Joseph & James designer Juanita Page is making menswear to hang out in
We talk to the Melbourne-based designer ahead of her Australian Fashion Week solo runway debut, where she will present her new collection of crisp and clean menswear, titled 'Gathering'
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THE BRUNSWICK HOME office-slash-studio of Juanita Page, the designer behind Joseph & James, is the picture of a young brand preparing for a fashion show. Bolts of fabric are leaning on the wall; binders detailing fabric swatches are splayed open; a rack of runway samples are dressed in plastic covers. I wondered, though, if the paper streamers hanging from the ceiling were possibly a hint at the coming set design. “It was my birthday last weekend,” Page clarifies. “I’m one of four and that was a big thing in my family. Growing up, our parents would make a big deal about all of our birthdays. It was like, ‘This is your special day’. And so when my husband and I got married and I did that for him, it became our tradition as well. Now we’ll always get up before the other and put streamers up and sometimes have balloons . . . I’m a sentimental gal.”
A proud Gooreng Gooreng and South Sea Islander woman, Page’s connections to these home and family traditions are how she starts each of her collections. Speaking to me two weeks out from Australian Fashion Week (AFW), where this year Joseph & James will be making its debut solo runway and is the only menswear brand on the schedule – Page is presenting her collection called ‘Gathering’.
“I thought about what we do as a family that I’ve really enjoyed,” she says of the theme, recalling Sunday lunches of her youth, where her parents would invite old and new friends to get together over food and sharing stories. These narrative touchpoints through her clothes are both how she’s been able to connect with her customers, as well as offer some direction in how men dress today.
Founded in 2021, Page has established her brand as the kindly guide to the already fashionable male shoppers of Australia. Her clothes offer a crisp blend of streetwear ease in the fit and are finished with a tailor’s eye. Fabrication has been key to the brand’s ability to design for the fluctuating and diverse Aussie climate; Page has worked with European mills to develop seersuckers and cottons that are impossible to look dishevelled in. “When I’ve got a strong sense of what I want to make in terms of story, then that connects to the clothes,” says Page. “Customers will see and understand, ‘Oh, yeah, I would wear something like this to go out in’.”
In ‘Gathering’, the theme takes overt forms in a jacket printed with framed family photos, or an oversized shirt featuring cheeky illustrations of dinner plates, tiered cakes, ice-cream cones, clinking coups – a shirt to say I’m going out, indeed. It’s the formal details, though, that balance out the casual approachability of Page’s clothes: those same shirts and jackets feature welted chest pockets; short shorts aren’t so provocative when they’re pleated. It’s an instructional way of designing that Page explains goes back to the namesakes of the brand.
When it came time to put a name on her tags, Page thought: “Who are the main men in my life? And that at the time, and still now, was my dad and my husband, and their middle names are Joseph and James, [respectively] . . . Not only because they are really important to me, but also because of who they are: they value hard work, they’re reliable, they have integrity. My hope was that those qualities would also be like a foundation for what we do as a brand . . . for the clothes to also be hardworking, reliable, and have integrity.”
Part of this thinking started by looking at the market back when she was studying fashion design at RMIT University in Melbourne. “In that space it was like, You do what you want to do, and everyone was doing womenswear,” says Page. “And that was very interesting to me at the time, which made me start wondering about, Well, who’s designing for everybody else?”
Four years on, the space Joseph & James occupies in the menswear landscape is the clean and pure variety that’s designed to withstand trend cycles for years to come.
“I want our customers to feel good when they’re wearing our clothes because they also feel like they look good, you know? There’s that air of confidence. It’s not too flashy, but it’s also got some kind of element to it that’s slightly different, but not too in your face. So I wanted to create something that was in the middle but also comfortable.”
When discussing the path of her career, Page has found that an emerging local brand like Joseph & James finds itself sandwiched between heritage Australian labels and contemporary international brands in the retail landscape. “There is a level of considered risk that should be being taken,” observes Page. “Maybe government investment as well. Because it only seems to be that if a brand makes it overseas, then Australians will take them seriously as opposed to seeing them before they make it and actually really value what they’re doing, like, Let me invest while they’re still building.”
At AFW last year, Joseph & James was the first show on the Indigenous Fashion Projects docket, a grassroots movement supported by major retailer David Jones to show First Nations talent on the calendar. This year, however, will mark the brand’s first solo outing on the runway, and Page has been savouring the world-building possibilities a fashion show offers. “My husband’s day job is in film and TV. So he’s bringing that lens of, How would we film this if this was like a movie?
“Doing something like that and being able to take an opportunity that has more eyes on us, and allows us to contribute towards that conversation of, ‘This is Australian menswear’. We are here, we want to be seen, and we want to be creating stuff for you. It’s uniquely Australian stuff.”
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