Sydney - The smart young things trotting off to Sydney's spring horseracing carnival on a sunny Sunday are as uninspired in their dress sense as the jockeys: the men favour dark business suits and the women black cocktail frocks. It's enough to make renegade Swedish style guru Otto von Busch swallow his scissors.
These are his fashion victims - people condemned to wear this season's outfits and ditch them next year for more run-of-the-mill garments.
The University of Gothenburg academic urges people to have fun with fashion; not to be enslaved by it, but to be liberated - to even get out the scissors and the sewing machine and customize and reinvent.
"I recycle a lot of clothes and I think that's really interesting to do - to try and save the garments that are dying in the back of your wardrobe," he said.
Von Busch calls his approach "hacktivism," drawing an analogy with blogging on the web and news-gathering from lots of internet sources rather than from one daily newspaper and a favourite television channel.
"The format of fashion is extremely conservative," he said. "That's why it's interesting to think about how can fashion think outside the box. It's happened to computers and all kinds of other fields, but not so much yet in fashion and that's what I try to push a little for."
Less of a renegade, but similar in attitude, is New York photographer and fashionista Scott Schuman. A recent visitor to Australia, Schuman has had great success with a blog called The Sartorialist that features the pictures he takes of snappy dressers he finds in his travels around the world.
In Melbourne, Schuman spotted and photographed a man in his 60s he thought was particularly stylish.
"It turned out he was a tailor on Chapel Street in Melbourne, and he just had the most unusual jacket and it turns out he tailored it himself," Schuman said. "It was just totally unusual and he must have done it in 1960 or something and he was still wearing it and was still very much part of his style."
Not surprisingly, Schuman didn't find anything of interest at Royal Randwick racecourse. He gave all those off-the-peg dark business suits and black cocktail frocks a miss.
