Emma Elizabeth has attended Salone del Mobile most years since 2003, though not since 2023, and her assessment of what Milan has become is direct: rising talent has been priced out, and the fair is losing something because of it. For someone who graduated from IED Milano in 2006 and exhibited there the same year—before spending the better part of two decades leading cohorts of Australian designers to 5 Vie under the Local Design banner—this is not an abstraction, but a structural issue. LOST HiDE, her current exhibition at The Store, Abbotsford Convent as part of Melbourne Design Week, responds to that shift in some way; a demonstration that the conditions for serious design work can be built here, without the 26 hours in transit.
Studying Scenografia at IED gave Elizabeth what she describes as a sense of immediacy—no separation between learning and doing, with lessons delivered through real-world projects alongside local Milanese companies, and presentations conducted in Italian while her grasp of the language was still forming. Beyond the education itself, the city offered something equally formative: craftsmanship, fashion, architecture and art layered closely together, operating symbiotically. Milan taught her how to edit, position and construct a world around an idea. Growing up between the UK and Australia had already shaped a dual perspective—the British appreciation for material longevity and cultural layering on one side, and Australia’s openness and relative freedom from legacy on the other.
Leather Lamella designed by Richards Stanisich for LOST HiDE.
Kiro floor lamp designed by Leah Martin for LOST HiDE, crafted from leather, parchment and solid brass.
Sydney-based lighting designer Leah Martin
LOST HiDE began, as many of Elizabeth’s projects do, in the moment and on the ground. Visiting longtime friend Darren McKinnon of Swiss Design, she noticed stacks of leather piled throughout the warehouse. McKinnon, under pressure and wanting them gone, told her to take them, and she happily obliged, loading close to seventy hides into a van before stopping to count them or consider the colours. The leathers—mostly Maharam, Kvadrat and Pelle—were commercial selects passed over for one project or another, and Elizabeth saw in that rejection exactly the kind of material she wanted to work with: familiar enough to carry associations, available enough to redistribute freely and raw enough to ask something new of the people receiving it.
Twelve designers were given hides and a deliberately open brief—a set of reference images, a handful of thought-starter questions and room to move. The intention was to strip the material back to its weight, tactility and narrative potential, asking designers to engage with it on those terms alone. Participants span a broad range of practices, among them Adam Goodrum, Tom Fereday, Richards Stanisich and Clementine Blackman.
Selection, Elizabeth says, was based as much on character as output, with years of curating group exhibitions sharpening her understanding of what allows a collective to function well: designers who are kind, willing to challenge themselves and the work, and capable of holding a position without fracturing the dynamic around them. The WhatsApp chats, ladder climbs and van rides all form part of the process. Elizabeth describes herself as a grassroots operator, and believes the best work is made that way—directly and in the moment.
Multidisciplinary designer Dean Norton for LOST HiDE.
Curator, stylist and creative director Emma Elizabeth for LOST HiDE
Elizabeth’s practice moves across design, styling, production, creative direction and curation in a way that makes a show like this the natural place where all of it converges, and the ‘FOMO’, as she puts it plainly, was too great to leave her own work out. The space at Abbotsford Convent is part of the curatorial brief too, its layered history shaping both the positioning and the set design from the outset.
What she keeps returning to, across the formation years and the Local Design program and the work being made now, is a single question her practice has always been organised around, why does this need to exist, and what does it contribute? Melbourne, she thinks, is asking that question seriously. What remains is to make sure the rest of the world is listening, too.
LOST HiDE runs 14-24 May at The Store, Abbotsford Convent, as part of Melbourne Design Week. Free, no booking required.
Soft Spot armchairs by Adam Goodrum, upholstered in reclaimed leather hides, explores the material potential of leather through a considered reversal of its surfaces.