Introduction
Paris Jade Burrows is a Sydney-based fashion, costume and performance designer whose practice moves between independent fashion and theatrical production. She trained in Design for Performance at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2023 after work across costume, set and props departments and a formative costume-design role on Ong Keng Sen's production of Sandaime Richard. In 2024 she extended that training through fashion internships with Romance Was Born and SPEED while continuing to design costumes and production environments for theatre, film and music projects.
After NIDA, Burrows established a self-titled fashion label built around a Sydney made-to-order atelier. Its public debut, IT'S REAL IF IT BLEEDS, arrived in May 2025 as a 30-look couture presentation, followed by the ready-to-wear project The Void later that year and the 50-look DORÉ couture presentation in May 2026. Fashion has not displaced her performance work: commissions including Found; Missing Archives for the Biennale of Sydney context run alongside the label, making her career a continuous exchange between garment construction, scenography and live presentation.
Design ethos
Burrows designs through narrative before category. Theatre training taught her to build characters, environments and emotional pacing around clothing, and her fashion work carries those methods into historical dress and contemporary political imagery. Corsetry, tailcoats, exposed horsehair canvas, exaggerated shoulders and elongated skirts recur as structures to be disturbed rather than faithfully reproduced; dye, wax, mud effects, fraying and scenic treatments make the garment surface part of the story.
Her working method is deliberately close to costume-making. Pieces are developed through pattern cutting, hand dyeing, fitting and direct manipulation in a small atelier, with made-to-order production allowing construction to respond to the wearer rather than to a large speculative size run. Even when the label moved into ready-to-wear with The Void, Burrows retained this intimate process, reducing visual complexity while keeping the same attention to line, fabric behaviour and finish. The result is fashion that can move between sale, editorial use and live performance without treating any of those contexts as secondary.
Disclaimer
Career history
2026
The label entered the official Australian Fashion Week schedule through The Frontier, a group presentation at Sydney Theatre Company dedicated to emerging designers. Burrows showed an eight-look preview of DORÉ before presenting the complete couture collection independently four days later.
2025
The label broadened its commercial structure in late 2025 with a ready-to-wear line developed through The Void. The new line simplified the couture vocabulary into a tighter daily wardrobe while retaining local, made-to-order cutting, dyeing and sewing.
2025
Paris Jade Burrows entered public fashion in May 2025 with an independent couture presentation staged at St Barnabas’ Church in Ultimo. The debut established the label’s theatre-derived show format and its use of historical silhouette, scenic distressing and sociopolitical narrative.
2023
Burrows has remained the label’s principal designer from its formation, directing concept, pattern development, fabric treatment and garment construction. Her continuing role also links the fashion collections to a wider practice in costume, scenography and performance.
2023
After completing Design for Performance at NIDA, Paris Jade Burrows began building a self-titled fashion practice in Sydney. The label developed around made-to-order construction, zero-waste cutting and a presentation language drawn from costume and scenography.
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