Sydney is style. Appearance is everything and quite naturally the stylish jostles with the dowdy, creating action and reaction.

Looks determine success, marketing is paramount, it becomes the essence of the product itself.

Search the net for 'Sydney' and 'design' - and you get over 700,000 matches. In the city a quest for new design expresses itself everywhere: in restaurants, fast food places, cocktail lounges, office buildings, art galleries, public toilets.

Is it the fact that Sydney is such a new and rising city that triggers this ubiquitous stylishness? "We are thirsting for culture", an Australian friend told me. "Because we have no deeply entrenched local roots we tend to compensate by creating our own new world of style and fashion."

Not just forwards but backwards as well. "Paradoxically, since our anglo-celtic history dates back some 200 years only, we have come to market Aboriginal art and culture as the true Australian heritage, a culture we had suppressed and marginalised for so long."

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