TENDER FEELING

It was in the crucible of Melbourne’s 1980s clubland that music, film, fashion and design began dancing to one syncopated beat and posturing to a different modernity. The Cold War was peaking, Reaganomics ruled, and counterculture was resetting everything as the city’s brightest young things raged against the dying of the light.

“We all expressed ourselves in the most individual way we knew how,” recalls fashion powerhouse Fiona Scanlan, cofounder of the Scanlan and Theodore label — who back then belonged to a coterie of cool kids counting teenager Martin Grant — who make-shifted fashion into a new frontier. “I think back and compare