Excellence in fashion & education
Deborah Fisher was enrolled at Caboolture State High School as Deborah Long on 24 January 1977. Deborah won Academic Awards for English and Speech and Drama, and also enjoyed sport, being part of the Premiership Netball C team in 1979, and the Girls' Soccer Zone Premiership teams in 1980 and 1981. She was also part of the school musicals, Oliver and Calamity Jane, which sparked an early interest in costume design.
Deborah attended the Queensland College of Art, studying Fashion Design. After being announced as Queensland Fashion Designer of the Year in 1987, Deborah went to New York to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Merchandising and Management at the Pratt Institute and was named on the Dean's List for the Institute in 1991. She worked for fashion designers, such as Liz Claiborne, and designed seasonal collections for stores such as Bloomingdale's and Macy's. Her work as a fashion designer, stylist and forecaster involved working with factories in 13 nations, bringing young people into work as weavers in Guatemala, teaching screen printing in juvenile detention centres in Los Angeles, and rejuvenating an Eastern European factory from making military clothing to designing t-shirts for GAP.
After returning to Australia, and taking up a lecturing position with the University of the Sunshine Coast, Deborah has turned her attention to sustainability in fashion, upending the idea that fashion is something to be disposed of, because of the huge human cost involved in making clothes. In her work teaching fashion and design at UniSC, and in her PhD studies, Deborah is exploring fashion and identity, and particularly how fashion represents and incorporates people with disabilities. She sees both diversity and inclusivity as being integral to the fast-changing cycles of fashion design, as are women's relationships with clothing through material culture, personal branding and design thinking. Deborah received the Women in Fashion Award for the Outstanding Educator/Mentor in the Industry in 2020 and, in 2021, the UniSC Vice-Chancellor & President's Award for Inclusion and Diversity.