Italian-born Australian fashion designer Carla Zampatti died last Saturday at Sydney's St. Vincent Hospital. Zampatti, 78, had been hospitalised after falling at an outdoor opera event.
"Australia's most successful and enduring fashion designer", as an obituary on Zampatti's website calls her, she was born in Italy in 1942 and emigrated to Australia in 1950.
Passionate about fashion from an early age, Zampatti created her first fashion collection in 1965, launching her house in 1970. From then on she went from strength to strength, expanding her retail network and opening a chain of boutiques across Australia and New Zealand.
Opting for functional yet feminine styles, she became a favourite with many Australian influential women, including former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, actor Nicole Kidman and current New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian.
In 1987 she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to the fashion industry and in 2009 she was elevated as a Companion of the Order in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. A champion of multiculturalism she always thought newcomers from other countries enrich the social texture and the culture of the country they move in.
Zampatti also held dear to her heart another cause: when she started her career in the '60s she wanted to design clothes for women fighting for liberation through the women's rights movement and she kept on creating to empower women in leadership, at their workplaces, in their home and at major life events.
One of the most striking photoshoots featuring her clothes remains the very first one: while Australia's Sydney Opera House, designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon was under construction, Zampatti went to the building site to shoot her models wearing her brand new designs.
The is result is an unpretentious set of images (republished on the magazine celebrating the 55th anniversary of the fashion house): the models' shoes are covered in dust and they are posing in practical clothes like long tunics over bell-bottoms, practical shift dresses and playsuits while workers are busy in the background. There is also an architectural correspondence with one asymmetrical dress that seems to be in a design dialogue with the shape of one of the interlocking concrete vaulted shells of the opera house behind her.
There's a lesson in this photoshoot, reminding us that we should observe what's around us and wonder in which ways it can help enhancing our vision: building sites aren't usually linked with fashion and may not be exciting sets for glamorous poses, but in this case they provided realism and showed Zampatti had a vision for the future and had realised how important this place was going to become in the following decades.
The architectural parallelism ended up worked pretty well: Sydney was building its opera house; Zampatti was creating her fashion house. They both became established as time passed and, while the former turned into a World Heritage Site, Zampatti's house transformed into an empire and an icon of Australian fashion.
