Carla Zampatti’s passion for fashion was sparked when she was a little girl living in Lovero, a village in northern Italy.
With money tight in postwar Europe, her mother would pull together enough money to buy a new dress each year, and for the rest of the year keep it fresh with cleverly placed embroidery, buttons, pleats and brooches.
“It sent my spirit soaring to see my mother able to dress as well as or better than the wife of the town’s mayor,” Zampatti wrote in her 2015 memoir, My Life, My Look. “Fashion to me was a symbol of dignity first and foremost … It made me tingle to think I might have a gift for creating that special form of art.”
For decades, Zampatti would fulfil her childhood fancy with her eponymous fashion label launched in Sydney in 1965. With chic tailoring, flattering cuts and timeless designs – worn by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Queen Mary of Denmark and former prime minister Julia Gillard – she emboldened women everywhere, while providing a template of success for a talented, determined self-starter.
“Carla was an icon to the fashion industry, a pioneer as an entrepreneur and a champion of multicultural Australia,” the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, said following Zampatti’s unexpected death, aged 78, on April 3, 2021, following a tragic fall while attending the opera in Sydney. “Her contribution to our nation will be timeless, just like her designs.”
On May 12, the celebrated brand marked its 60th anniversary by opening Australian Fashion Week, with other local labels charged to create looks inspired by Zampatti’s influence.
“For six decades, the brand that Mum built has been at the forefront of Australian fashion,” Zampatti’s son, Alex Schuman, who has been the company’s CEO since 2019, said in a statement. “She mentored an entire generation of designers and helped shape the industry we know today.”
Zampatti left school at age 14, after her family followed her father to rural Western Australia, where he was working in the goldfields, and eventually moved to Sydney in her early twenties, finding work with a blouse manufacturer. Financially backed by her first husband, Leo Schuman, she launched her label but lost the business in their divorce. She relaunched in 1970 with a $5000 loan from her cousin.
“When I started out, I had all the insecurities and frailties that women did in the ’60s because we weren’t told then how good we were at everything,” she told The Australian in 2015. “And now we know.”
Zampatti welcomed her daughters –fashion designer Bianca, 48, and politician Allegra, 47 – with her second husband, John Spender, before their divorce in 2010.
“You don’t really understand it from the outside because you’ve only got one example of a mother, but it’s very clear to see just how ferociously driven she was,” son Alex said in a May interview with Wish magazine. “And I think if she gave Bianca and Allegra and I one quality, it’s [that] we’ve all got this incredible work ethic that she really drilled into us.”
In the wake of their mother’s passing, the tight-knit siblings are resolved to keep her vision alive. “We’re trying to be the first eponymous second-generation fashion brand in Australia,” Alex told The Australian Women’s Weekly.
