Kerrie Lester Contemplating the emperor's new clothes

Kerrie Lester first met Akira Isogawa when he migrated to Australia from Japan in 1986. After studying fashion design at the Sydney Institute of Technology, Isogawa sold his first designs in East Sydney boutiques until 1993 when he opened his own boutique in Queen Street, Woollahra.

Since then he has established himself as one of Australia’s leading fashion designers. He currently presents five collections each year in Sydney and Paris, and his garments are sold around the world.

‘I have long admired the textural quality of Akira’s clothes, his artistic approach to design and the way he assimilates Japanese and Australian influences in his garments,’ says Lester. She also related to his heavily stitched materials which are not unlike her own stitched canvases.

Isogawa is painted in his studio with his couturier dummies, which Lester felt ‘with their headless shapes of the female form emphasise the facelessness of the fashion industry’.

Lester says that Isogawa was a wonderful sitter, ‘so interested in the art and everything about it. He was both interested and interesting to paint’.

Born in Sydney in 1953, Lester is a painter and installation artist. She studied at the National Art School from 1971 to 1974 and then at the Alexander Mackie College, in 1975. Since 1975, she has exhibited in the Wynne, Sulman and, of course, the Archibald Prize. ‘This is now my 13th consecutive year in the Archibald.’

Lester’s portrait of Isogawa is now in the Macquarie University Art Collection.