In the Front Row

How Australian Fashion made the World Stage

Simon P Lock

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780522867923
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

In the Front Row charts the rise of Australian Fashion Week, from one man's ambition to take Australian fashion to the world, to the glittering international event it is today. Simon P. Lock's determination placed Sydney on the international fashion week circuit, up there with New York, London, Milan and Paris.
Lock's story takes you backstage for the twenty years that Fashion Week has wowed the world. It tells the story of daring designers, supermodels and celebrities and details how Australia's biggest fashion stars—Akira Isogawa, Collette Dinnigan, Peter Morrissey, Wayne Cooper, sass & bide, Zimmermann, Dion Lee and Ellery—got their start. He reveals the parts Miranda Kerr, Elle Macpherson, Linda Evangelista, Dita Von Teese and Cate Blanchett played in this often drama-filled adventure.
In the Front Row reveals the feuds, frustrations and triumphs of producing one of Australia's most fabulous international events.

1

The University of DPL

TODAY WAS A pretty big day for our little business. It doesn’t seem like over twenty years ago that I had the same emotions when the very first Australian designer committed to what was then known as Mercedes Australian Fashion Week (MAFW). I am in New York trying to get the most famous designers in the world to buy into something just as new and exciting to grow their businesses. The similarities between now and all those years ago are incredible. The feeling I have now when three of New York’s most applauded designers join our new global wholesale platform ORDRE is every bit as sweet as when the designing duo Peter Morrissey and Leona Edmiston became the first Australian designers to commit to what was then just as radical an idea. The world of fashion has changed since I came up with the crazy idea to launch a new stop in Sydney on the international fashion week circuit, but in many ways it’s still the same. It’s all about the designers—you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them!

*

My mother says that I was a born entrepreneur. Apparently when I was about five and growing up in the Melbourne suburbs in the early 1960s I filled used jam jars with soil from the garden and sold them to the neighbours as special potting mix. Only a few years later I was running a bottle collection depot out of our backyard and going head to head with the local scout bottle drive. My business sense was always strong.

In later life this trait was to brand me as a megalomaniac of sorts in the fashion industry, especially when I established a range of marketing agencies around Fashion Week to capitalise on the investment I had made in the event. The truth of the matter is that at the time it was necessary just to survive financially. Still, my ever-present competitive nature didn’t hurt. This inherent characteristic has always been coupled inside me with a feeling that I’m not afraid to fail and that I can achieve anything—driving forces I carry to this day.

If I’m going to tell the story of Fashion Week I don’t think I can do so honestly without explaining where my drive and passion come from. At the end of the day it has been this focused feeling, energy and attitude that has made the difference between success and failure. In my case it is all due to an incredible force of nature and human dynamo known as David Price Lock, my father and hero. Every designer who has ever launched a business through Fashion Week, or secured an international order, or a front cover of Vogue has my father to thank, because without his radical way of addressing life and business I doubt very much I would have had the foresight, skills and determination to pull off what many thought was impossible.

David Lock was born in Melbourne to a Welsh coalmining immigrant father and a mother who died when he was very young. Basically he was a kid born on the wrong side of the tracks who grew up in the working-class suburb of Port Melbourne while dreaming of a wide world that had to be conquered. His father was the original Lock entrepreneur—when he came to Australia he traded his coal pick for a squeegee and set up his own office window-cleaning business in Melbourne. Growing up in the docklands of Melbourne my father dreamed of the exotic locations the cargo vessels sailing in and out of the harbour visited and, determined to see beyond the horizon of Port Phillip Bay, embarked on an apprenticeship to become a fitter and turner. This would lead to the first of his three careers, as a marine engineer. It was a career that not only led him to discover the travelling life but to cross paths with a man who would change the course of his life: Alan Franklin Rudd.

Alan lived in a Victorian mansion on Guildford Road in the upmarket Melbourne suburb of Canterbury. He was one of four children, but the only son, of a well-to-do Melbourne builder, a man who must have been broken-hearted when Alan chose to become an apprentice in Melbourne’s docklands rather than join the family business when he left Camberwell Grammar School. I think maybe Alan had also seen those boats leaving Port Phillip Bay. The boy from the wrong side of the tracks met the silvertail and immediately they became unlikely best friends. They completed their fitter-and-turner apprenticeships and soon signed up as engine hands on cargo ships heading north. Not long after, to the complete shock of their respective families, the two, who had now become inseparable in their shared dream, decided to move to Hong Kong. This was the early 1940s and not at all like today, when many travel to Hong Kong on bankers’ contracts. For my father and Alan, it was exotic going to the Far East, a far-flung colony next to a growing communist waking giant, full of pigtailed men pulling rickshaws and beautiful Suzie Wongs in cheongsams.

Before the boys left, however, there was a fateful meeting. Alan had been taking Dad home to Guildford Road for dinner on a pretty regular basis. David eventually met Alan’s sister Joy, who had left her pigtails of Canterbury Girls’ behind and was now a secretary to a professor at Melbourne University. She was a stunning young woman. By all accounts she was responsible for a never-ending queue of young men to the professor’s office to see if he was ‘in by chance’, especially on his rostered days off! I don’t quite know whether for her it was love at first sight, intrigue about the good-looking, well-mannered ‘kid from the wrong side of the tracks’ or that by then my grandmother had clearly declared my father as her favourite among Alan’s friends, but a deep bond formed between them around that dining room table and as the dishes were washed at Guildford Road. It only grew stronger the closer it came to my father setting sail.

David and Alan set off on their great adventure. From Shanghai to Borneo the pair lived the life. My father was always incredibly sketchy about the details. The occasional reference to a daring gold-smuggling racket that ‘apparently’ some of the boys were involved in on the Shanghai run. The parties with the daughter of the chairman of Jardine Matheson, the boys’ employers. The descriptions of opium dens they had never been in! One can only imagine. These experiences opened up my father’s mind, life and attitudes about how the world was an amazing place. He discovered new cultures, he made new friends easily, he learnt respect for traditions and to appreciate what he had and understand what he wanted. He developed a work ethic that saw him continually promoted, one that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his life and one he would instil in me. Above all he developed a belief in equality and justice. His convictions would remain with him all his life and they were always central themes in our dinnertime ‘classrooms’ at home in the years to come.

When the boys’ time in Asia was up, an optimistic and growing economy in Australia was calling them home, as were their families. Alan arrived first to find his sister Joy had just turned down her sixth proposal of marriage. She confided in her brother that she couldn’t hold out much longer and if David P. Lock didn’t show up very soon the spark that had been ignited years before would finally go out. One telegram later, and like a scene from An Officer and a Gentleman, my father was on the doorstep of Guildford Road and the rest, as they say, is history. My mother and father married soon after, with Alan as best man. The three were inseparable.

Having lived a life few would dream of the thought of a nine-to-five job held no appeal. What to do? Like their fathers before them, there was only one course to take: open their own business. ARA Engineering was born. It was a welding works for a number of manufacturers, registered in haste using Alan’s initials that got jumbled up on the form and never corrected. Despite the protests of my grandfather—it was obvious to him from day one that welding sparks and wooden floors were never going to be a great foundation for success—the boys somehow convinced him that the stable in the backyard of Guildford Road was the best place for their operations. It wasn’t long before my grandfather arrived home one evening to smouldering ruins. Not deterred, the boys found a factory in a new industrial estate in Clayton, then on the outskirts of Melbourne, and the business took off. Mum and Dad had by now moved out of Guildford Road and into a brand new AV Jennings home in Albert Street, Mount Waverley, a bright shiny new suburb in Melbourne that looked exactly like something out of a 1960s American sitcom.

Business was booming. The boys were the best of partners, complementing each other in many ways. Alan had also got married and it was nearly time for me to enter the world. But when Mum was in early pregnancy the unimaginable happened. Alan had been on a weekend break with friends down at San Remo near Phillip Island in Victoria and a group of them were fishing from the rocks. Two small boys fishing on a rock ledge nearby were suddenly swept away into a nasty ocean by a freak wave. Without a care for his own safety Alan dived into the swirling mess and attempted to rescue the boys. With great effort he managed to shove one back up onto the rock shelf to safety, and returned in search of the other. The two bodies were never found. I was born soon after with a strong physical resemblance to my uncle.

A beloved and only son was dead, a husband was gone, a brother who was a kindred soulmate was never to return. My father had lost his best friend and his business partner. Where does a man go from there? If you’re my father, you dig deep. A handshake between friends—‘If anything ever happens to one of us let’s make sure the other’s family is looked after’—becomes your driving force. For the next half a decade my father worked day and night, sacrificing time with his own young family and sometimes his own health, until he knew he could honour the commitment he had made to his best friend. ARA was sold and half the proceeds went to Alan’s widow. As far as I know she never had to work again.

By this time my father was in his mid thirties, having already had a successful career as a marine engineer and sold a thriving business. At this point, most people would invest some of the proceeds from the business’s sale, start a new business or get a job. Instead, my father gathered up his young family, which now included my younger brother, Richard Alan Franklin Lock, leased out his home and went on a five-year road trip around the world, and spent the lot!

Welcome to my formative years. We left Australia and sailed to London, where my father leased a beautiful home in Surrey, close to where the Beatle George Harrison lived, purchased his dream car, a Mark II Jaguar, and brought his mother-in-law over. We then spent eight months living in hotels in France, then in Cardiff to understand his heritage, and then on the Costa Del Sol in Spain. He returned to university in London to complete his engineering degree and then bundled us all into a cool caravan and traversed the Continent for eighteen months before travelling the long way home to Melbourne via Miami and the Caribbean.

I returned to the final years of primary school with a proper English accent and a completely different attitude from everyone else. Nothing was impossible because my father had shown me that. The world was full of culture and people to be celebrated and embraced, not feared or discriminated against. Mount Waverley Primary School and the trials and tribulations of the schoolyard were another world for me at that time, and I guess from that moment on I knew I was never going to have a normal life.

This amazing journey at such a young age left me with an uneasy feeling that I couldn’t quite put my finger on until much later in life, something that was to be a driving force in creating Australian Fashion Week. As a kid in foreign lands I was often ostracised because I came from the land down under. No one seemed to have the view of our country that I had formed from a young age, which was a combination of the newness and opportunities epitomised by the bright shiny new suburb I had left behind and the refined sophistication I knew through my grandparents. It seemed from my childish point of view that the only opinions the world had of Australia were that it was completely unworldly, was great at sports, had a wealth of natural resources and that was about it. It was a country devoid of any creative culture or place in the arts.

In the mid 1980s, the Australian Tourism Commission released their Paul Hogan ‘throw a shrimp on the barbie’ campaign. I first saw it on a business trip to the United States and was horrified. It hit me in the heart and head. It was the same feeling I’d experienced as a child when I was teased because to all these posh little English kids I appeared as an uncouth Antipodean who spoke funny and wore shorts in winter. I wanted to tell the world we were more than this stereotypical version of Australia. One of the major reasons I was so passionate about making Australian Fashion Week a success internationally was because it sends a very different message to the world about who we are as Australians. It tells the world we are creative, innovative, sophisticated and able to compete in the luxury world of ready-to-wear fashion alongside New York, London Paris and Milan. These are attributes that add value to the DNA of brand Australia, in addition to the casual openness of our culture, our sporting prowess, wonderful environment and our two greatest assets: Indigenous culture and natural resources. Like our emerging artists, filmmakers, winemakers and chefs, fashion has a role to play in promoting a more accurate perception of us as a nation. And I’m very proud to say that Australian Fashion Week has been a part of that.

*

The next phase of my life was going to give me the tools I needed to get Fashion Week off the ground and instigate my initial intrigue in the fashion industry. As always, my father was leading by example. Having arrived home from our extended worldwide travels we were broke. My father soon landed a job at the Royal Dental Hospital, before he found a career at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, where he would stay until he retired at the age of fifty-six as a board director—he subsequently went on the road again with my mother. Along with my grandmother, we moved to Doncaster into what I have always considered our family home.

These were the years, I guess, when my father prepared me for what lay ahead. The art of open debate on every subject was encouraged and often compromises were hard fought and won. The evening dinner table was seminal in my development as a young man, from the manners expected of me to my contribution to the conversation to the undeniable impact my father’s business news of the day would have on us all. We would listen to how my father negotiated with the union or superannuation companies on behalf of the thousands of employees at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, his daily criticism of those poor souls who didn’t pull their weight around him or his continuous commentary on politics and world news. Just imagine growing up when Gough Whitlam was in power and the controversy that came with every political discussion. Daily I learnt how to handle people in a work environment, how to create a like-minded team to achieve a common goal, what was fair and just in life and business and what wasn’t. The University of DPL was open daily. It was to become the only university degree I was ever going to finish.

It was during this part of my life that my mother also became much more of an influence. My mother is the creative one in the family. She is the feeling one, the incredible portrait artist, the poet, the singer, the writer and the actor. If Dad was the commerce, then Mum was the art. As it turned out, later in my fashion career I realised that ultimate success in the fashion world comes from a balance between art and commerce. There was also another talented and strong-willed woman living in that household: my grandmother, Lillie Emilie Mary Rudd.

My grandmother was the most endearing snob you could ever meet. She moved through life as if she was born to royalty. She loved the ‘little people’ and was known to help them out through her endless charity work. She was a man’s woman and my father adored his mother-in-law, the mother he never really had. I was spellbound from an early age. She was larger than life: she had an opinion on everything, went on the most extravagant outings, had the best fun and was always the favourite of my mates. Much to my mother’s annoyance, she often ruled the roost at Vine Court in Doncaster, and during my difficult teenage years she became my confidante on all things. There was nothing I couldn’t discuss with Nan and nothing she wouldn’t advise me on—often to my complete shock! One of the most special times in my life was when my parents were travelling on an extended trip and I was ‘between’ marriages. I moved back in with Nan on the premise of looking after her. If the truth be known, it was the other way around.

Emily, as she was known to all, was the reason for me being interested in fashion in the first place. Every season I witnessed a ritual that fascinated me. When the latest collections arrived at Venn Gowns, then one of the only multi-label designer boutiques in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, my grandmother would take herself off to buy her new season’s wardrobe. Twice a year Nan returned with up to six new outfits perfectly selected to mix and match for her social outings and charity work. The new outfits would be laid out on her bed while she removed all the current season’s outfits from her wardrobe. These were then sorted into two groups: those that might make an appearance the following season and those that were off to St Vincent de Paul. European designer names that I am now so familiar with were packed into boxes and, season after season, dispatched to the ‘little people’. If only back then I had had the foresight to open a vintage store!

A seed, however, was planted. What was this thing called ‘fashion’ that required constant renewal and reinvention? What could possibly make a seemingly sensible woman behave in what I thought then such an illogical manner? The clothes my grandmother was dispatching were perfectly good and in some instances almost brand new, but they had been deemed ‘unfashionable’, forever banished from her sight. Little did I know then that the intrigue and astonishment of this seasonal ritual was going to lead me to create a platform for Australian designers.

*

From the safety net of Camberwell Grammar I headed out into the real world. After years of pursuing a dream of becoming a doctor I missed getting a place into medical school by a country mile—what was I thinking?! I tried applied science instead but dropped out halfway through my first year. That’s when it dawned on me: if I couldn’t become a doctor why not the next best thing: a hospital administrator like my father? I applied for a job as a stock clerk in the supply department, and having my father as a well-respected member of the management team didn’t hurt my chances. That was the last time Dad was to open a door for me, but once opened there was no turning back.

I threw myself into my new career; I was ‘Simon everywhere’. I’d finish my job on the stock cards at 10.30 in the morning—my predecessor had made it last all day—and then it was on to whatever needed doing or not. I soon came to the notice of my first mentor, Bob Green, the department head. He just kept putting the challenges in front of me and I kept knocking them out of the ballpark. First it was assistant purchasing officer, then purchasing officer, and then, to the surprise of the entire hospital executive, I was appointed the youngest-ever assistant department head of the Royal Melbourne Hospital Supply Department. I had a staff of about thirty-five people and was involved in helping to oversee an acquisitions budget of $80 million. I was studying for an economics degree and the junior manager most likely to succeed. The perfect company man.

At twenty-one I was wearing three-piece suits to work every day, and my hairline was rapidly receding, so with my late-1970s moustache I ...