Jack Hancock (The System) has been practicing as a fashion designer and garment maker since 2006. Graduating with 1st class honours at RMIT in 2012, Jack has worked in a number of corners of the fashion and textiles industry, operating as a pattern maker, a bespoke dressmaker, a costume designer for a number of contemporary dance works and has worked as a technical consultant for a whole range of local brands in Melbourne and surrounding areas.

As a designer Jack’s focus is always principally an exploration of form and fabric. Jack Hancock is a queer designer who explores bodies and forms in objective ways. 

In 2020, Jack established the slow fashion house “The System” which is an exploration into the complex facets of the fashion, textiles and garment making industry. The System is an attempt to find new ways to operate in an industry that feels incongruous with a future that is demanding complete revolution. The garment making practice explores movement & ergonomics of cloth, whilst investigating the traditions of garment making practice and technique from a broad array of chapters of history and across cultures. Jack’s personal research into the political history of Japan, its garment making and wardrobe systems from across the late Warring states period through to the early meiji restoration has been critical in how he sees garments and textiles now. This research allowed Jack to observe the historical shifts within fashion and culture that occur not only across time but as populations of differing cultural expressions encounter one another.

Jack approaches traditional tailoring and contemporary fashion design practice with a somewhat “polyphasic” approach to the type of eras, expressions and design movements that give each piece or collection their meanings. Jack observes and creates garments through a framework that attempts to be highly objective when considering the garment being created, to its wearer and the wearers context. This highly detailed, carefully considered material application and meaning making is somewhat detached from fashion design trends, whilst also trying to express them and say something different with the same objective qualities we take for granted. This objectivity allows for textiles to be recontextulised, forms to be questioned and it fosters a process free from conformity to rigid understandings of what garments must be in their archetypical form. 

Lately Jack has been focusing on garments for ceremonial purposes.