Jan Fran: ‘I’d love for “brown people on TV” to be normalised’
Television presenter Jan Fran loves a statement outfit, but now she wants to make a statement about Australia’s small screens, as she opens up about why she is so hungry to see our diverse population better reflected on TV.
Stellar
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Jan Fran is a self-confessed criminal. The crime? Stealing clothes from her friends and family. Case in point: the turtleneck she’s wearing when she sits down to speak with Stellar. It turns out she has pinched it from her sister.
Of course, Fran says her sister doesn’t actually mind, since the decision to wear it aligns with a “no new clothes in 2020” policy the TV presenter has proudly adopted. It’s a sustainability-driven approach that has its roots in her time working as co-host of SBS Viceland’s The Feed, when she realised how much clothing her wardrobe had amassed.
“I didn’t just want to wear something once on television and then that’s it,” Fran, 35, says. “I thought, ‘Surely there’s got to be another way of doing this.’ That’s when we came up with this plan of not buying new clothes anymore. I wanted to wear outfits that no-one else has. I wanted to experiment and get creative.”
The inventive approach to getting dressed every day helped Fran become something of a fashion icon on Instagram – “That might be a bit of an exaggerated label, but I will accept it,” she laughs – and even after leaving SBS in July of last year, Fran continued with her experiment.
She says she has yet to buy a new item of clothing since. It’s a policy she’ll keep up for the rest of this year, and likely continue well into the future. “When I think of the amount of textiles and clothing we consume so quickly... there has to be a shift in consciousness.”
Fran acknowledges it’s far easier for her to follow the no-new-clothing rule because her “average size” affords her the luxury of finding items at vintage stores, and the nature of her job lets her wear what she wants – most of the time, that is.
“I had to do a corporate conference last year and I didn’t have regular clothes to wear,” she says with a laugh. “Everything was outrageous; really bright colours.”
Which makes her the perfect muse to execute Stellar’s vision of a post-quarantine fashion shoot, dressing up in statement pieces with playful silhouettes. And if Fran had fun mugging for the camera, she admits it wasn’t a novel experience. She plays dress-ups at home, too.
“I have this long velvet dress I really don’t need, with these excessive sleeves,” she explains. “I wore it on my balcony.”
All joking aside, Fran has spent much of the past months on serious matters, such as an upcoming memoir that covers growing up Lebanese in Sydney, particularly in the years leading up to the 2005 Cronulla riots.
For Fran, who makes regular appearances on panel shows including The Project, Q&A and Lateline, the book offers another chance to touch on and share her views around diversity, in both the industry she works in and Australia as a whole.
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“I would love to get to the point where I’m not talking about ‘brown people on TV’, [but] where brown people on TV is normalised,” Fran says. “But to have that normalised, we have to have brown people on TV, and to have brown people on TV, you have to agitate. It doesn’t just happen.
“These are things people have been talking about and lobbying about for a long time. I think now we are starting to see it pay off. It’s a good step in the right direction and it’s credit to the people who have been pushing for this for decades. But we still have a long way to go.”
In late April, Fran joined co-hosts Tom Tilley, Annika Smethurst and Jamila Rizvi on The Briefing, a daily news podcast that takes a look at three to four big stories from the previous 24 hours.
“It’s about picking stories we think are important and what our audience will relate to,” Fran says. “We’re across the news of the week because we’re newshounds and we’d be doing that even if we were unemployed.”
There’s just one catch. Because it drops at 6am, Fran has to be ready to fire away with analysis and a fresh take. And as such, her weekday alarm now rings at 4am – which is not her ideal.
“I’m an afternoon person, so I’m doing it for the people of Australia,” she says, laughing. “I’m doing it with a lot of thoughts and prayers... for myself. I’m going to have a snooze now.”
The Briefing is available weekday mornings on PodcastOne Australia.