Announcing All Fur Coat & No Knickers, an exhibition of fashion illustrations and textile art by Eirian Chapman, presented as part of the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme.

“You can never be over dressed or over educated.”
- Oscar Wilde

All Fur Coat & No Knickers explores the joy of dressing up and the individualism of style. This exhibition showcases a year’s worth of fashion drawings, highlighting the clothing choices we make to express our personality.

A combination of fashion illustration and textile art by artist Eirian Chapman explores how cloth interacts with the body and the message we give out to the world. Inspired by the late 90’s early 00’s Japanese street style magazine Fruits, Eirian explores street style through her fashionable friends and people she admires on Instagram. The illustrated who’s who of Melbourne’s most stylish folk.

Eirian’s illustration style emphasises the character of the person wearing the clothes. She uses spontaneous pencil mark making on paper to show movement and the joy of pattern and texture. Alongside the drawings on paper will hang brightly painted linen canvases transformed into wearable clothing. The painting’s once flat planes and hard edges become soft and three dimensional as they shift their symbolic meaning into wearable talismans.