Setting aside her formidable achievements in the cultural life of this country, Carla Zampatti AC will always be known as someone who paid it forward. “I’d like to be remembered as someone who helped women achieve,” she once said. The Italian émigré who arrived from the small town of Lovero, Italy to country Western Australia at age nine did just that. From 1965 through to today, her clothes offer women a powerful brand of modern elegance and will live on alongside the Carla Zampatti Foundation Design Award for emerging designers, the runway at Australian fashion week named in her honour, as well as a major retrospective exhibition chronicling her life’s work at Sydney’s Powerhouse, opening this November. When she passed away at age 78 in April last year, her nine grandchildren and three surviving children, Alexander Schuman and Allegra and Bianca Spender, mourned alongside a country – from the influential in politics, business and the arts, to women she encountered only briefly but touched nonetheless.
Her three children sat down with editor-in-chief Edwina McCann to discuss memories of their mother and her influence looking ahead. Though taking different paths – Alexander through the family business as CEO, Allegra in politics making a bid for
