Meet the queer fashion designer who rejected hustle culture through couture

“I’m building a fashion practice where garments carry lived experience, collaboration is structural, and time is treated as a material rather than a constraint,” says Nehma Vitols, the Australian fashion designer whose work is pushing back against the speed, image politics, and exhaustion that still define much of fashion.

For Vitols, clothes are not just things to be worn or sold. They are vessels for labour, memory, place, and the realities people carry in their bodies.

Vitols’ vision comes sharply into focus in Vintage 2025, her latest line and exhibition project, inspired by her wife’s work as a winemaker during grape harvest in regional Australia. Built from interviews with women winemakers in the Riverina, the project centres labour that is often overlooked, tracing the physical, emotional, and seasonal rhythms of their lives through garments, film, sound, and storytelling.

More than a fashion collection, Vintage 2025 is a study of women’s work, endurance, and authorship, and of what happens when fashion chooses to listen before it speaks. Vitols says her clarity does not come from feeling at home in the industry. It comes from moving through it while constantly sensing where she did not fit.

“I never really fit the mould the industry seemed to reward,” Vitols says. “I wasn’t skinny enough, pretty enough, or positioned within the kind of male queerness that was visibly celebrated, and authorship in a space that didn’t reflect me always felt uneasy.” She kept going anyway, but without ease. Even at university, where creative spaces are often imagined as open and collaborative, she found herself at odds with the culture around her. “I was prolific with my work, which became a point of tension rather than connection,” she says, describing peer relationships that often felt “competitive rather than collaborative.”

That early unease stayed with her when she moved to London to try to make it in fashion. What the city revealed was not just the grind of creative ambition, but the class architecture beneath it. “It revealed how closely access is tied to pedigree,” she says. “On that side of the world, fashion operates as a profession for the already resourced.” For people without those buffers, the costs pile up quickly. “When you are underpaid, the cost of living forces you into additional work. Long hours in bars alongside full time creative labour quickly erode sleep and stability.” Eventually, that instability culminated in a severe psychosis episode.

What followed was not just recovery, but a reset. Vitols had to rebuild her life around conditions the industry rarely treats as essential. “I had to build a life with foundations,” she says. “Sleep became non-negotiable. Medication, routine, and structure came first.” It changed the way she made work, too. “I now approach making slowly and deliberately. I chip away at it as a meditative process rather than forcing outcomes.” Creativity, once tied to depletion, became something steadier and more sustaining.

That shift also forced her to draw lines the fashion world often treats as weakness. “The boundary I drew was refusing to operate at a pace that required self erasure,” she says. “I will not produce work that requires me to disappear in the process.” In practice, that means saying no to work that does not align with her values, and refusing a model of ambition built on silence, urgency, and collapse. “I do not separate wellbeing from rigour,” she says. “Care is the structure, not the compromise.”

Those ideas run through Vintage 2025, her latest line, which takes its name and spirit from grape harvest season and from her wife’s work as a winemaker in regional Australia. The project began with something intimate and difficult to dress up. “My wife and I had recently married, and I became what we jokingly called a ‘Vintage Widow’,” Vitols says. During harvest, her wife worked long, demanding days across the week for four months straight. “I missed her deeply. I cried most days.”

Wanting to better understand the work that was taking her wife away for months at a time, Vitols asked if she could visit the winery and photograph what harvest actually looked like. What she found opened the project outward. “What I saw was grit, precision, and extraordinary rigour,” she says. That experience also made her wonder how many other women were doing this work quietly across the region. “Wine is often romanticised, yet the Riverina is one of the most overlooked and under romanticised wine regions in the country,” she says. “Centreing women winemakers felt necessary because their labour, expertise, and endurance are foundational, yet rarely foregrounded.”

That decision gave Vintage 2025 its shape. Built from interviews with women winemakers, the project draws directly from their lived experience. One of the strongest themes to emerge was the duality of the work itself. “Many of the women were drawn to winemaking through a balance of art and science,” Vitols says. “Technical precision sat alongside intuition, sensory memory, and judgement built over time.” She was especially struck by the women who were also mothers. “Several likened Vintage to having a newborn every year,” she says, describing a cycle of physical intensity, lack of sleep, and relentless expectation that they would continue to show up fully both at work and at home.

Vitols calls each garment a “wearable archive,” and the phrase is more than metaphor. It is her design logic. “I think of the archive as layered rather than singular,” she says. “It holds memory, not as nostalgia but as something embodied and ongoing. It holds place as a condition shaped by climate, industry, distance, and rhythm. It holds labour, both visible and invisible.” In her hands, clothing does not merely reference experience. It stores it. “A seam can signal protection or tension. A print can function as an archive rather than decoration.” The garment, she says, “does not illustrate experience. It contains it.”

That philosophy sets her apart from the mainstream fashion model, where speed is often treated as relevance and novelty as value. “Seasonal fashion is designed for replacement,” she says. “My work is designed for accumulation.” Instead of asking what is next, she asks what needs to be held. It is a small shift in language, but a major shift in politics.

That politics extends beyond the garments themselves. Vintage 2025 was conceived not as a standard runway, but as a layered exhibition experience involving storytelling, film, and live sound. “Clothes were never going to be enough on their own,” Vitols says. “I wanted audiences to slow down and encounter the work through multiple entry points.” It is an approach that resists passive consumption and asks for something rarer now: attention.

It also resists the myth of the solitary creative genius. Vintage 2025 intentionally spotlighted other local women creatives, including jewellery designer Kristy-Lee Agresta, makeup artist Lucinda Panarello, hair stylist Alison Matthews, and photographer Ginette Guidolin. “From the outset, Vintage 2025 was not about assembling contributors around a single author,” Vitols says. “It was about building a world shaped collectively, with visibility, agency, and credit intact.” That matters aesthetically, but also materially. “Resourcing and crediting women as co authors shifts power,” she says. “The work exists through collective labour rather than individual genius.”

For Vitols, this is not a detour from fashion. It is the point of it. She wants the work to reach people who may never have seen themselves as a “fashion audience” at all, by bringing it into conversation with agriculture, craft, music, labour, and regional life. She designs for women who refuse the male gaze, for queer ways of looking, and for people who have built their lives through persistence rather than permission.

She also sees Vintage 2025 not as a one-off collection, but as a model for what comes next. “I see Vintage 2025 as a framework rather than a singular event,” she says. There is something quietly radical in that idea. Not a brand chasing reinvention for its own sake, but a practice rooted in listening, trust, and time.

In an industry still obsessed with acceleration, Vitols is making a case for another way forward. One where rest is not the enemy of ambition, where care sharpens rather than softens the work, and where clothing can do more than decorate a body. It can hold a life.