By Janice Breen Burns
THE heartland of veteran designer Perri Cutten's fashion market is smack in the middle of middle-class Melbourne, the genteel suburb of Armadale, where retired ladies still dress sharp for lunch and mums do the Volvo school run in designer trackies before changing into high heels, pencil skirts and tailored coats for the corporate commute. "Good fabrics, good taste and always flattering," Cutten says, neatly nutshelling the classic look that has enamoured two generations of lay-dees and kept her business not only buoyant but firing on all cylinders for 30 years.
Her "good taste" mantra was never going to set fashion on fire — but it wasn't meant to. Nevertheless, Cutten barely registered a hiccup in the great recession of the early 1990s and its steady, upward trajectory continued without a kink through the global financial crisis. Despite dire warnings of doom swirling around retail fashion now, it clocked its best results in 30 years only last week. "I do mean best results ever," Cutten says. "We aim to have a little increase every year — not a great big one — and certainly not a dip, so that's how it's been. When times do get tough and you've been there a while, and people trust what you do and maybe your competition is diminishing, there is no reason why you can't do well."
The designs of Perri Cutten were among the first to cater for the corporate women's market.Credit: Simon Schluter
And do well she does. She and business partner Michael Gannon own a dozen stand-alone Perri Cutten shops and 20 Myer and David Jones concessions. It's a small-to-medium fashion empire run on diligent business principles with a distinct lack of ego and more genuine care than greed.
"Discipline," Cutten says emphatically. "We have always been very disciplined. We decided 'This is our market, these are the people we need to look after', and we've stuck to that."
One of Perri Cutten's designs.
Cutten left the headline-grabbing to more flamboyant contemporaries.
"It would have been lovely to go off on a tangent and do all the hot, latest looks and get into all the papers and magazines," she says. "But we didn't. That isn't what our customer wanted and it isn't good business."
What graphic design graduate Cutten and entrepreneur Gannon did launch three decades ago was a brand fastidiously pitched at women of a certain, and quickly swelling, demographic: employed professionals.
"Women had just become part of the workforce in a much bigger way than they'd been," Cutten says. "They'd been mostly nurses and teachers but now they were going into corporate jobs."
It's tricky to picture now but middle-market womenswear at the time offered little that could serve as "feminine corporate wear". Cutten knew this because she needed a quality, well-fitted and finished feminine professional wardrobe but was having a devil of a time finding its components. Thus, her first collections evolved with logic driven by need and, not surprisingly, immediately clicked with their market.
It didn't hurt that Cutten had also brought rare skills to her drawing board, learnt during several years at legendary Flinders Lane brands Geoff Bade and Thomas Wardle, where her contemporaries were Teena Varigos and Ojay's Harry Goles.
But Cutten also remembers being aware of certain subtle sub-agendas that her new collections would have to address. "Men, for instance, were expecting that all these women coming in [to the corporate workforce] were just going to leave to have babies soon," she says.
If women were to be taken seriously, then Cutten's fashions would have to at least help to dissolve such assumptions and stereotypes.
"So that's what we did; designs that would help [women] fit in and feel feminine but not look silly."
The fact Cutten swirled the odd socio-political imperative into her designs must have contributed to their success; serious classics based on corporate menswear's language of impeccable fit and fine tailoring but elegantly twisted with details to ground them in the "now".
In its first decade, the brand won a raft of awards, including four from the Fashion Industries of Australia and a coveted Woolmark award for excellence.
Cutten is 61 and semi-retired now, a pleasant, endearingly cheerful woman as chic as ever in these slower, calmer days, in black uncut cord jeans, suede boots, dark-blue blouse and swirl of pompom trimmed scarf. For this interview, she drove reluctantly from Flinders, where she and her partner of 18 years, photographer Jo Daniell, own a house with views over Bass Strait and tend a garden they've designed and built from scratch. "I'm a weeder now," Cutten laughs. She is also an active philanthropist with connections to Foundation 59, which runs programs for disadvantaged young people, and a National Gallery of Victoria women's fund-raising group.
Her treks from Flinders to her apartment in the revamped Herald and Weekly Times building are less frequent every year, she says, but she does act as occasional overseer and mentor for the business and for Penny Loorham, the designer who, she says admiringly, "stepped into my shoes".
Loorham, formerly of Laura Ashley, took creative charge of the Perri Cutten collection five years ago and immediately proved herself as intuitive as Cutten about the balance of fashion and classicism the market will tolerate.
"I've always said, it's much harder to work in this market," Cutten says.
"It's easy to make something fabulous that only 10 people can buy but when you're virtually re-engineering an idea that women love, to make them love it again, that's hard."