In this conversation, A-ESQUE Founder and Creative Director, Amanda Rettig, reflects on a practice shaped as much by instinct as by discipline. What emerges is a perspective based in feeling, where form follows an intuition rather than convention.
Your work at A-ESQUE has always felt deeply considered yet instinctive — how do you balance restraint with expression when approaching a new design?
We are guided by a combination of forward-thinking instinct, the results and data of our immediate history, and an underlying commitment to inspiring desire. There is also something deeply practical at play — making everything in Melbourne at our Richmond Atelier creates inherent limitations, and those constraints enforce decisions and invite compromise in ways I genuinely believe in. Restraint isn’t a creative sacrifice; it’s often where the most interesting work begins.
Melbourne has a reputation for cultivating a distinctly intellectual and quietly subversive design culture — how has the city shaped your aesthetic language and creative rhythm?
It’s often when I travel that I gain the clearest perspective on what we make at A-ESQUE — and in those moments I feel an enormous pride in it. Seeing our work in an international context makes it very apparent how distinctly Melbourne A-ESQUE feels. There is a subtle confidence to it that is personal, iterative and foundational — something that resists easy definition but is immediately recognisable. The city has shaped not just the aesthetic but the attitude: a quiet conviction that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Your work feels as though it exists in conversation with art as much as design — where does form begin for you: with function, or with feeling?
Feeling is always where it begins — it drives our conversations around what we want to create and informs how every piece ultimately functions. We have never tried to be all things to all people, and staying connected to what genuinely moves us is the conduit to our clients. The affinity with art comes from a lifelong passion for the creative process and an innate love of the way art is presented — the considered placement of an object, the relationship between form and space. That sensibility finds its way into everything we make.
There’s a sculptural clarity to A-ESQUE pieces that borders on the architectural. Do you see your work as wearable objects, or objects that happen to be worn?
Architectural form has been an enduring inspiration. Every new design begins with paper patterns and is built as an object at the Atelier — the placement of seams, the development of design details, the construction of each bag. This is where our innovation lives. I think that process naturally draws the work closer to architecture than to the rhythms of fashion, and I find that distinction meaningful. These are objects first — considered, constructed, resolved — that happen to be carried.