Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford

Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford is an Australian fashion designer, pattern cutter and co-founder of Nicol & Ford. Before the joint practice, she studied sewing, fashion and costume design and worked in costume production, including professional costume-making experience connected with Boston Ballet while living in New York. In 2009 she also ran a small independent label and Etsy shop in Melbourne, selling simple dresses online and at markets before closing that operation.

In 2013 she met Lilian Nicol-Ford at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick during the Sydney premiere of The Great Gatsby. Their relationship developed into a shared fashion and vintage practice under the name The Gold Hatted Lovers. The first documented collection is dated 2014, and the pair continued under that name until 2017, when the practice was renamed Nicol & Ford. Katie-Louise has remained a continuous co-designer from the first collection through the current atelier.

Her principal contribution is technical as well as conceptual. Katie-Louise performs much of the pattern cutting, sewing and garment construction in the Newtown atelier, translating historical references into clothes made for contemporary bodies. Early product records describe garments made by the founders in their Sydney home studio with two- or three-week lead times, custom sizing and editions sometimes limited to only a handful of pieces. That direct making model remains central even as the public scale of the collections has expanded.

Nicol & Ford entered Australian Fashion Week in 2022 with La Pouffe and returned annually through Feint in 2026. Across these collections Katie-Louise has worked with community-led casting and a body-specific construction method in which looks are fitted around selected wearers. She also shares the atelier’s specialist collaborations with footwear, leather, metal, jewellery and silicone makers, integrating externally made components into clothing that remains authored by the founders.

Her practice extends beyond seasonal runway work. Katie-Louise co-designed costumes for Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, contributed to Nicol & Ford’s museum and exhibition projects and co-curated Inner West: Ideas for the Biennale of Sydney in 2026. She continues to lead the technical life of an active made-to-order atelier producing custom-sized clothing, bespoke eveningwear and bridal commissions alongside its annual public projects.

Katie-Louise approaches design through construction. Historical imagery becomes useful only when it can be converted into proportion, cut, volume and movement on an actual body. Her costume training makes period clothing a technical resource instead of a template to copy: an Oxford-bag trouser, Regency volume, bias-cut gown or corseted structure can be dismantled and rebuilt for the wearer and the present collection.

Fit is part of that process. Nicol & Ford’s cast-first method asks the atelier to design around individual bodies instead of treating a single sample size as neutral. Custom sizing for clients follows the same principle. Katie-Louise’s pattern cutting therefore carries much of the label’s politics of representation at a practical level, through where a garment opens, supports, exposes, drapes or permits movement.

She also works responsively with finite materials. Remnant and deadstock fabrics, inherited textiles, antique beads, salvaged lace and singular components can limit the number of garments that can be made, while leather, metal, silicone or hand-painted silk may require a specialist collaborator. The task is to resolve those constraints into coherent clothing without hiding the handwork or pretending that an atelier piece belongs to industrial-scale production.

Across runway, theatre and bespoke work, Katie-Louise’s design ethos remains grounded in making. History, image and community may establish the direction of a project, but construction determines whether the concept survives contact with a moving body.