Rebecca Judd: The woman who turned the Brownlows into the ‘Gownlows’

IT’S the last hurrah for queen WAG Rebecca Judd, who helped catapult the Brownlow red carpet into a more captivating spectacle than the awards themselves.

Bec Judd talks about THAT dress

IT’S the last hurrah for queen WAG Rebecca Judd, who helped catapult the Brownlow red carpet into a more captivating spectacle than the awards themselves.

The brunette beauty will step out for her 11th and last Brownlow as the partner of a current player on Monday night after her dual medal-winning husband, Chris, retired this year because of injury.

And while they will be invited to the Brownlow for years to come because the West Coast and Carlton great is a previous winner, Judd has already hinted they will take a break.

“Because we will keep getting invited, I don’t feel too sentimental about it. If it was our last one, of course I would be,” Judd says.

“It’s a great night and it holds so many special memories for us. We’ve had so many great nights and so much success there for Chris, so it’s great to be invited but I don’t know if we will go every single year. We might have a break next year.”

Rebecca Judd: Darling of the Brownlows red carpet.

But she plans to go out with a bang at this year’s Brownlow, calling on her favourite red carpet couturiers, J’Aton, to create another show-stopping gown.

“It will be beaded this year, I’ve never done a fully beaded dress. It’s time for me to move away from lace because I’ve done it so much of late,” she says.

“I can’t say too much about the colour but it won’t be black. I’ll never do black, I wear so much black in my day-to-day life that I think on a red carpet you won’t see me in black.”

Now parents to two children, Oscar, 4, and 19-month-old Billie, the Judds are planning to make the most of Monday’s night out.

“We were a bit quiet last year and then the year before that I was pregnant and Chris had just had surgery so we lasted until the first ad break and then went up to our room and had club sandwiches and chips because he was about to faint in pain,” she says.

“I think this year, because it’s the last one as a current player, we’ll go out with a bang. We’ve got the babysitter organised, we’ve got a room at Crown, I’ve got work off for the next day so I don’t have to be anywhere or do anything.”

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 her partner’s unexpected Brownlow win.

She says her first inkling that the dress may 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.”

The most memorable moments from the Brownlows red carpet over the years.