Carla Zampatti’s children fashion the future
For the first time since her shock death following a fall at the opera, Carla Zampatti’s her children open up about the impact of her passing and the question now gripping fashion circles.
“This was where Mum always held court,” says Bianca Spender of the simple but chic living room where her mother Carla Zampatti would entertain guests, whether for a sit-down dinner for Sydney Dance Company, cocktail parties for the Australian World Orchestra or mid-morning fashion shows for her latest collection. Likely dressed in a sexy black jumpsuit of her own creation, ever-present sunglasses shading her eyes no matter the time of day, she would calmly take the hand of whoever she was speaking to in her soft but direct manner, eager to hear the latest news in their world rather than discuss her own. There might be a pianist playing the grand piano in the corner, or dancers performing on the lawn outside, given Zampatti’s lifelong love of the arts.
This room in the spacious 1920s Italian-style home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is where Bianca and her older brother Alexander Schuman and younger sister Allegra Spender chose to be photographed for this story. “It seems very suitable it was in this room,” Bianca says. Allegra shows me a painting on the wall that their mother discovered at a market in Lucca, Italy, and says: “You’d think it was painted for that space. She would always come back from her trips with these things. Like these marble lions that came back from India. One of which we’re actually going to put on her grave because…”
“Because she told us to!” interjects Bianca with a laugh. Allegra: “Well, we thought that was the best, a lion. She was very feline and she loved lying in the sun. It was one of her ways to rejuvenate herself.”
For the first time since their mother’s shock death in April following a fall at the opera on Sydney Harbour, the three siblings are ready to open up about the impact of her passing, their hopes for her enduring legacy and the question that has fascinated fashion circles: what will happen to the business that has dressed Australian women for 56 years, including its most powerful and celebrated? It’s a business that transcended fashion to become part of the Australian psyche, reaching into the arts, politics, business and multicultural society. In every sense, Carla Zampatti the person was Carla Zampatti the powerhouse label. How does it live on without her?
That tragic night in late March began like so manyother nights for Zampatti. Attending the opening night of La Traviata outdoors on Sydney Harbour, the 78-year-old was photographed on the red carpet wearing a deep blue evening dress and pearl jewellery with her signature sunglasses. Later in the night, in a terrible accident, she fell down the bottom few steps of the temporary seating structure, hitting her head. She was transferred to St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney where she remained for a week before passing away on Easter Saturday. “That was really a very private week, where we genuinely thought she was going to recover,” says Alex. Adds Allegra: “We all spent a lot of time together, the [nine] grandkids spent a lot of time with her, that week between her accident and when she passed away. That was a very, very special time.”
Her death shocked the nation and beyond; the rich and powerful – Prime Minister Scott Morrison, her dear friend Dame Quentin Bryce, even British star Nigella Lawson – paid tribute. Within days, her three children were preparing for a state funeral at St Mary’s Cathedral. “The gift of having three kids was that all of us had a different pace and rhythm, or highs and lows at different moments,” says Bianca. “I’m a visual person, so I decided to get into the photos and all of the images. Every time I sat down to write for the eulogy, I would be drowning in tears and couldn’t put a word down. Allegra and Alex could find words that I couldn’t and then I found my words in the end.”
When the siblings stepped up to the altar to deliver their eulogy, holding each other for support, Bianca said: “If she were alive today she would say, ‘This is the best-dressed funeral I have ever attended.’” And she would have been right – it was a Who’s Who from the worlds of fashion, business, the arts, media and politics, former foreign minister Julie Bishop opting for a navy feather-trimmed cocktail dress, the same style worn by Allegra on the day.
Alex says the “barrage of attention” after his mother’s death was moving “but also very overwhelming”. “Trying to navigate that with all the media attention and a state funeral… was pretty tough on all of us. After that, finally we gave ourselves the time to come to terms with it again. It was a very challenging time. But the outpouring through messages of support was absolutely phenomenal.”
The condolences page on the Carla Zampatti website was inundated with thousands of messages from her fans, many of whom had been customers or who had aspired to be; women who’d worn her designs for their major life milestones, and admired her for what she had achieved in her lifetime. “I was proposed to in my Carla Zampatti dress and connect you with pure joy,” wrote Margo; for Chloe, “Your timeless design took me from a girl with big dreams to a woman living out her dreams”; “I named my own daughter after her and wore one of her outfits to my daughter’s wedding,” wrote Donna.
“At first I was too scared to look at the page,” says Allegra, “because I thought it would be too difficult. But it made me very proud of the difference she had made to so many people, and I think that was actually comforting in itself.”
For many looking in from the outside, the question soon emerged: what will happen to the brand without Carla at the helm? Australia does not have much of a track record of independent brands with a designer’s name on the shopfront flourishing without that name in the atelier. Among Zampatti’s early peers from the ’60s to the ’80s, very few businesses are still going, let alone thriving. Trailblazer Prue Acton closed her business in the early ’90s; Trent Nathan retired from his namesake label in 1999, selling it four years later, and it now ticks along without much fanfare; George Gross and Harry Watt closed their George Gross & Harry Who label in 2014, before Watt passed away in recent years. Anthea Crawford is one of the few still at the helm of her label, although it’s less high profile than in its 1980s heyday.
Zampatti didn’t shy away from succession discussions with her children. “She’d always say, ‘When I get hit by a bus…’ It was our way of talking about, well, what does it look like? We could never imagine her not being there, because she was such a powerhouse,’’ Bianca says. “But it was really her thing, we’d even bring it up in board meetings: ‘When Mum gets hit by a bus, this is what we are doing.’”
“I still never believed she’d get ‘hit by a bus’,” says Allegra after a pause.
“We’ve all grown up in the business since we were really, really young – we were in primary school when we started working in the business,” says Alex. “Carla built things to last. You can see that in her clothes, but also you can see it in true Italian mum style, she built a family business that was really intended to last… to be taken to the next generation by us and nurtured by us. I don’t think any of us can say we’ve ever left the business since we were five or six years old, to be honest. Even going back 15 years ago we were quite far-sighted in how we’d set it up. Of course, we knew this day would come. We’d been talking about it together as a group, the four of us, for many years.”
Some assumed Bianca, a successful designer in her own right, would be the obvious heir to head up the design team. Prior to launching her eponymous label, she was a senior designer within Zampatti’s team and her label was part of the greater family business before she broke away in 2017. “Mum thought I did a much better job when I was on my own. So when I broke off I always remember it was a beautiful thing because it gave us our mother-daughter relationship back.
“She said, ‘I always started this business because I love it and I want you all to do what you love. And it’s beautiful that you’re all so committed to my business, I didn’t expect it but I can see it. But I love what you’re doing for your own thing and you really know how to do it and don’t ever forget that.’” Bianca says she felt no pressure to step in. “I remember she just always would be like, ‘What do you think it looks like with the succession of me?’ We would often talk about her design succession together. It never really was the conversation about me, because she was like, ‘You do your thing.’”
That succession plan involves all three siblings working together to continue her business and her broader legacy. Alex has already been in the label’s chief executive seat for two and a half years following a career in economics and finance, most recently as head of economic policy under Gladys Berejiklian. He will continue in the role “running the day to day”. Allegra had been managing director for an eight-year period some time before him, and is now chief executive of the not-for-profit Australian Business and Community Network, working “with kids from low socio-economic backgrounds and lots of kids who are migrants, and that’s for me a very deep and personal connection to Mum”.
Continuity is a word that Alex likes to apply to the business. Zampatti’s design team, many of whom had worked alongside her for decades, will continue to design the collections. “There are literally people in the team that have known us since we were children,” says Alex. “The team has as much a claim on family as the three of us here today, they’ve been around for so many decades and are such a big part of mum’s everyday life but also our everyday lives.”
“I’ll never forget the Tuesday after the long weekend [that Mum died],” says Bianca, “we all went to the office, Allegra, myself and Alex, to meet with the team because they all were deeply affected by it. It was really beautiful because there was so much love and sadness in the room.”
All three siblings will be on the board of the fashion label. In practical terms, while Allegra and Bianca consider themselves “guardians” of Carla’s legacy, in design terms they will keep across the process to make sure that it still “feels” like Carla. “I’m not a designer, I’ve never been a designer,” says Allegra. “But I’ve been really close to the product when I was in the business, and for the past 15 years I’ve tried on all the collections. I do have a good sense of whether they’re Mum or not. That’s what I see is my role, that we actually stay true to that feeling for our customer.”
“She gave us a gift being very definite in her taste,” adds Bianca. “She was incredibly black and white, there was no grey. Allegra and I were looking at something the other day and thought, we could never see Mum in that. Oh, way too frumpy for Mum. She’d be like, ‘Where’s the sex in that?’” Frumpy was up there with “tizzy”, “dowdy” and “mumsy” as adjectives that Zampatti simply couldn’t abide when it came to fashion.
It’s common practice in fashion houses in Europe and beyond to bring in a name designer to head up the brand, but Alex says that won’t be the path they take. “We’re really wanting to keep the faith with our existing customers who have been incredibly loyal to Carla – to Carla the brand and mum the person – over the years,” he says. “If you have too much of a sharp shift away from her design ethos the real risk is that you leave too many of your very loyal followers behind. Ultimately, we’re in the fashion industry, we’ll move on, it’s always a continuing, unfolding story and here’s the next journey. But it won’t be a break from the namesake designer to a completely different nameplate designer.”
They are fully aware that, while continuity is important, stagnation in fashion is death. “A danger of family businesses is that you try and preserve things exactly as they were forever as your parent left them,” says Allegra. “And one of the things that mum taught us is that fashion is dynamic and you must change, because she didn’t grow old. One of mum’s greatest qualities was actually her openness to change and learning and newness. So we need to strike that balance, between doing what mum did, which is basically delivering for her customers that sense of how they feel in the clothes and the confidence that they get from wearing the clothes, but at same time not trying to live in the past.”
Throughout her career, says Bianca, her mother would talk with other designers about their businesses, their collections, offering advice to see them succeed. “She would say, be true to who you are, be true to your product and show your belief in it by wearing it every day and reacting to how you feel and learning from that.”
Fashion wasn’t Zampatti’s only touchpoint and her legacy must bear that out. The boards and organisations that benefited from her insights and unique mix of business and creative savvy included Westfield, Sydney Dance Company, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and SBS – where she was the first female chair. She was also a founding member of Chief Executive Women, along with other 1980s power players Ita Buttrose and Bronwyn Bishop.
Allegra says the siblings are clear on what Zampatti stood for: “Women, multicultural Australia and the arts. She was deeply passionate about all three.” These are the areas that will be the focus for charitable and philanthropic support via the Carla Zampatti Foundation. Like the family business, it’s something they have all been involved with for years. “We’re lucky enough that it’s not the first time we’ve had any of these conversations, but not having Mum in the room is the difference… All the years Mum has had the foundation we’d meet every year to talk about who we should support and how we should support them.” Alex likens the three of them to “a Venn diagram of knowledge of Carla – we all know her very well but we also know her in different ways”.
There have been a number of dedications to Zampatti’s legacy, including the naming of a runway at Australian Fashion Week, the announcement of the Carla Zampatti Award for Excellence in Leadership, to be added to the annual Australian Fashion Laureate Awards, and the Carla Zampatti Award of Influence, which will be a fixture in Westpac’s annual CEO awards, open to Westpac staff who show leadership, innovation and advocacy for inclusion. It’s a fitting acknowledgment of the woman who won the Australian Business Woman of the Year award in 1980, just one of many commendations she received in her lifetime, including a companion of the Order of Australia and Commander in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. “She would cross the road to help a woman,” says Allegra. “She just wanted women to succeed and she believed that they could do anything.”
“She really did,” adds Bianca. “If you look at the surveys, men are very good at defending what wage they should be paid and women are terrible at salary negotiations. She would go and give these talks about how to prepare yourself for interviews, how to prepare yourself for negotiations. It didn’t matter if it was with Chief Executive Women or Burwood High, all of the women would walk away going, ‘I really believe I can do this now.’ I saw this from these high-achieving businesswomen to young schoolgirls. She wanted you to fight as hard as you could to realise your best potential, every day.”
Alex thinks his mother’s story resonated so strongly thanks in part to her background, which she outlined in her autobiography Carla Zampatti: My Life, My Look. “That narrative of a young girl coming to Australia in the post-war period from a non-English-speaking background, not finishing school and then doing as incredibly well as she had and having such an impact on so many people, that’s a story that is being told right around the world and it makes me incredibly proud that I’m from that stock,” he says. “But it’s a daunting legacy to have to follow, of course. We have to get it right.”
Zampatti’s public legacy is one thing, but it’s the littlememories that her three children cherish, including her lack of pretension, her hatred of waste, fear of public speaking, her propensity to under-cater for parties, her love of statement cars (most recently her beloved yellow Mercedes convertible) and her “fluid” driving manner.
“She was a crusader for [supermarket chain] Aldi and the savings you could make,” adds Alex, as Allegra and Bianca fall about laughing at the memory. Bianca says: “I have all these friends that love Aldi, and when I told them my Mum does they were like, ‘Even Carla?’ Oh, definitely Carla.”
“To put that in context, she was a self-made woman and never forgot the value of money and taught us that that was important,” says Allegra, attempting to temper their mutual amusement.
With the three settling into their new responsibilities, there are still practical issues to address, including their mother’s home and possessions.
“We haven’t done all that yet,” says Allegra.
“I have to be very prepared [in order] to walk into the space,” says Bianca of the Sydney house. “And to walk out of it. The other day, walking into it I got overwhelmed, then I kind of settled. Then when I closed the door to leave, my nine-year-old was hugging me going, ‘It’s OK, Mum.’ And we were like, ‘Bye, Nonna.’ There’s something about walking into it and out of it without her there. It’s just…”
Not the same without her.