WORLD-CLASS FASHION:

Pia du Pradal is putting Australian design and innovation on the map

Her smart, striking suits have been present at some of the most significant events in Australia’s recent history. Susan Chenery meets Pia du Pradal who, with collaborator, traditional artist Louise Numina Napanangka, is taking Australian design to the world.

When Dame Quentin Bryce attended the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011, she was resplendent in a hot pink, coral and orange silk brocade suit with matching pink patent stilettos.

The Governor-General of Australia was seated close to the action in Westminster Abbey. “There’s the royals,” she recalls, “then the foreign royals and then the governors-general. We were right up front in the abbey, looking across where they face each other. So we could see everybody coming in – the Middletons, all the royal family. It was a lot of fun.”

While 36 million people watched the wedding on television, in a small studio in Brisbane, several seamstresses watched even more intently. They had made the GovernorGeneral’s outfit and now it was being beamed around the world.

The next day, designer Pia du Pradal’s phone started ringing with media asking for details about Dame Quentin’s suit. “I was mortified,” says Pia. “We are very discreet about who we dress. This was all hush-hush. There is no way that any of us would have spoken about it.” Then the phone rang again. It was Dame Quentin. “I told them,” she admitted.

This was the first time, says Pia, “that the public actually learned we were dressing Quentin to a large degree.”

As Governor-General, Quentin

Bryce was famous for always looking fabulous. Immaculately coiffed, she made headlines in her custom-made clothes. It was high fashion in high office. The tailored silk suits were elegant, sharp and classic, but it was the colour that stood out in seas of suits. Under intense scrutiny, constantly photographed, she did not shy away from forthright choices. It was power dressing but with the disarmingly sunny optimism of lucent, unapologetic yellows, greens, blues. A dazzling academic, lawyer and human rights advocate, there was still plenty of pink.

Dressing a Dame

In the Brisbane studio of Pia du Pradal there are the classic box jackets and architectural skirts that are her signature pieces hanging on racks, patterns on cutting tables, rolls of fabric from Italy and the calico that is used for fittings. Dame Quentin is

sitting at a table eating sandwiches and recalling the days when she was meeting world leaders and doing up to four public engagements a day. When she was travelling, she could change outfits three times in one of those hectic days. “There would be a meeting at breakfast, then official things, then afternoon tea, and there would be formal dinners at night that were black tie or military dress, when everybody was dressed to the nines.”

Pia and Quentin exchange memories and anecdotes. They plainly have an easy friendship and immense mutual respect. Tall, willowy and blonde, Pia’s relationships with all her women – her clients and staff – are clearly grounded in great warmth.

Pia met Quentin through a mutual friend at a hotel where she was showing her clothes. “This very, very chic woman walked in,” recalls Pia. “I think she was wearing Louis Feraud and she was going to be the future Governor of Queensland. And she said, ‘When I’m Governor of Queensland I’d like to support local industry’. I thought, that’s very nice of her, she’ll probably buy a shirt. And then she invited us to do the outfit for her investiture.” (That suit was made from a purple Versace fabric “where her medals would stand out” and teamed with lime green shoes.)

Later, says Pia, “we had rented a [workshop] space from Apex Smash Repairs, and Quentin would arrive with the guards and the flag, and they would move all the smashed cars to give her somewhere to park.”

“A friendship developed,” says Pia, “and we ended up having all her patterns. It would be fair to say that almost everything she wore as governor was made by us.”

To avoid the awkwardness of wearing the same thing as someone else, it was decided her outfits would be made individually. Though on that, Quentin says now, “what does it matter?”

There were so many things to take into consideration. The clothes had to work hard. “She had to be able to sit down on a stage,” says Pia, “so the skirt couldn’t be too revealing. She had to be able to get out of planes and walk on mud. Quentin would order dresses that were wider when she went to a children’s hospital so she was able to squat down with the children. We had little weights put into the hems.”

They quickly learned that you cannot pin a medal on a light chiffon. “Every garment was designed to be able to wear medals,” says Pia.

“You need so many clothes in that role,” says Quentin. “You need a lot of wardrobe. There was a lot of standing up for ceremonial functions so it had to look good from the back.”

Pia would send sketches and fly to Canberra for fittings. There was the challenge of visiting the Crown Prince in Spain with his beautiful wife, Letizia. “Quentin said everyone would be wearing French and Italian couture, so we had to match that. My staff don’t often get the opportunity to produce real couturier work – they loved it.” They created a pink suit for Dame Quentin to wear for a luncheon.

“When I needed something fresh,” says Dame Quentin, “I would ring and say, ‘Can I have the yellow suit in a hot pink?’”

There was the famous yellow coach dress that she wore to swear in Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, splashed on front pages across the country, now in the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. And there was a woollen crepe in soft apricot pink for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, freezing on a boat on the Thames. “I was on boat number three,” remembers Quentin, “and you could see the water dripping down from the canvas awning.” There was a mauve suit to meet Nelson Mandela.

“People think fashion is frivolous,” says Pia, “but they don’t give enough attention to the fact that, if you are well dressed, you don’t have to worry about how you are dressed. You can focus on what you are doing.”

Then there was the time Dame Quentin brought in her female personal protection officer to be fitted for a jacket with room for a gun on her hip.

When her time as Governor-General came to an end, Quentin said, “bring a truck” and donated many of the clothes to women’s charities.

Out of Africa

Pia did not set out to be a fashion designer. Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, she studied social anthropology, African studies, and psychology, then did postgraduate studies in Denmark. Her parents had migrated from Denmark when she was very young, eventually starting a factory making lampshades. “My mother was brilliant with fashion,” she says. “Today you would call her a couturier but she

was making ball gowns and clothes for the social elite and all the ambassadors’ wives. I was a little girl watching. She taught me to sew and pin and I saw her draping these women. She is still very stylish. She is 91, wears hot pink jeans and has flaming red hair. She made all my clothes and people would stop us in the street.”

But as a young woman in the ’70s, “there was no way I was interested in clothes”.

She went to do research in

Botswana and stayed for 10 years.

“I met my husband [Jacques, an architect] and it was a really wonderful life. I lived in some very isolated villages without water, without electricity. It was probably the most beautiful time of my life.

I was doing research and consultancy work, socio-economic impact analysis, that sort of thing.”

When she migrated to Australia, she wasn’t able to work in her field. “I had specialised in African Studies and I knew nothing about this region. You just do what you can do.”

One day at lunch, someone commented on her outfit, which she had made herself. “They said, ‘You should have a label.’”

Soon Pia too was dressing the social elite – people such as Anna Bligh and others she is far too discreet to name. Hillary Clinton once remarked that the lime green denim jacket ABC TV’s 7.30 presenter Leigh Sales (at that time a regular client) wore to interview her was “fabulous”.

In the early days, Pia worked out of a garage, using outworkers. She put an ad in The Courier Mail and had hundreds of Vietnamese refugees apply.

“Instead of them coming to my home and bringing a sample of their sewing I decided I would see them in their homes. There was a practice where a person who spoke good English would act as a middle man, use people who couldn’t speak English and then take a cut,” she explains. “It was unbelievably exploitative.”

So instead, she developed a close working relationship with three very

“The significance of Louise’s art for our label is unimaginable.”

special seamstresses who are still with her today. First she met Hong Nguyen, “who had been through dreadful times”, and started working for her in the late 1980s. She was joined by her sister-in-law, Loan Tren, who had been working in an abattoir “and was very unhappy there”. Then Quy Du joined the team, the three of them skilfully and dexterously making the clothes that make the headlines.

Pia’s high-end clothes are structural and highly tailored. She goes to Lake Como at least once a year to buy fabrics. “That is my passion. If you have fabulous fabric, you don’t have to over-design or over-embellish.

I want the client to be wearing the garment, not the garment wearing the client. I want the personality to shine.”

Partners in design

In 2016, when Pia went to Italy, she found all the fabrics very subdued and conservative that year. So she began to look elsewhere. Fortuitously, she was introduced to Louise Numina Napanangka, one of six sisters from Stirling Station, north of Utopia in the Northern Territory. Louise came from a family of celebrated artists and had been taught from the age of five by her aunt, Gloria Pitjara, who won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1999. Gloria had been the first person to put the bush medicine leaf story on canvas and bring it into the public domain. Now known for her own medicine leaves motif, says Pia, “there is just something magic about Louise – her work is mesmerising”.

The bush medicine leaf story is an illustration of cultural heritage, a story allocated through the family and community of that region. Louise’s work comes from absorbing the stories from an early age – hearing, understanding, embodying and then expressing them.

“It’s the Aboriginal way,” says Louise. “We sit down together and paint. That is how we keep our culture strong. We sit with our aunties and we learn our storylines. We learn about bush medicine, the plants, how to make it and how to use it. It keeps our family strong; it keeps us strong and our culture strong.”

Mindful of cultural appropriation, Pia commissioned three paintings from Louise and had them digitally scanned and printed on silk and cotton. Part of the deal was that her work would be promoted on the garments. Louise has come from Darwin to Brisbane three times to paint in Pia’s studio. These soulful, vibrant paintings of bush medicine flowers and leaves, bush melon and bush yams are now stitched into garments and carry with them a traditional story about food, medicine and culture. “A healing story,” says Louise.

In 2018 Louise was painting in Darwin when the NSW Greens politician David Shoebridge took a video of her. It attracted 10 million views on Facebook. “It was absolutely mind-boggling,” says Jane Lewis of Raintree Art, a friend whose gallery sells her work. Another 30-second video taken by Jane received seven million views. Louise once wanted to be famous like her aunt, Gloria. Now she is. And the collaboration has been life-changing for both Louise and Pia.

“The significance of Louise’s art for our label was unimaginable,” says Pia, “Having clients ask questions about her and her culture is thrilling for me. And to see her designs on our garments at so many significant events in people’s lives is wonderful. We had a client wear pink bush medicine leaves to a wedding in Lake Como; green bush medicine leaves have been made into a gala gown to be worn in Venice; Louise’s work has been made into suits and worn to international conferences. When clients send me photos I feel as if we’ve been there with them. I love knowing these clothes travel the world telling such an ancient story.” AWW