Lilian Nicol-Ford

Lilian Nicol-Ford is an Australian fashion designer, historian of visual culture and co-founder of Nicol & Ford. Her academic background includes art history and theory and archaeology at the University of Sydney, giving the joint practice a historical base that reaches beyond fashion history into art, literature, social history and material culture. Historical publications under another public name refer to the same continuous founder; Nicol & Ford’s current authorship is shared by Lilian and Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford.

Lilian met Katie-Louise in 2013 at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick during the Sydney premiere of The Great Gatsby. The pair began working together as The Gold Hatted Lovers, a name drawn from Fitzgerald’s epigraph, and produced their first documented collection in 2014. In 2017 they replaced the original name with Nicol & Ford and continued the same founder partnership.

Within the atelier, Lilian leads much of the historical and conceptual development while participating in design, fitting and production. The collections often begin with a person, text, place or archive that opens a wider social question: queer domesticity through Carlos de Beistegui, Regency culture through the Great Comet of 1811, Rosaleen Norton and the policing of outsiders, Magnus Hirschfeld and the destruction of queer archives, or Adrian Feint and coded intimacy in Sydney art. Lilian’s role is to build the historical field closely enough that the clothing can respond to more than surface imagery.

The historical study is then tested through community and collaboration. Nicol & Ford casts many runway participants from the founders’ own Sydney networks and commissions specialist makers when a collection calls for particular footwear, metal, leather, jewellery or body effects. Lilian helps connect those elements to the collection’s historical narrative, ensuring that an accessory, movement sequence or setting participates in the same argument as the garments.

Her work has increasingly moved into cultural programming as well as fashion. She co-designed the Darlinghurst Theatre Company costumes for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, contributed to Powerhouse and Museums of History NSW projects and co-curated Inner West: Ideas for the Biennale of Sydney in 2026. Nicol & Ford remains her active design practice, combining the annual runway with made-to-order production, direct client work and institutional projects.

Lilian’s design method begins with historical inquiry broad enough to change the shape of a collection. A historical subject is examined through images, social conditions, objects, relationships and surviving cultural traces, allowing the founders to identify tensions that can be expressed through clothing. This approach keeps a reference such as Rosaleen Norton or Magnus Hirschfeld from collapsing into portraiture or costume quotation.

She is particularly attentive to how queer histories survive through partial records. Patronage, censorship, coded imagery, nightlife, private intimacy and destroyed archives all appear as design material because they affect how a past life can be seen in the present. The collections use this incompleteness productively, translating it into shifts of colour, exposure, armour, ornament and bodily transformation.

Lilian’s historical role remains connected to making. She shares design and production with Katie-Louise, works through fittings and material decisions, and develops collections inside the constraints of a small atelier. Historical depth is filtered through available textile, the selected wearer and the capacities of the specialist maker network instead of existing as a detached concept document.

The later institutional projects extend the same method beyond the runway. Theatre costuming, Biennale curation and Treading Feintly all use fashion as one component of a wider cultural encounter. For Lilian, historical study becomes most useful when it creates a situation in which clothing, people, objects and place can be read together.