Collette Dinnigan going out of fashion

COLLETTE Dinnigan stunned all but her closest family and friends by revealing she's stepping away from high-end fashion.

WHILE so many of her contemporaries fall like stiletto-challenged models around her, the very private Collette Dinnigan stunned all but her closest family and friends this week by revealing that after 24 years at the top of her game, she was stepping away from the high-end fashion business.

The news broke on Tuesday morning at about the same time Dinnigan was informing between 50 and 80 staff at her stores and workshops that they would soon be out of work.

Minutes later, the sceptics were online shooting down Dinnigan's assertion that she made the decision to close rather than sell her brands, forfeiting her right to make "a lot of money" because she wanted to leave the business with her "integrity intact" and selling up and making money is "not what I believe in".

"Maybe things are not what they seem?" one dissenter posted online. "Something not right here. I smell a rat," said another.

COLLETTE DINNIGAN CLOSES HER BUSINESS

SUCCESS FOLLOWS IN COLLETTE'S WAKE

GALLERY- SOME OF COLLETTE'S FASHION

Collette Dinnigan with model Olivia Henderson wearing a design from the 2010 autumn-winter collection launched at David Jones in Sydney.

Possibly not helping the designer position herself as one who was retiring at the top of their game was her decision to hand the announcement not to the media at large, but to a sliver of fawning reporters who supportively repositioned Dinnigan's forthcoming fire sale as a "collectors'" opportunity.

Bradley Cocks and Collette Dinnigan.

Then there was the matter of the failed talks with prospective investors.

While Dinnigan described these talks in terms of having been part of an abandoned strategy to "grow" her business, a spokeswoman for David Jones flat out confirmed the department store had "passed up the opportunity" to buy Dinnigan's business when a prospectus was proffered as far back as two years ago. Dinnigan denies the talks had taken place.

Either way, the designer, the reigning prima donna of the Australian flash pack, has stepped aside, and not even she would deny that the local fashion industry is in strife.

A sailor in her youth, Dinnigan, who once spent four years on a home-made sailboat travelling from South Africa to Australia, looks to have proven that she is still in possession of the instincts honed in childhood that have helped her avoid the economic storm that has capsized so many of her peers, Lisa Ho, Kirrily Johnston, Bettina Liano among them.

Collette Dinnigan with children Estella and Hunter.

The designer is leaving her business "debt free", she said this week.

This writer doesn't doubt it. She has spent the past four years consolidating lucrative property investments in a manner which suggests she has wisely and strategically been using her property to offset fashion industry pressures but to say making money is something in which she doesn't believe in seems
a stretch.

Dinnigan and her husband Bradley Cocks, a waiter-turned-tourism-consultant-turned-online-hotelier, sold Dinnigan's expansive Underwoood St, Paddington home for $7.3 million in 2011 - settling on $4 million less than hoped when first listed in 2009 with $10 million-plus expectation. The sale still represented a profit of $3 million on the three-title home she bought in 2002 with then-partner Richard Wilkins.

Simultaneously Dinnigan turned a tidy profit on a house in Paddington St, Paddington. Purchased in 2009 for $4.45 million, the house sold a year later
for around the $5 million
mark.

The Paddington Street sale helped finance the couple's purchase, in 2010, of a $3 million cottage on Barrenjoey Road at Palm Beach which they have since established as a boutique hotel.

In peak season the house is leased for $10,000 a week.

But even that property, which along with a home in Milton purchased in 2007 for $830,000 represents her entire current property portfolio, was briefly listed for sale before then being withdrawn. It seems the sands have been shifting under Dinnigan for some time.

Just last year she had a rethink on selling her wedding gowns in smaller boutiques and started approaching boutiques to stock her pretty designs, but this week's announcement revealed she'd had a change of heart about that too.

Just what she plans to do next is pure speculation at this time but one thing seems true - the birth of her son Hunter 12 months ago certainly looks to have been a catalyst for major change. And that, and a canny desire to escape an industry in trouble, makes complete sense to any mother.