By CASEY NEILL
HOSNIA Mohammad couldn’t sew in a straight line three years ago.
Now her couture creations will be in the fashion spotlight at Melbourne Spring Fashion Week and the Victorian Spring Racing Carnival.
The Narre Warren mother of three designed and produced one of five winning collections in a collaborative competition between Kangan Institute, Red Cross and Fashion blogger Le Blonde Fox, AKA Adriana Perri.
Contestants transformed Red Cross donations into unique outfits for Adriana and her photographer Dermie McIntosh to wear at key fashion events.
Winning designs will also feature in a window display at the Red Cross retail shop in Bridge Road, Richmond.
“You’re all so talented I’m forever grateful to wear such beautiful pieces … you all have such big futures ahead of you,” Adriana said.
Hosnia’s designs featured more than 330 hand-sewn flowers made from old bedding and butterflies cut from printed pyjamas.
She made a top made from a pants leg with the cuff as a collar on one side, and transformed curtains into a floor-length lace jacket.
“I don’t decide what I’m doing, it just comes by itself,” she said.
Hosnia moved to Australia from Afghanistan in 2004 and married her husband.
“I was working with the United Nations. I was already speaking English,” she said.
“I’d never been to Australia before. It was a new city but things were fine.
“I could speak to people, I could go out and talk to people.”
She taught at a TAFE in Tasmania, studied and worked in administration at Chisholm Institute in Dandenong, and gave birth to three children, now aged 10, 6 and 3.
After having her third child, Hosnia explored studying interior design but the course was too far away.
She stopped by Kangan for inspiration and found fashion.
“As soon as I entered the corridor I decided ‘I’m going to do this’,” she said.
That was in 2012. She finished the three-year fashion design diploma in July.
The wattle-inspired dress she made from Australian wool graces the cover of Kangan’s Creative Industries Course Guide 2016.
“I could never sew. The first day they asked us to sit at the machines. They were industrial sewing machines,” she said.
They had to sew along dots printed on paper.
“If I showed you that you’d laugh your head off,” she said.
“I could not sew in a straight line.”
She’s come a long way.
“I can’t believe it,” she said.
“I was the oldest in the class. The youngest was 16 or 17.”
Hosnia wants to run her own boutique, but money is tight so her dream is on hold.
“I want to create things,” she said.
“I just want to bring the traditional and the modern together.”
