Every Stylist Has a Moment. This Was Mine.

Mine was Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals.

I was a teenager in Melbourne. I saw it on Countdown, with Molly Meldrum, the way most Australian kids my age found out what the rest of the world was doing. Until then, I'd never seen anything like it. Fashion was something I understood as pretty. Nice. Something you put on so people would approve.

And then this.

Buffalo Gals came out in November 1982. It was McLaren with the World's Famous Supreme Team, produced by Trevor Horn. The video was filmed on the streets of New York, with the Rock Steady Crew breakdancing, graffiti writers working live, and square-dance calls layered over scratching. For most of the world watching, it was the first time we'd ever seen hip-hop culture on screen.

And then there were the clothes. They were Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Nostalgia of Mud collection, the one everyone now calls Buffalo. Enormous mountain hats. Muddy browns and greys. Slouchy, shapeless sack boots. Skirts worn over padded petticoats. Satin bras worn on the outside, years before anyone had heard of Gaultier doing it.

None of it was pretty. None of it was flattering. That was the point. It wasn't about looking nice. It was about making a statement.

You don't know, at fifteen or sixteen, that you're being handed an education. But that's what it was.

Buffalo Gals sent me looking, and it opened the door to an entirely new world. Westwood first, and through her, The Face and i-D, which showed me that a magazine could have a real point of view. Then Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons and Issey Miyake, who had arrived in Paris the year before with black, unfinished, deliberately "wrong" clothes, and were saying much the same thing in a completely different way.

Those designers, and the stylists around them, shaped my creative life.

There's one detail I love, and I only found it out much later. A Worlds End Buffalo ensemble from that exact collection is held in the National Gallery of Victoria. In Melbourne. The thing that reached across the world and changed everything for me had been sitting twenty minutes from where I grew up the whole time.

Every stylist I've ever respected can point to their own Buffalo Gals. A video, a film, a photograph, an album cover, someone they saw on a tram once and never forgot. It's rarely the obvious thing, and it's rarely the thing that would look impressive on a moodboard. But it's where your eye comes from. And your eye is the only thing in this industry that is truly yours. Everything else can be bought, hired, borrowed or copied.

Mine taught me that style could be art, culture, storytelling and rebellion, all at once.

Sometimes one image, one film or one song changes the course of your life.

For me, this was it.