Each year at Thanksgiving, American flags would go up outside the Adams Dolan household in Sydney’s Castle Hill, an affluent suburb about 30 kilometres north-west of the CBD. Matthew Adams Dolan’s mother – an avid quilter and sewer – would ensure the decorations were in place and that a traditional American Thanksgiving would be celebrated. For Christmas, his relatives in America would send him OshKosh and L.L. Bean clothes that he would wear for the next year.
“I have always felt quite American,” says designer Adams Dolan in an Australian accent. Born in a small town outside of Boston, he grew up primarily in Australia, save for stints in high school in countryside Japan and in Switzerland on university exchange. His parents were meant to be in Australia for only a few years, but they enjoyed it so much that it was prolonged – and they still live in Sydney, his father is an agronomist and his mother a narcotics investigator. But he confirmed his outsider status earlier, conscious of his identity as a “non-Australian Australian”, as he puts it, living in Australia,“or when I was in Switzerland or in Japan, where I was obviously not Japanese, so you’re always distanced immediately from everyone because of that”, he says. “When you’re an outsider, you’re able to take a step back and look at everyone and everything else around you.”
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