Our Story


With her devotion to craftsmanship and sustainability, designer Hoshika Oshimi invites us into ESS Laboratory to explore the dialectical complexities of illusion and reality. She celebrates the brutality of beauty, the compression and rearrangement of time, and the harmonic and discordant moments embedded in our memories and dreams.
Her garments are not easily definable, interweaving historical design motifs with an idiosyncratic form and structure that is as transformative as it is timeless. Hand-crafted in Melbourne from carefully sourced Japanese fabrics, her intricately developed pieces are true ensembles of history; layering references drawn from music, art, literature and poetry with the designer’s own field of subconscious enquiry.
As a conduit for Oshimi’s sensorial and material perceptions, within ESS Laboratory we are invited on a journey where time is sculpted in liminal increments. She asks us to slow down, to speed up, to stop, reflect and to introspect. Along the way we encounter regeneration, nostalgia, the reflections and refractions of fashion when it intersects with the creator’s consciousness. Indeed, the designer’s deepest mind and manifesto is evidenced in each facet of her thoughtfully composed world.