A LIFE LESS ordinary
Growing up amid the Bosnian War affected Mira Comara deeply. So she worked in intelligence before finding peace – and fashion – in Australia. By Sophie Tedmanson. Styled by Philippa Moroney. Photographed by Hugh Stewart.
Achildhood in troubled Bosnia, an education at Oxford University’s “spy college”, and a career dealing with international kidnappings and intelligence are a far cry from the Australian fashion industry. But Mira Comara’s life is one a far less ordinary. The striking brunette is walking through Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden as the harbour sparkles brightly on a perfectly sunny autumn afternoon. She is matter-of-factly describing her upbringing on the other side of the world, one so far removed from this moment and so extraordinary it is worthy of a movie script; the kind of Eastern-European-female-sort-ofspy-turned-fashionista-with-posh- connections story that Angelina Jolie would revel in.
This autumnal day comes at a particularly poignant time for Comara, one of exciting new beginnings and reminders of a troubled past. The previous day, she had a meeting with Robyn Catinella, whose boutique luxury fashion consulting business Comara joined in January, after deciding on a career change upon moving to Sydney with her Australian husband. Then she turned on the news and saw that Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb politician known as “the Butcher of Bosnia”, had finally been found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 and crimes against humanity after his eight-year-long war crimes tribunal.
Karadzic’s actions had an enormous impact on Comara, whose family fled Bosnia as the war commenced, and who lost several members in the subsequent years.
“The war had already broken out in Croatia and Slovenia, but there was trouble brewing in Bosnia and you could feel it in the air,” she recalls of late 1991, around her seventh birthday. “There were rations, people were getting very agitated. There was no money. There was just that feeling of something brewing. I remember that feeling as a kid.”
Her mother, Snjezana (known as “Sno”), was already in England undertaking a residency at Oxford to study as an anaesthetist. “We were getting ready to go out and visit her. My dad was working, so my sister [ Jasna] and I moved in with Granny for a couple of weeks. I remember we were watching the fall of Vukovar, one of the towns a couple of hours from Sarajevo, and I remember saying to Dad: ‘Is there going to be a war?’ and he was like: ‘No, no, this is Sarajevo, we are in Europe and we had the [ Winter] Olympics [in 1984].’ We left two months later, mainly to visit Mum for Christmas, but we never came home.”
Her father, Sead, followed three months later, just as the Bosnian War began in April 1992. “He promised my mum he’d be there to celebrate my sister’s second birthday on the 12th of April, and that date is stamped in all of our memories because the war started on the 6th of April, and my dad was on the last plane out. There were so many things that happened in how we got together as a family. I think we were so lucky.”
As a child, Comara was always studious and loved playing dress-ups – she sneakily swapped her clothes for books and all her Barbie dolls in her suitcase when they moved to London. And as an adult she remains equally passionate about her seemingly disparate worlds: she talks as enthusiastically about essays esteemed British academic professor Robert Service has written on Stalin as she does about a Roksanda dress or Matteau bikinis.
Comara’s studies included university in the Netherlands, because of its proximity to the Hague, where former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who worked closely with Karadzic, was being tried at the war crimes tribunal. She sat in on a hearing one day and came face to face with him. “I felt it was really important to go; his actions had had such a huge impact on my life,” she says. “I don’t mean anything to him but there were so many people who had been so grossly affected by what he had done. To see him defend himself in court, I was actually in awe of how he was able to conduct himself.”
She then returned to London, studied international politics and did a masters thesis on the fall of communism in Russia at Saint Antony’s College at Oxford, colloquially known as the “spy college” because its graduates tend to work in intelligence, NGOs or law. After graduating, she dappled with working for an international law firm before discovering a company where she could utilise her degrees and “weird interests”: Control Risks, an international organisation that specialises in advising companies with employees in dangerous areas prone to kidnapping, piracy or attacks, such as the Middle East, Central America or Eastern Europe. To simplify, if one of those companies became embroiled in trouble and a client was kidnapped for ransom, Control Risks would assist in resolving the matter.
Comara cannot divulge much of what she did there for security reasons, but her first role involved academic-style research into how the landscape of terrorism could change post 9/11. “You specialise in a particular region, and for me I had this interest in regards to the former Yugoslavia, Russia and Eastern Europe. I spoke the languages and understood Russian, so it was a good fit,” she says.
After several years, she moved from research into more patronage work, and was given her own client to look after. “Another director and I were advising them – so you’re working with their security team, their analyst team, to ensure that the company operates in a way that can anticipate where their weak points are,” she says. “I got really attached to them; they were a huge corporation and I was their person of contact.”
Then Comara got a phone call she hoped she would never receive: one of her clients had been kidnapped. “I was in Switzerland doing kidnapping and ransom training,” she recalls. “We would do a run-through so you’re prepared, so you know how it goes, so you have all the processes and procedures in place. Because you don’t know when it’s going to come up, and you have to learn fast because you can’t afford to be learning on the job.
“So we had this 14-hour day where we had all of the management all in one room training, doing role plays. Then I flew back on the last flight out, got into the office the next morning and received a voicemail from them about a kidnapping that had happened. And I was like … ‘Fuck.’”
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She pauses. I ask what transpired and she chooses her words carefully.
“It didn’t end well. It’s rare when it happens, but that’s the reality of the job. You live through it; I mean we certainly had all the procedures in place …”
Comara had only just turned 28 at the time. What emotional impact did that have? “Absolutely devastated,” she says. “It stays with you – I thought maybe I’m not strong enough but … these are high-risk places. But when it happens, it puts into perspective what you are doing.”
Last year, her husband, Teddy Alexander, a Tasmanian Rhodes Scholar whom she met at Oxford, was headhunted to Sydney by a finance firm. It proved the perfect opportunity for Comara to make a career change, and a refreshing one at that: fashion.
“I think that’s one of the nicest surprises about moving to fashion here and it being so social. I have an amazing array of female friends here, whereas in London my work wasn’t social and my friends were predominantly male,” she says, looking out over the harbour. “Our life is very different here and I feel like fashion offers me something different – we work with a lot of young designers and I really like that because they’re trusting you with something that is their dream. So the fact that they’re letting you in on something is amazing. It’s a very special thing; to be able to share someone’s dream and to be able to develop it and hopefully make it much bigger.”
Her background has also enabled her to have a pragmatic view on her new career. “I love the creative side of it. And on the worst of days, when you have a bad day, maybe you miss a deadline or maybe the right fabric didn’t arrive … everyone is still alive so you never lose your head,” she says, with a wry smile. “That’s not me trying to belittle it: I want to put everything into context, as I feel very privileged doing what I do and I feel lucky being able to do it. That’s very rare because there are so many people who have to do what they do so they can put food on the table. Their job takes them to really dangerous places in the world whereas I don’t have to worry about my safety anymore. That’s something I am very aware of.”