were so glossy, so exciting – that was the spark. This idea of creation started forming in my mind: ‘I want to create these pieces.’ ”
His family were supportive: fashion was taken seriously in the Esber household. “My mother was very stylish, so was my sister,” says Esber. “They were always putting on a look. My parents are from Lebanon – there is a certain aesthetic. They really take pride in their presentation – there’s always make-up on, the hair’s done.”
‘My biggest fear was to be a hype brand … I wanted it to be a slow burn.’
Christopher Esber
By the time he was nine, his aunt – a former professional seamstress – had taught him to sew and cut patterns. This made high school textiles unbearably boring (or, as Esber puts it with typical gentleness, “there was more freedom in fine arts”) but he has fond memories of high school art at Our Lady of Lebanon College, Harris Park, and his course at the Fashion Design Studio. He graduated in 2008, a good period for young Australian design talent. Two of Esber’s direct contemporaries, Dion Lee and Kym Ellery, went on to international stardom – until their companies collapsed: a recurring theme in the business of fashion. (Ellery liquidated her business in 2019, leaving creditors with $2.6 million in debt; the Dion Lee brand went into voluntary administration last year, with $35 million in liabilities.)
Esber, meanwhile, established his business in 2010. His parents helped out with “bits and pieces” of financial support, and his brother, a certified practising accountant, helped him set up the business after-hours. But he deliberately stayed very small for a long time. “I’m very cautious,” he admits. “I remember saying to my first PR that my biggest fear was to be a hype brand. And they kind of looked at me: ‘But you come here for brand awareness?’ And I was like, ‘But don’t blast me everywhere.’ I wanted it to be a slow burn.” So he didn’t want to be famous? “No, not in that way,” he says. “The front-facing side has never interested me.”
Christopher Esber with his 2024 ANDAM fashion award.Credit: Ayka Lux
“Christopher [does not] chase trends or celebrity,” confirms Nathalie Dufour, founder and MD of the annual ANDAM Awards, writing from Paris. The ANDAMs are a kind of Oscars of fashion, and last year, Dufour and the jury (which included Carla Bruni, Emmanuelle Alt and Charlotte Gainsbourg – who could ask for more French chic in a single room?) awarded Esber the €300,000 Grand Prix: a profound vote of approval and support from the international fashion community. His qualities of methodical hard work and self-effacement are “both refreshing and somewhat unusual”, says Dufour. “But [they are] increasingly valued within Parisian fashion circles. He is perceived as thoughtful, focused, and dedicated to his craft.”
Even today, apart from tennis, going to the beach, and spending time with his partner (about whom he says nothing, because, as he explains, “they don’t want to be in the public eye”), Esber is still utterly absorbed by work. ” ‘Absorbed’ is a good word,” he says. “When people talk about work-life balance and that whole thing, I’m like, I dunno. I don’t relate to it. I feel like I’m always working in some aspect. But it doesn’t feel like work.”
Wonderland of style
The legendary American fashion editor Diana Vreeland once said: “Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.” When Christopher Esber was a child, the most intoxicating release he could find was the roller coasters of Wonderland Sydney, the now-demolished amusement park in Eastern Creek, on the city’s outer fringes. He would go with a cousin or friend, whenever he could find the time and the $30 entry fee. It’s a miracle you didn’t die, I say. “Tell me about it,” he says. “They had the craziest rides. But I loved them. On the one hand I was drawing dresses, but I was also drawing roller coasters: up and down and loop the loop and upside down. I loved it.”
Here, direct from Eastern Creek, is the inspiration for the kind of glamour gowns that have made Esber famous on red carpets all over the world. Worn by everyone from Zendaya to Jennifer Lopez, Esber’s most celebrated designs are sculptures of sinuous curve and vertiginous plunge. “Fearless, fun, quirky, sexy and cool” is how Gemma Ward describes the feeling of them.
Jennifer Lopez in an Esber dress on a 2024 album cover.Credit: @christopher_esber/Instagram
Are they also, umm, a bit impractical and uncomfortable to wear? “Well, we do always say, ‘Put your hands up and drive,’ ” Esber points out, miming the action of hands on the steering wheel. “But yes, [some dresses] you don’t expect much in practical terms. But people still want them. The ‘Moulded Venus’ dress, say, was done for fun and became very commercial.” British model and actor Adwoa Aboah wore a version of this dress to the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscars party. Incredibly, she actually appears to be sitting down in one photograph, but this feat would certainly be beyond most mere mortals. The other problem with these designs, surely, is that (unlike Dua Lipa or Margot Robbie) most women with ordinary figures simply can’t wear them, because we know, alas, that a fashion fight against a dress with a curlicued neckline plunging to our waist is one we cannot win.
But is this such a problem, really? This is the high-drama end of global fashion, after all, not the underwear department of David Jones – sensible support and concealment are not really part of the brief. And it must be said, when it comes to dressing the Everywoman, Esber puts at least as much time into his loosely structured jackets and immaculately cut wide-legged pants as he does into any luxe gown.
Indeed, his interest in these wardrobe staples long predates his success with glamour gowns. He spent a year after college working in bespoke men’s tailoring, and even now he can spend hours discussing the internal structure of a lapel point or how to reinforce a shoulder seam. “I’ve actually done a little manual for the team on certain measurements in the shoulder,” he confesses, “because it became a part of my [design] foundation and structure.”
Actor and singer Zendaya, an early celebrity adopter, in an Esber dress.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Surrounded by fast fashion – of which Australians are some of the greatest consumers in the world – Esber wants a woman who owns one of his blazers to be able to dry-clean it “50 times or more” without it losing its shape. He wants her, moreover, to be able to buy another one in five years’ time “[and get] the same kind of feeling”.
Unusually, he’s prepared to back this belief in timeless style within his own business. When he first produced his beautiful “Minette” shoe – an elf-like creation of delicate mesh, and perhaps my favourite of all his designs – nobody bought it. But Esber repeated it in the next collection, and the next, and the next. “I think they say people need to see something, like, 18 times before they’re comfortable with it,” he says, smiling. “So we just bumped it along. And now I think we’ve sold over 10,000 pairs.”
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The flipside of such consistency, however, is that as he’s become more famous, his designs have become targets for low-cost copies and rip-offs. “It’s not a good feeling,” he admits: “I mean, someone’s stealing from you. But what do you do? The law makes it really complex for creators to defend their art. You’ve got to just keep moving. And I guess the good thing is you’re
already on to the next thing.”
Luckily, the next thing is never a problem for Esber. Like many successful designers, he’s part-Jedi – able to sense disturbances in the fashion force long before they reach the rest of us, and successfully turn them into product. As his head of PR explains, this past season featured a pair of bright-cactus-green jeans. “And I just would never have assumed they would, well, sell!” she admits. “And they’ve sold out twice now.” She shakes her head: “Restocked and sold out – twice!”
The secret to this zeitgeist-divining skill seems to rest in two enormous display boards sitting in Esber’s studio, each one covered with photos and fabric swatches and small found objects. At the start of each collection, he gathers up his latest favourite material samples, any intriguing little objects he likes, and a selection of photos that catch his attention from his phone’s photo reel (which he calls a “Google search of my subconscious”). He talks to his team, drapes his mannequins, sets his timer and draws for 15-minute blocks “just to get the ideas out”. Eventually, garments begin to take shape, and prototype pieces are sewn, examined and adjusted. Finally, once the final design is agreed, a sample garment is made.
This procedure is repeated for literally hundreds of items per collection, four collections per year, including swimwear, bags, shoes, eyewear and – recently – a bridal line. The whole process is, by necessity, extraordinarily swift. “I remember the first Paris show we did, the stylist was here at the start of September and there were about 20 garments,” one team member tells me. “Then she turned up in Paris two weeks later and there were 758 samples.”
By this reckoning, Christopher Esber is either personally designing, or overseeing the creation of, more than 3000 garments a year, not to mention accessories and shoes. So much organisation required – and, even more terrifying, so much inspiration.
Thank god for those roller coasters.
The road to Paris
There may be a question in life to which the ultimate answer is not “Paris”, but it’s hard to think of one. Esber, certainly, always dreamt of taking his collections there. In typically sensible style, however, he took things slowly, gradually building his brand recognition, his expertise, his confidence in this country first. In 2012 he won the Australian L’Oréal National Designer Award; in 2013 the Australian regional final of the International Woolmark Prize; in 2015 Italian Vogue’s Most Talented Designer Award for Australia-Pacific (thank you, Merrylands newsagent).
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He actually began showing in Paris a decade ago. Not on the official catwalks of Fashion Week, but as part of the enormous brand-to-buyer business being done behind the scenes, beyond the famous venues of the 1st Arrondissement. It’s a well-established system, and Esber was successful at it, but it wasn’t easy. “In those early years, where you put your heart and soul into things and they might not necessarily be received well, there were definitely disheartening moments,” he recalls. “And you’re like, ‘Oh.’ Then you have to pick yourself up and do it all over again. It’s hard to get that breakthrough.”
Then, in 2019, he did a collection, Resort 2020. He pauses, thinking back. It had been hard in the lead-up, he says. He’d been in business for a decade, “the economy was trending down, and everyone was talking doom and gloom. I remember thinking, ‘Is this going to be it for me?’ ” He pauses again. “And I do have this thing – I don’t know if it’s self-sabotage or I don’t like people telling me what to do – but I was like, ‘OK, well then let’s, let’s just go out with a bang.’ ”
At this moment, I think of Hamer, and her comment about Esber having “balls”. In the face of potential doom, Esber produced a collection that was freer and sexier than any of his previous work. He followed this with a huge photo shoot, “the biggest we’d ever done”. Then he and his tiny team took the collection and set off for Paris.
‘It all just started. You could feel the buzz. We knew something exciting was happening.’
Christopher Esber
“We only had four people in the business at the time,” he says now, “so we all had about three jobs: we were really bootstrapping it. It was really just a bunch of friends making clothes and trying to get deliveries out.” He looks bemused at the memory. “And as soon as we arrived, we started picking up [orders from] really great department stores in London and in the US. And then within one day, we got a request from [the singer-songwriter sister of Beyoncé] Solange Knowles, needing a look sent for a red-carpet event. So I had sent it out, and then I get another DM from [model and actor] Emily Ratajkowski’s stylist, who’s on the other side of Paris, saying, ‘I need this look within 45 minutes.’ I had no time to send it, so it was literally me on one of those Paris rental bikes, pedalling, pedalling, rushing this look across the city.”
He smiles, thinking back. “And literally, it was like this crescendo. Within the space of a week, Emily wore it; Solange wore it. And then Law Roach, who styles Zendaya (whose 180 million Insta followers put Emily’s 29 million to shame) was like, ‘I need to have this look for Zendaya.’ And I’m like, ‘Of course, of course.’ So I sent it off and she wore it too, on the red carpet.” He leans forward. “And it all just started. You could feel the buzz. We knew something exciting was happening: the buyers seeing this press, seeing the collection; it was like this frenzy.” Esber, you will not be surprised to learn, looks utterly unfrenzied. “It was the right look for the right moment, and it just took off.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Sales rocketed all over the world, but especially in Europe, where more than 40 per cent of his stockists are now based. Tiffany Hsu is chief buying officer at Munich-based online luxury fashion retailer Mytheresa. She first bought Esber’s collection in 2019, when his “minimal yet ultra-sexy aesthetic really caught our eye”. The company, which delivers to 130 countries worldwide, has stocked him ever since. “[And] we consistently see double-digit growth [in his sales] season after season.”
“It’s just amazing what Christopher has accomplished,” says Jaana Quaintance-James, CEO of the Australian Fashion Council. “And he’s done it alone.” She describes the recently announced NSW Fashion Strategy as an acknowledgement of the need to support Australian designers better, via a network of grants, manufacturing and market access. “Imagine what brands like Christopher Esber could have achieved if they’d had some support!”
Actually, Esber already appears to have achieved everything possible. In 2023, he won designer of the year in the Australian Fashion Laureate awards. The same year, he was invited by Paris Fashion Week’s governing body (the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode) to show “on schedule” in Paris: an experience he describes as the very “definition of terror”, but which covered him in glory. And last year, he won the ANDAM with a collection that, Nathalie Dufour puts it: “radiated confidence and strength”. He was transformed from a long-term quiet achiever to an overnight success; an understated keeper of the faith to the hottest thing in town.
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And yet he also stayed exactly the same. His momentary appearance at the end of his third catwalk show in Paris this past June was as brief as ever; his wave to the crowd as self-deprecating, his black shirt as understated. True, his show had just included a top whose hand-beading took artisans 700 hours to complete in a Parisian atelier, rather than being embroidered by his mum in front of the telly; but this was a change in degree, not in kind. So what happens from here?
“I could totally see him being a very low-key head of some great [haute couture] house,” says Ilona Hamer. This would certainly be a fairy-tale end to the story – the Australian from Merrylands in charge of Chanel, or Dior, or Balenciaga. Esber laughs. “It’s just so romantic, right?” he agrees. But he also still wants what he’s always wanted. To simply grow his own business; go on creating his own world. Fragrance might be a new avenue to explore, perhaps? Leather goods? Homewares? “I kind of want to see how far this universe can be stretched.”
Amid all the possibilities, there is one piece of definite news. After almost 20 years in fashion without a single garment he himself can actually wear, Christopher Esber has finally decided to design some “good jeans, good shirts, good trousers” for men. “I do struggle to find pieces I like,” he confesses. “So it might also, selfishly, be a little bit about a wardrobe for myself.”
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