Where she leads
As the Preatures frontwoman and a Chanel muse, Isabella Manfredi’s style language speaks aloud in the season’s best slogan T-shirts. By Alice Birrell.
For someone who stalks the stage with a feline presence reminiscent of Chrissy Amphlett and shakes her Joan Jett black hair as she abandons herself to the kick drum of her band the Preatures, Isabella Manfredi could have anyone thinking she was born this way. More fool us. “When I was a teenager I had extremely bad style, like, terrible style,” she emphasises. “I used to dress up in my room and create outfits and go to these parties with the Bondi girls or the Bronte boys and people would just be like: ‘What are you doing? What are you wearing? Who do you think you are?’”
Time and talent worked their ways and after meeting the rest of the band at the Australian Institute of Music and at a gig in Sydney in the aughts, she had answers to all of those questions. “I had what I would call an explosion of personality after about seven or eight years of feeling like I had suppressed myself. I started shopping again, I started going to vintage stores, and I started building my style.”
Touring, the kind of shambolic microenvironment as seductive as it is formative, became a reality in Manfredi’s life, taking her from Bondi to London, New York and the stages of Coachella as the band’s album Blue Planet Eyes held traction. “Being in a van with seven guys for six or seven weeks, sometimes three months at a time … it’s not really conducive to life.” Jeans, a jacket, two pairs of boots and T-shirts were her staples when one tour-end in Las Vegas left her with single items only.
“I just spent this ridiculous amount of money on clothes and it’s funny because at that point it really was a binge, but every item of clothing that I bought I still own and love,” she says. That included vintage knits and T-shirts, though today they’re just as likely to be Chanel as they are pre-loved. Travelling to Paris and New York as a brand ambassador has been an experience that plays to Manfredi’s romantic side. “I loved being in that context, because it’s all drama and theatre,” she says, though fashion wasn’t something that always sat well with her. As a teenager she gave up magazines that pushed fashion for fashion’s sake, though today she’s reconciled with the industry. “There’s always been that tension between commerce and art,” she says. “Artists have always needed patrons, so I’ve come to peace with it.”
So, too, is she at peace with being someone who is looked to for style cues, albeit on her own terms. “I was very conscious of not making it all about being an It girl,” she says plainly. “I’m not a model, that’s not my job. [But] I guess over the last year I’ve become a lot more curious.” Like her predecessors and