The augustly named Fashion Design Council was in fact a riotous tribe of like-minded creatives who were convinced of the transformative power of fashion.

Founded in 1982 by illustrator and radio presenter Robert Pearce, jewellery designer Kate Durham and arts law graduate Robert Buckingham, the FDC formed for a decade the hub around which peacocky Melbourne revolved.

Their elaborate events are the stuff of urban legend. The flyer for the Fashion Babylon show in December 1988 invited us to witness "brazen hussies, glamour pusses, spivs and bright sparks; rising stars, mischief-makers and the phenomenal dreams of groovy fashion designers implode onto the catwalk".

That catwalk was installed in the massive Metro nightclub on Bourke Street, the queue outside as elaborately dressed as the models who would eventually, glamorously late, gambol down the podium.

"I wasn't a member of the FDC but I did sometimes have the joy – and sometimes the agony – of lining up for parades and various events," remembers Professor Robyn Healy, head of RMIT's School of Fashion & Textiles. Healy is co-curator, along with Dr Fleur Watson, Kate Rhodes and Nella Themelios of High Risk Dressing/Critical Fashion, which opened at RMIT's Design Hub last month.

The show is based on the archive of paraphernalia donated to RMIT by Buckingham, formerly creative director of the Melbourne Fashion Festival and now chief executive of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation and creative director of its annual  MPavilion. Comprising graphically fantastic flyers by Pearce, video and film, but also the stacks of grant submissions and various other correspondence, it's a vast repository of cultural artefacts – relics of a very particular moment in time.

"The term 'high risk dressing' is not something we made up," insists Healy. "Going through the archive you see the term used over and over again. The idea was that maybe you needed to take risks in order for things to happen, that there were other ways to experience fashion beyond the anonymity of a big brand department store. That fashion can be a driver and an showcase for a plethora of creative endeavour."

"The idea of the show," says Buckingham, "was not to be nostalgic for another era, but to allow current practitioners to interact with the archive and see what arises."

What arises is a conceptual installation around three major ways the FDC activated fashion: the office, the shop and – perhaps most memorably – the nightclub or bar.

Twelve designers, many associated with RMIT, were selected to interact among themselves and with the public within these settings, each of which has been designed by a Melbourne architectural practice.

WOWOWA Architecture's octagonal Office is like a bright pink fish tank with a printed travertine floor.

"Our own office is a shopfront on Rathdowne Street  in Carlton," explains WOWOWA's director, Monique Woodward. "We love the performative aspect of being on display, of being on the street interacting with people."

The pink plexi filter around their installation at RMIT is to echo the rose-tinted glasses of the fashion world. Plants scattered about, she says, "are symbols of the 1980s water cooler, updated for the office of today". The stamped terrazzo floor echoes corporate materiality.

Clearly, High Risk Dressing is not your average fashion show.

"What the Fashion Design Council wanted to do was have a place where individuals could come and be creative, and we want to do the same," says Healy. "Some people have a tendency to remember it as one big party, everyone just having a really good time. But the FDC was in fact funded by government to encourage youth employment to employ people through fashion, but not in the mainstream. In fact the mainstream became this kind of oppositional force that the FDC was reacting to."

For fashion designer Kara Baker, "the FDC was so significant in my career because the fashion shows enabled me to design for the runway and to present my collections in the context of a public spectacle with all the exaggeration and drama a young designer in the '80s could ever wish for. The excitement of the events, the energy surrounding them and the ensuing publicity was like an aphrodisiac, spurring me on to greater creativity."

The practitioners involved in High Risk include D&K;, a collaborative project between artist and lecturer Ricarda Bigolin and curator Nella Themelios; Matthew Linde, founder of the Centre for Style's experimental fashion practice: and long-standing avant-garde designers Denise Sprynskyj and Peter Boyd of SIX.

Their installation, titled Le Tapis Noir ("The Black Carpet") is a collection of garments, objects and films drawing inspiration from the very venues in which the FDC showed. All the squelchy, threadbare carpets of St Kilda nightclubs, the faded glory of cracked chandeliers, the ditzy glitz of giant mirror balls. Signs of bygone times.

NEED TO KNOW

High Risk Dressing/Critical Fashion is on at RMIT's Design Hub until April 13. Address Building 100, corner Victoria and Swanston streets, Carlton, Melbourne. For more see designhub.rmit.edu.au