This website uses cookies to improve your experience navigating our site. By continuing to browse, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
OK, I understand
Australian houses, from architectural masterpieces to suburban family homes, Victorian terraces, mid-century marvels, coastal shacks, city apartments, and everything in between.
Award-winning Australian architecture, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top architects.
Award-winning Australian interior design, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top designers.
In depth features on Australia’s most beautiful gardens and landscape design.
Studio visits with Australia’s most talented creatives, from artists to architects, ceramicists to stylists, furniture makers to lighting designers.
Studio visits with Australia’s top artists, and unmissable art exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond.
Weekly recipes and meal ideas from our favourite cooks, authors and foodies.
Unique travel destinations, design-led accomodation and day trip ideas in Australia and New Zealand.
Australian houses, from architectural masterpieces to suburban family homes, Victorian terraces, mid-century marvels, coastal shacks, city apartments, and everything in between.
Award-winning Australian architecture, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top architects.
Award-winning Australian interior design, inspiring homes, and interviews with Australia’s top designers.
In depth features on Australia’s most beautiful gardens and landscape design.
Studio visits with Australia’s most talented creatives, from artists to architects, ceramicists to stylists, furniture makers to lighting designers.
Studio visits with Australia’s top artists, and unmissable art exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond.
Weekly recipes and meal ideas from our favourite cooks, authors and foodies.
Unique travel destinations, design-led accomodation and day trip ideas in Australia and New Zealand.
Today we welcome The Australian Ballet who are sharing a very special Designing Dance series! Over the coming 5 days The Australian Ballet are opening their doors & showing us some super exclusive behind the scenes action from their design departments. Enjoy! - Jenny x
I’m not the only one at The Australian Ballet who’s intrigued by the room of white tiles, metal vats, and rows upon rows of vibrant-coloured bottles with names like Alfalfa, Coral, Galah and Wombat. Ask anyone here about the dyeing room and they want to know more; and not because of its sinister-sounding name!
It’s in this room that the fabrics for The Australian Ballet’s many costumes are dyed, painted or airbrushed into any number of shades and patterns. And we’re lucky to have master dyer Lynn Munro’s expertise in these areas.
The process almost always starts with the costume designer’s brief but after that it rarely follows the same path. Though the wardrobe department always tries to find the perfect fabric, a large amount of what is bought has to be dyed or altered in some way.
I love the fiery orange and red dress worn by the Marschallin in Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose. Lynn coloured the originally white fabric with two fibre-specific dyes which attached to the silk backing and the rayon pile respectively.
Most of the kimonos for Stanton Welch’s Madame Butterfly were dyed using a similar technique. Different lots of one type of fabric – mattress ticking sourced from a mattress manufacturer; full points for creative thinking by our buyer! – were dyed to create many different kimonos.
But it’s not just fabrics that Lynn changes, chameleon-like, from one shade to another. Occasionally pairs of pale pink pointe shoes are hand-painted black or a bright hue. The men’s canvas shoes require painting for most ballets to match the tights, socks or trousers. And once a custom-colour is mixed, a bottle ends up on the shelf of vibrant-coloured bottles, somewhere between ‘Molto Vivace Apprentice Cupid shoe paint’ and ‘La Fille Mal Garde chicken feet’.
- Fiona Howatt, The Australian Ballet
The Design Files acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present.
First Nations artists, designers, makers, and creative business owners are encouraged to submit their projects for coverage on The Design Files. Please email bea@thedesignfiles.net
The Design Files’ original content and photos are copyright protected. Please email us before reposting our content on other publications, personal websites, or Instagram. Feel free to share our images on Pinterest using the credit ‘via thedesignfiles.net’. Thank you!