Hollie Bohun_Portfolio

She Who Wears The Tartan

Hollie Bohun

Collection

Hollie Bohun

bio

Hollie Bohun grounds her work in emotion, history, and the quiet power of texture, using design as a space to explore both personal and cultural identity.

Growing up between the Victorian High Country and suburbia shaped her view of clothing as something that is both deeply functional and highly aesthetic. Her passion for design began early, creating small projects throughout school and earning recognition as a Top Designs shortlister. That thrill of creative accomplishment has fueled her continued exploration of fashion through university, where she is now refining her craft and expanding her design language.

Bohun’s work explores silhouette and surface through auto-ethnographic themes, drawing on personal heritage, historical references, and the curiosity of the past. Her garments often contrast contemporary ideas with references to historical periods, such as the Black Plague, 16th century dress, medieval clothing, 1950s pop art, and the golden age of exploration. This interplay of past and present creates a unique tension in her practice, one that reflects a designer equally fascinated by lineage and innovation.

Looking forward, she aims to create emotionally resonant garments that blend sustainability, storytelling, and sculptural form, designing for a future that honors the past.

Concept Statement

This hero look draws from the raw beauty of Australia’s alpine flora and the tradition steeped strength of 18th and 19th century Scottish Highland dress. It transforms rugged symbolism into a sharply feminine silhouette, merging structured heritage with the softness and wildness of natural forms.

Inspired by botanical textures and Highland craft, tartan wool is manipulated into spiraling textural rosettes. Strips of fabric are wrapped around thick macramé cord and sewn into coiled forms, their sculptural quality echoing native blooms and ceremonial detail. These handmade spirals become motifs of memory and inheritance,

delicate yet weighty, like cultural lineage itself.

Paired with Tencel, a fiber made from wood pulp, the materials reinforce the garment’s grounding in nature while embracing a contemporary sustainable approach. Corset inspired shaping, bold tartans and dramatic proportions mirror the landscape, windswept, grounded and powerful.

This look becomes a hybrid of history and terrain, feminine, defiant and deeply rooted in both heritage and place.

Dusk, midnight, shadow, obsidian, nightfall, ridges, pinewood,distant tus, larch,fern,alpine timber,

wildwood, peak, plateaus,range, carpments, granite, mist, winds,haze,blizzards, overcast air, lakes,gales,streams, brooks, currents, lagoons, ripples, flows, quiet, ty, erie,solace,havens, al shades, drifts, lumen-light.

midnight, twilight, veil, depth, eclipse, nocturne, silhouette,

moonlit skies, starlit distant horizons, pine, pinewood, snowgum, eucalyp- moss, cedar, spruce, alpine ash, bark, groves, canopies, meadows, wildwood, summit, ridge, range, bluff, highlands, trails, valleys, es- carpments, crags, outcrops, boulders, rockfaces, haze, fog, frost, glacial blizzards, chill, drifts, skies, clouds, crisp gales, stillness, silence, streams, stillwaters, currents, tides, pools, springs, reflections,cascades, depths, quiet, calm, tranquili- solace, whispers, lull, rev- havens, serenity, ethere- shades, murmurs, echoes, lumen-light.