Miimi & Jiinda Returns to Paris with Migaana

One year after our European debut, we return to Paris with Migaana, the first collection in our Day to Night series. Selected for the inaugural Australian Fashion Rooms, Miimi & Jiinda will present the collection with founder and creative director Melissa Greenwood and her mother, artist Lauren Jarrett, both travelling to Paris.

This September, Miimi & Jiinda returns to Paris with a more refined expression of the work Melissa Greenwood has been developing for almost eight years. Migaana brings original painting into substantial silk, fluid silhouettes and considered tailoring. Its central artwork is one Melissa and her mother, Lauren Jarrett, made together.

For Melissa, the ambition for Miimi & Jiinda has always reached well beyond the studio. She wants people to encounter something she has known all her life: the beauty of her culture, the intelligence within it, and the generosity of the people who have shaped her. Through painting, and now through the contemporary Aboriginal fashion and art house she is building, she has found a way to share that world.

This year, Miimi & Jiinda is among 12 designers selected for the inaugural Australian Fashion Rooms, presented by the Australian Fashion Council during Paris Fashion Week. At Galerie Poggi, international buyers and editors will encounter Migaana alongside Australian collections ranging from ready-to-wear to couture. An opening reception at the Australian Embassy, hosted by Australian Ambassador to France Lynette Wood, will bring the designers together with buyers, media and cultural figures.

It is a significant step from the first European presentation a year ago. Miimi & Jiinda returns as part of a national showcase, with Migaana giving clearer form to Melissa’s ambitions for the house. The work continues to begin at home on Gumbaynggirr Country on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, where she lives, paints and develops the collections.

Beauty changes the way we see

Melissa founded Miimi & Jiinda in 2018. Its matriarchal foundations are deeply personal, shaped by the lived experience of her mother Lauren, who was taken from her family at nine years old as part of the Stolen Generations, and by the strength of her grandmother, who raised 14 children. Their stories helped ignite Melissa’s determination to create change, celebrate culture and build something meaningful for future generations. Lauren encouraged Melissa’s confidence in her art; Melissa, in turn, wanted the business to help her mother recognise the value of her own work.

That encouragement carries particular weight in a family whose experience includes the forced removal of Lauren from her parents as a child. What she reclaimed and passed on helped shape Melissa’s determination to change how Aboriginal people and culture are seen. It informed years of advocacy before the house began, and continues through what she chooses to make.

Melissa knows the distance between the culture she lives and the narrow perceptions through which it is sometimes viewed. Speaking about those perceptions, she says: “I think the most powerful way to change them is simply to share the beauty of who we are.”

As she leads Miimi & Jiinda further into fashion, original paintings remain works in their own right. She wants the making of the clothes to reflect the care she gives the artwork. The fabric has to feel right, and the cut must allow the painting to find its place on the body. A woman should feel that care when she puts a garment on, before she knows its story.

Migaana, from painting to silk

Melissa and Lauren have an instinctive way of working together. Melissa begins a painting, Lauren spends time with it, and the work moves between them until it becomes one. Migaana’s central artwork emerged through this exchange.

Now, both artists will be in Paris as that work is presented in another form. In silk, its colour shifts with the light. A fold brings one passage forward and conceals another; walking changes what is seen. There is something intimate in this passage from a painting made between two women to a garment that becomes part of another woman’s life.

Migaana takes its name from a Gumbaynggirr word that speaks to revolving, rotating and moving through cycles. That meaning resonated with Melissa through the rhythms she experiences on Country and the movement of her own days. Her relationship with Country continues to shape the work, including an evolving collection rhythm that draws from Gumbaynggirr seasons and the changes observed around her.

The first Day to Night collection grew from Melissa’s own desire to feel comfortable and beautifully dressed through the different demands of her life. Home, the studio, work and an evening out rarely arrive as neatly separated occasions. She wanted clothes that understood that.

Substantial 19-momme silk gives the collection both weight and fluidity. Bias-cut slips and wide-leg trousers sit alongside shirts, wraps and refined tailoring. The Migaana garments presented in Paris are designed and made in Australia, developed with close attention to fit and finish, including French seams across many styles. Those details matter to Melissa because they change how the clothes feel to wear.

What Miimi & Jiinda brings to Paris

“Why shouldn’t Indigenous culture be associated with luxury?” Melissa asks. “The stories I paint are stories of Country. They are stories of family, culture and lived experience. I hold them with deep reverence. To me, those stories deserve a beautiful canvas.”

For Melissa, the quality of the clothes is a way of honouring what the artwork carries. Migaana makes that conviction tangible, and brings us to Paris with a collection through which people can experience the direction the house is taking.

Miimi & Jiinda is returning to build an international future for this work. Australian Fashion Rooms gives us the opportunity to present it in person, to begin new conversations and continue those opened a year ago. Melissa and Lauren will be there together, with their shared painting now expressed through the collection.

Some people will begin with a colour, others with the fall of a sleeve or the feeling of silk. From there, a conversation can begin about the painting, the women who made it and their relationship with Gumbaynggirr Country.

Migaana will be presented at Australian Fashion Rooms, Galerie Poggi, 135 Rue Saint-Martin, Paris, from 30 September to 4 October 2026. For showroom appointments, contact info@miimiandjiinda.com.