The claustrophobic, camp horror worlds of Dario Argento. The lurching, fantastical realm of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The amorphous romance of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. The mind-bending surrealism of Salvador Dali. All have seeped under the skin of Suzaan Stander and into her designs.
A graduate of the University of Technology Sydney, Stander creates clothes that embody an all-encompassing vision, perhaps to recapture the feeling she first had experimenting with fabric scraps and begging her dressmaker mother to whip up a fairy costume that would whisk her off to a dream world.
"The fun for me was always in experimentation, in creating a character," she says.
Now, at 24, the designer's compulsion has matured but remains connected to states of mind. "What compels me about fashion design is the ability to fuse historical research and art into a moving body of work," she explains. "I've always been a sucker for academic research and often find myself enchanted by articles detailing the unique psychological connection between people and clothing."
Her work - twisted, torqued construction and corsetry, somewhere between armour and a warped fairytale - demands of her psychological fortitude.
"I'll spend hours in front of the mannequin placing separate pattern pieces I've made, fitting them onto the body like puzzle pieces," she says. Each piece is then lined and boned - one leather jacket with boning took her a week of hand-sewing. Showing at Australian fashion week this year is a launch pad: she wants to continue making custom pieces and expand into ready-to-wear while building her dream world. "I'm aiming to capture the same joy I got as a little girl dressing up in elaborate costumes."