Social media has made clothing brands easier to start and considerably harder to sustain, and every week brings another generic label with a clean logo, a considered aesthetic, and a capsule collection.
Australian fashion brands that are building something that lasts have understood, often through painful trial and error, that an audience can smell the difference between a brand and a business pretending to be one, and that the only reliable defence against that kind of scepticism is to mean something before you sell it.
In Sydney, three labels are breaking through by doing precisely that: LÈ BAUS, Motorino, and EARLS Collection each started with a feeling of belonging, of grief, of friendship, of a particular place at a particular hour of the morning – and found that clothing was simply the most durable material in which to preserve it. Their founders, operating across Paddington and Bondi with very different aesthetics and completely different origin stories, have come to the same conclusion…
Community is the product, and everything else hangs off it.
LÈ BAUS
If you step off at Oxford Street and head down a backstreet in Paddington, you’ll find a converted garage that doesn’t look much like an Australian clothing brand.
Here, there are well-dressed people draped over couches, listening to old records with a barista-made coffee in hand, patiently waiting for their backgammon partner to make their next move. There are personal objects with deeper meaning, like a side table from a grandmother’s home, and photography from far-reaching travels of close friends, pinned to the walls. And yes, somewhere among all of it, there’s a clothing collection.
This is LÈ BAUS, an Aime-Leon-Dore-esque boutique that sees hundreds of Sydneysiders passing through its doors any given weekend, hoping some of the magic rubs off on them too.
Founded by Bayan Fanaeyan, the label takes its name from the Farsi word for clothing – a quiet nod to his Iranian heritage that runs deeper than the branding, but guides the brand through intentional design.
“It’s not something I’ve ever pushed overtly as a founder – it’s more subtle and expressed naturally,” Fanaeyan tells B.H. “LÈ BAUS is really a reflection of my perspective – how I see design, space, and community. Your identity inevitably shows up in your taste, your decisions, and the energy you create. For me, it’s less about explaining who I am and more about letting people feel it through the brand.”
If you were on Instagram last month, you’ll no doubt have seen LÈ BAUS’ incredibly inviting new space proudly shown across your feed.
Perhaps it’s the return to analogue we’ve all been yearning for in 2026, but few places can offer that sense of tangible community quite like a brick-and-mortar store, and the brand’s Paddington home has broken through the algorithm and ignited something within the local community.
“I wanted to create more than a retail space – I envisioned somewhere my friends could hang out, have coffee, and connect over music and shared moments,” Fanaeyan explains.
“By making it feel natural and inviting, it allowed the space to grow organically, with friends bringing in friends and forming a community. The clothing sits within that, but the foundation has always been about bringing people together.”
“Since I was a child, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of having my own store,” he continues. “But it became a necessity once I began developing the garments. At a higher price point, it’s difficult to fully communicate quality, fabric, and fit online – especially as a new brand. Having a physical space allowed people to truly experience the product the way it’s meant to be felt.”
And that feeling is stitched into every garment that leaves the store, each LÈ BAUS piece, handmade in Portugal by a family-owned factory. When a piece sells out, it’s gone, unless it’s part of the core collection.
With manufacturing originally in Australia, Fanaeyan eventually cast the net wider. It became a philosophy that took two years and several continents to realise, country after country, before ultimately landing in Portugal. The setbacks were frequent, but Fanaeyan remained constant in the standard he wanted to achieve.
“I was very clear on the level of quality and detail I wanted, and I wasn’t willing to compromise. I still remember the moment the samples came back exactly how I envisioned; I was genuinely in tears. That was a pivotal moment early on, and it really came down to persistence and trusting that the right partner was out there.”
That level of quality isn’t something you can communicate through a screen, but feel in the fabric. It’s the reason the Paddington store has reached through the feed since its launch, with people stopping by to check out the latest drop or simply to enjoy a coffee and a yarn with like-minded individuals.
“Opening the store was the most pivotal decision in getting LÈ BAUS off the ground,” he says. “It was daunting at first, but I always knew the brand was meant to be more than just clothing – it was an experience, a world of its own. The space allowed that vision to fully come to life.”
“Today, it’s reflected in everything we do. Bringing people together to enjoy vinyl, good coffee, and well-made clothes. That sense of connection, of friends becoming friends, is really the essence of LÈ BAUS.”
Motorino
Keep heading down Oxford St, through to Bondi Junction and then down to Campbell Parade in Bondi, and you’ll find a different kind of Sydney entirely. Where 7 AM on the beach is already late, and the best waves have long since been ridden.
It’s a different kind of social scene, built around tides and training runs rather than coffee and backgammon, and since 2016, it’s had a clothing brand to match. Though that was never exactly the plan for mates Clarrie Moore and Jack Grant.
“We called ourselves the North Bondi Motorino Social Club because we’d ride around on motorbikes in matching tees, make funny videos, and just have a laugh with the boys,” Motorino Co-Founder Clarrie Moore tells us.
What began as a few weekend runs quickly came with an open invitation to anyone keen for a team ride and a good time, combining that uniquely Australian larrikin energy with the kind of lifestyle that can only be found in Sydney. And the brand’s first-ever product, the OG Club Tee, wasn’t far behind.
Though it was a natural head-turner with the locals, Moore says the tee was less a piece of clothing than a symbol of the Motorino mentality. One tee turned into three, three turned into a brand, and somewhere along the way, the Social Club became something far bigger than its founders had planned.
“Motorino has always been about mates getting together, having fun, repping where they’re from, looking cool and feeling cool,” Moore says. “That spirit is still the identity of the brand today.”
It’s a spirit that extends naturally to how the business itself is run to this day. A uniquely Australian fashion brand launched by a group of mates who wanted to reach out to their community. So I had to ask them, “Would you recommend getting into business with a friend?”
“Yeah, I would,” Moore says without hesitation. “It’s definitely not always sunshine and rainbows. Business is tough, and it constantly puts you in the trenches. But when things get hard, who would you rather be beside than one of your best mates?”
“If you’ve played footy together, struggled together, grown up together, you already know what kind of person they are under pressure. You might disagree at times, but when things get hard, you look at each other and think, ‘There’s no one else I’d rather be in this fight with.'”
The shift from social club to clothing label didn’t arrive with a business plan, but with the long-forgotten, though frequently referenced, global pandemic that shook the world.
As the local muck arounds dried up, Moore and co-founder Jack Grant turned their attention to content and clothes, reaching out to a community of people who found themselves increasingly disconnected. It was around this time that the brand released the Lords of the Hood collection and changed the direction of the social club forever.
“That was the moment where I thought, ‘F–k, this is actually becoming a real clothing brand,'” Moore continues. “It stopped feeling like a social club making merch and started feeling like something much bigger.”
The turning point, he says, was getting their first space – a North Bondi flagship named the Motorino Love Shack that gave the brand somewhere to create content, hold meetings, build the culture, and show people what the brand was actually about.
“We needed a creative space and an office anyway, but if we were going to do it in Bondi, we thought we should have a shop too – Jack really pushed for that,” Moore continues.
“Once we opened, people genuinely wanted to come in, try stuff on, hang out and vibe out. Bondi is such a lifestyle destination. You grab a coffee, go for a swim, and check out stores. We wanted Motorino to be part of that experience.”
In 2026, Motorino celebrates 10 years of the journey that once started with a single thread and now extends to the whole community, releasing this year’s winter collection.
The campaign that accompanies it has quietly gone viral, and it’s not hard to see why: a ball of yarn unravels through Sydney’s most sought-after suburb, winding through iconic locations against the backdrop of sunrises and surf, along the Bondi promenade, past the beach’s outdoor gym, through residential backstreets and late-night spots, before arriving at the home of Motorino and the people who built it, sharing the same beliefs they always have. And, the brand stresses, without a thread of AI.
“As we’ve grown, I’ve realised how unique Sydney, especially Bondi, really is. You’ve got this urban street culture living right beside the beach. Not many places in the world have that mix,” Clarrie says.
“Motorino sits right in the middle of it. Beach culture mixed with fashion, nightlife, food, music and street energy. That combination feels uniquely Australian, and it’s probably our biggest point of difference as a brand. We’re really proud of that.”
EARLS Collection
Back up Bondi Road and along Oxford Street, sits EARLS Collection, the Paddington brick-and-mortar home of former NRL player Lewi Brown, whose story goes far beyond sports and fashion – though it’s one closely intertwined with both.
“I got called into a room by six teachers with my mum to say, ‘This kid needs to let go of this NRL dream. Do you know how many kids make it out of Christchurch?’ I laughed, and they got angry at me. Because they’re meant to be empowering me, to tell me, ‘You should dream. You should dream, young boy. You should have the biggest dreams in the world.’ Not shoot them down.”
Brown went on to make 197 appearances in the NRL (or 198, Brown jokes, depending on which Wikipedia entry you read), with stints at the Roosters, Warriors, Panthers and Sea Eagles, and 15 tests for New Zealand. He went back to that same school years later as a guest speaker. Some of those same teachers were in the room.
Within days of retiring from the NRL, he had started building EARLS Collection. Though Brown’s drive wasn’t, as he puts it, “just regurgitating something that’s currently in the market.”
His catalyst was grief, losing his father to suicide in 2017. At the funeral, he discovered his grandfather and great-grandfather had met the same fate. The only thread connecting all three generations was a shared middle name: Earl. A name he had always hated, but he resolved to give new meaning. It’s now proudly carried through every uniquely sought-after piece his Sydney label releases.
“This brand is built on mental health,” Brown says quietly. “If it wasn’t for my dad, who knows – I probably might not have done EARLS.”
When he launched the brand, the doubters continued to circle. “When I hopped into this space of EARLS, the same messaging came: ‘He’s just another footy player, it’s just going to be another footy brand. I take receipts,” he says, “but I don’t show them. I just store them and use them as fire.”
Of course, sport is, and will always be, a core part of the EARLS DNA. As Brown says, it’s “the floorboards of this brand.” But you only have to take a look at what this uniquely Australian X New Zealand label has become to see that a brand can’t just be reduced to where it came from.
It carries Māori culture and personal history. The community behind it has been built the only way Brown knows how: through storytelling and authenticity.
“No community, no brand,” he says. “You don’t have a light switch, and then all of a sudden you have a community. You’ve got to build that over time, through storytelling and authenticity, through what you stand for and what the foundation of your brand stands for.”
That foundation carried him somewhere he never anticipated. “I got a sneaker before I got an office,” he says, still with a trace of disbelief. “That kind of shows the history of EARLS. I’ve just felt my way through this space.”
That sneaker was the first EARLS x ASICS collaboration, the GT-2160 called Ngāwari, Māori for “tread gently,” arriving the day after Brown lost his grandfather, the man who raised him, his father figure.
“ASICS reached out in an email that same day,” he says. “I thought we were just going to get sent shoes for photoshoots. And then all of a sudden they said they’d love to do a co-label.”
“I got a sneaker before I got an office.”
Lewi Brown, EARLS Collection Founder
The ASICS relationship, he says, mirrors the most important one of his life. “It really reminds me of my grandad and me – that older, wiser brand taking this younger, juvenile human with a big imagination on a journey, opening up doors that would never necessarily happen. Two good humans. Two good brands. Organically, we found each other.”
The second collaboration goes further still, releasing a new GT shoe and the first-ever EARLS x ASICS rugby boot, a product that had never existed before in the partnership’s history. Global HQ even called it a soccer boot.
“Pressure makes diamonds,” Brown says. “And for me, I’m the type of person that I need pressure in my life, because that’s where I grow. That’s where you get the best out of me.”
Brown took the ASICS campaign home to Christchurch, back to Belfast, and the community club that made sure he had food, a lift to training, and boots when he couldn’t afford them.
He took the campaign back to his 90-year-old nana, whom he had struggled to connect with since his grandfather’s passing, bringing her into the global campaign. Though she’s not the most tech-savvy, she has since made Lewi’s mum drive to her house so that she can watch it twice a week.
“We haven’t been able to talk properly since the day my grandfather passed away,” Brown says. “We’re super close, but we just cry with each other. This project gave us a way to reconnect. Where his death is celebrated, not just mourned.”
When you watch the campaign, you’ll see Lewi’s “special, special” mum featured too. Celebrated after working three jobs to keep the lights on. Some weeks with no power. Brown says he often had holes in his shoes.
“She didn’t tell me to work hard,” Brown tells me. “She showed me how to work hard, by her actions and how she would commit herself to her work.”
During the final shoot of the day, Brown picked up a ball and drop-kicked it off one of the new boots, the way he used to kick off his grandfather’s shoe as a kid, because they couldn’t afford a tee. It wasn’t in the shot list, but Brown reckoned he had it in his sights, clearing the house in his first attempt, and the shoe fell on its side.
He had to make a quick dash around the building to make sure it hadn’t landed on any of the camera equipment on the other side. And something remarkable happened: the shoe propped back up to an upright position.
“I could feel him there,” Brown tells me. “Him and my dad. They were both there. And they looked after me on this one as well.”
“Part of this campaign, I wanted people to feel goosebumps. I wanted them to feel like they wanted to pick up the phone and call their grandma or their nana or their mum and just tell them they love them.”
“To be able to go back and showcase my home and my community, Belfast, where I came from – that big house that, when you drive down that main road of Belfast, it’s hard to miss. So to shine the light on them and Christchurch as well.”
“Who would have thought the little boy from Christchurch with a massive dream, who got told that he would never make the NRL, who would pop up on the other side and who, once upon a time, never had a shoe, or couldn’t even afford his own boots or shoes, now he has his own boot and his own shoe. It was just all meant to be.”
For Brown, the lesson is to stay true to who you are. It’s the only strategy that holds, he says. During his NRL years, he’d show up to club events in a cardigan. It wasn’t exactly the most common thing to see blokes wearing on gameday. But he wore it anyway.
“I’m probably more me today than I have ever been,” he says. “And you know, the coolest message I ever got from ex-players is, ‘It’s so cool just to see you stay true to who you are.'”
“To be able to get the tag of fashion-forward brand now, that’s a title you earn,” Brown says. “You don’t just get given that. That’s earned through your designs, the way you hold yourself as a brand, and the way you elevate your product.”
