Rebecca Vallance has fashion in her blood. At her wedding in 2010, her father said so in his speech. Fashion, he wanted everyone there to know, was not something Vallance learnt to love over time, or came to later in life. It was a part of her and always had been.

This sounds like the hyperbole typical of wedding speeches, but in Vallance’s case, the evidence stacks up. Her final essay for year 12 English was about Gianni Versace. As a teen in the mid-’90s, she “fell in love” with Tom Ford’s ground-breaking designs for Gucci. She found it hard to make friends during high school because she was only interested in fashion and magazines – things that were not high on the agenda of her Ballarat High classmates. “Fashion was all I cared about, it was all I was interested in,” she says.