What Collette Dinnigan did next
She was one of Australia’s most celebrated fashion designers with celebrities and royalty desperate to wear her gowns. But at the height of her career, Collette Dinnigan up and quit. So just what has she been doing?
Stellar
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“I can’t be Superwoman,” says Collette Dinnigan to the question of work-life balance.
Yet, she’s six days into a whirlwind week in Australia, four hours into her Stellar shoot, five minutes into our conversation and, at 2pm, two bites into her lunch.
She’s dressed in loose khaki trousers, a cobalt blue knit, signature tresses flowing, and not a second ago, she was seen sweeping through the studio in a blur of floor-length gold taffeta, conducting three conversations — with a photographer, a make-up artist, and the publisher of her new children’s book — simultaneously.
Tomorrow, she’ll fly back to Rome where, for the past year, she’s been attempting to live an anonymous civilian life.
All of which is to say, if she’s not Superwoman, then the 53-year-old designer does a bang-on impression.
It’s been six years since Dinnigan shocked the industry by closing her eponymous empire, which she launched in 1990 with a small line of luxury lingerie.
Just five years later, she became the first Australian designer invited to show her collection in Paris and her designs were beloved by every A-lister from Nicole Kidman to Julia Roberts, Sarah Murdoch (on her wedding day) and more recently, Kate Middleton.
In 2013, when she decided to walk away, the business was still booming. But everything had changed, professionally and personally.
When she started out, Dinnigan says, “designers weren’t at the forefront, but halfway through my career, suddenly the designer had to have a profile.”
“You had to be in store. After showing in New York, then London, then Paris, there had to be trunk shows, a road trip.”
“If, say, Marc Jacobs did it, I had to do it — my agent would say if you don’t, the stores are not going to buy product.”
That didn’t sit will with Dinnigan. “I never went into fashion to get attention or be famous,” she explains. “I figured my brand should sell itself and my private life had nothing to do with my public life.”
But the media felt differently, especially once Dinnigan gave birth to daughter Estella in 2004.
As with any celebrity pregnancy, public interest would have been high enough, but two months prior she split with her partner, the TV personality Richard Wilkins, and the press went into overdrive.
“There was a photographer on every street corner,” she recalls. “Back in the day those shots were worth whatever amount and it was their job to sell those.”
“I wasn’t one to chase the press and I think they respected that and gave me as much privacy as they could. I understood the game.”
For the next decade, Dinnigan kept going — balancing the travel with the running of a business in two hemispheres and the relentless pressure of turning out more than a dozen collections a year, and all with the pressure of single parenting.
It helped that Estella, now 15, took travel in her stride: “We’ve counted up and I think she’s been to Paris 19 times.”
But then, in 2011, Dinnigan married Bradley Cocks, a business consultant, and the next year, age 47, gave birth to son Hunter.
“Our third trip to Paris with Hunter,” she says, “I was a wreck by the time I got there. Breastfeeding was almost a nightmare — he’d see me from across the room and scream. There were tears, from both of us, and I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t do this to him.’”
Any woman who opts to forgo work for family, for any amount of time, fears losing their professional edge. And Dinnigan wasn’t immune.
“It’s not a feeling. It’s the truth. If you’re not part of the group, you miss the conversation and it affects your confidence. I get that.
“It’s interesting that the new generation [of designers] want me as a mentor, or they don’t even recognise me. I’m lucky I’m not that insecure that I’ll think, if only you knew... I’m quite happy I don’t have to go out, find an outfit, put the stilettos on.”
And, she says, “it is interesting to see how the industry rotates around you”, a humble way of saying that offers poured in post-“retirement” — partly, she says with a laugh, because of the perception that she’d have nothing to do.
Television would have been an easy get — as in Australia’s Next Top Model or Project Runway. “A lot of those shows I’ve been asked to do and the people who took them have become household names, but I still don’t want to be a public personality.
“I don’t mind doing interviews, but when it’s so sensationalised and bitchy and dramatic, and it’s about getting attention, I just don’t think I could do that.”
In recent years, fashion has a new, very public platform — namely Instagram. Designers have their own profiles, and many fashion labels get their start on the social media site.
When Stellar asks what Dinnigan’s take is on the platform, she says she’s equally disinterested and baffled by “the whole Instagram social-media-influencer-blogger-tweeter, whatever you call people in that realm...” Her own Instagram is devoted to interiors and fine art.
So what tempted her out of (non)retirement in the end? When asked if she just got tired of wearing leggings, Dinnigan says — the one and only time she sounds a tiny bit fah-shion — “I’ve never really worn leggings, but anyway...”
It was her private passion for interiors, which grew almost by accident into a property and accommodation empire.
And after a career in couture, she gave herself the challenge of designing a range of affordable but ethically produced childrenswear for Aldi, and collaborated with brands such as Specsavers.
Dinnigan’s latest venture is unlike anything she’s done before, a children’s book called Louie And Snippy Save The Sea.
“I get asked to do things,” she explains. “I was asked to do this book over a year ago, and I thought, ‘I could do that. I’ve got a good idea.’”
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The good idea was inspired by her own childhood years spent on a yacht and her passion for the environment.
“The ocean to me was my playground and my safety net,” she tells Stellar. “My formative years were very much about travelling on the sea, learning respect for nature and the environment. We lived mostly off fish, my mother dried vegetables. We always had to conserve water, and never throw rubbish overboard.”
Dinnigan has balanced this all while taking a family gap year with her husband and Hunter, now six, as well as jetting back and forth to visit Estella who is happily ensconced in boarding school in regional New South Wales.
The irony being, Dinnigan’s busier than ever — but there’s still time for reflection.
“When I turned 50, I looked back and thought, ‘God, my 40s were good.’ There’s been some very sad times for me.”
And, when it comes to regrets, she worries that her own perfectionist streak made her sometimes too exacting as a boss.
“But I’ve travelled to nearly every country in the world, I’ve met some amazing people. I’ve had a very successful business, and I have the same group of friends as when I started.”
And all at once — if you’re Superwoman.
Louie And Snippy Save The Sea by Collette Dinnigan (Simon & Schuster, $24.99) is out on October 1.