Brownlow Medal 2016: The red-carpet evolution of Rebecca Judd

SHE'S helped catapult the Brownlow red carpet into a more captivating spectacle than the awards themselves and Rebecca Judd has been a "Gownlow" standout since she donned THAT red dress in 2004. Take a look back at Bec's Brownlow red carpet moments.

Bec Judd at Brownlow 2010

SHE'S helped catapult the Brownlow red carpet into a more captivating spectacle than the awards themselves and she has been a "Gownlow" standout since she donned THAT red dress in 2004. 

 

It was the famous revealing red Ruth Tarvydas dress that propelled the then young university student and model  into the spotlight in 2004, almost eclipsing Chris' unexpected Brownlow win.

She says her first inkling that the dress was going to garner her some attention was when she put it on at Chris’s parent’s home the day before the Brownlow.

“It wasn’t until I put it on at Chris’s parent’s house in Sandringham and his mum and dad looked at me and they were like, ‘Ooh, you’re wearing that?’

“Chris saw it as well and he’s said to me since, ‘As soon as I saw you in that dress, it was like, oh, we’re going to run into some issues with that dress’.

“Chris was very media shy then. He was always quite guarded, so me wearing that dress would conflict with his own private endeavours of wanting to lead a more private life. I got in trouble with his grandmother, too.”

Judd says she remembers clearly waking up the next day to find photographers waiting in the lobby of their hotel — not for her Brownlow-winning boyfriend but for her.

“I was like, ‘What?’ So that was a whole introduction to public life I hadn’t had before,” she says.

She has barely put a fashionable foot wrong on the Brownlow red carpet since, though she admits there is one dress she wished she’d never worn, by Perth designer Celestial Tenielle in 2007.

At the time it was described by one fashion writer as a “wishy-washy grey-blue silk dress with purple beads … which may have been punched straight on with a Bedazzler rhinestone gun”.

Judd says, “I was pretty much on the red carpet and then, whoosh, straight off.”

But she says she doesn’t have a favourite dress.

“I don’t have a highest favourite. The Toni Maticevski dress was a bit of a turning point, to a more fashion forward look. Obviously 2008 was special because it was the start of my J’Aton relationship, and it was something different for me, not having a corset,” the Channel 9 presenter says.

“They all represent something different to me, like the red one is the Billie dress (she was pregnant with daughter Billie when she wore it in 2013) and it was the first time I’d done red since ‘the’ red dress. They all have a special little place.”

WHAT SHE WORE - REBECCA JUDD’S RED CARPET TIMELINE

Rebecca Judd, then Twigley, in her eye-popping 2004 dress.

 

RUTH TARVYDAS 2004

I chose that dress with my mum. I put the black one on and Ruth said she could do it in red. Mum said, “You look great in red”, so we went with that. People still question me and say, “Oh you wore that dress on purpose” or “You knew that was going to happen”, but I honestly didn’t. I was naive, I was 20, I was just a uni student from Perth going to the Brownlow with my boyfriend in the big smoke.

In Celestial Tenielle at the 2005 West Coast Eagles Brownlow dinner in Perth.

CELESTIAL TENIELLE 2005

She contacted me and I went over and saw a few of her dresses and I really liked that one; it was different. I wanted to do something more ladylike. That dress was all handpainted. It was cute but quite plain. We were in the Grand Final so we didn’t attend here in Melbourne.

In the ethereal 2006 number.

AURELIO COSTARELLA 2006

I loved that because it was different and it had the big bustle. Back then I thought, “I’m going to get married in a dress like this”. It was made out of vintage mosquito nets that came from some of the first ships to visit WA. It was the intricate lace mosquito nets in the cabins of the more wealthy travellers coming to settle in Australia.

This 2007 gown was almost a ‘disaster’.

CELESTIAL TENIELLE 2007

That was pretty close to being a disaster, that dress. I tried at the very last minute to get another dress. I was flying over from Perth. The dress had arrived in a box (the night before the Brownlow), it was creased. I tried not to wear it, I couldn’t find anything else in time, I didn’t have any Melbourne contacts then.

Rebecca and Chris Judd in 2008.

J’ATON 2008

I felt a million dollars in it, wearing my first J’Aton dress, especially because I’d fallen in love them in Perth reading Harper’s Bazaar just before we moved over. It was great, they had the belt custom-designed after we’d bought the Chanel shoes. It was in a white jersey and it was different, it was a little bit Grecian.

A tight corset and a large rip made for an interesting 2009 Brownlow Medal red carpet.

J’ATON 2009

That was amazing but I ripped it on the stairs going up to the ballroom — Chris stepped on my train and ripped a massive hole in it before we even got in there. That was my first J’Aton corset and they almost kill you, they are the tightest corset, but that’s how they manage to get that womanly shape. I’ve got no shape, I’m straight up and down like a boy and they give me the illusion of a waist and that I’ve got hips because they give me my curves. I felt like
a princess in that dress — it was when they started doing their exposed boning, it became their trademark back then.

Rebecca Judd says she loved the embellishments and colour of this dress.

AURELIO COSTARELLA 2010

Aurelio is so great, he’s so organised. We did some fittings in Perth. He showed me his ideas for the pleated embellishments down the bottom that were kind of pleated flowers. I loved it because it was different and I hadn’t worn that colour before so I was happy to do that. I received the dress a week or two before the Brownlow, which was unheard of because it usually goes down to the wire.

Rebecca Judd shines at the 2011 Brownlow Medal.

AURELIO COSTARELLA 2011

That was just after I’d had Oscar and it was funny because on the red carpet people were like, “How did you lose your baby weight?”, six weeks after I’d had him. I was all corsetted in and under the dress where the corset ended I had all these rolls. When I sat down I was corsetted on top but underneath I was bulging out. It was OK when I was standing up but when I sat down it wasn’t pretty. It was quite painful to wear, given I’d just had a baby. That was where I was at then, I’d just had a baby and I was like, “What’s my style now, who am I, what am I doing?” It was more of a conservative safe mummy look before I got my mojo back and was happy to take risks again.

Rebecca Judd says the fit of this dress was ‘perfection’.

TONI MATICEVSKI 2012

I loved that dress, it was incredible and it was the first time I’d worked on something from scratch with Toni, and he is just amazing. The fit was perfection. He was great because he knew what I’d worn before and he said, “I want to take you this way, it needs to be more fashion, let’s do something a bit more contemporary, I want to put you in sleeves, all white, a bit more sci-fi, bit more modern”. That was really special and was a really popular dress.

Rebecca Judd was pregnant when she wore this dress in 2013.

J’ATON 2013

I always think of that as the Billie dress. We did the reveal on the red carpet reading the weather. It was so hot on the red carpet and as I was about to start reading the weather I felt like I was going to faint. I thought, “Oh no, I’m going to faint on live TV”. I remember doing it and just focusing on the words, I was sweating but somehow I managed to get through it. I loved that dress, to be able to wear something like that when I was pregnant was fun.

The intricate design of last year’s Brownlow. Picture: Alex Coppel

J’ATON 2014

They designed that big skirt from a ceiling rose and printed it on to paper and had the material
silk-screen printed. We felt once we got it in it was probably a bit too much for the Brownlow.
Even though it’s the fashion capital of Australia it was probably a bit OTT. At the end of the day it’s not the Oscars and it’s not the Met Gala, so we pegged it back a bit and did the two-tiered skirt. I wanted a full skirt but I didn’t want to do the big puffy thing in the end.

Rebecca Judd at the Brownlow in 2015. Picture: Tim Carrafa

J'Aton 2015

Golden girl Rebecca Judd could be heard before she was seen on the red carpet in a beaded Cleopatra style gown by J’Aton.

Originally published as Brownlow Medal 2016: The red-carpet evolution of Rebecca Judd