LEADING MAN
Described as the ringmaster of Australian fashion, Peter Weiss mentored designers over the decades and was a generous philanthropist.
Described as the ringmaster of Australian fashion, Peter Weiss created successful businesses and mentored fledgling designers over the decades, but was also a connoisseur of culture and generous philanthropist. Jane de Teliga reflects on his lasting legacy and what the local industry can learn as we all look forward.
FASHION HAS A very short memory, which I know from years writing on the subject. Coco Chanel when talking about her fellow designers with her usual acerbic contempt, said: “Only those with no memory insist on their originality.”
Since the pandemic has thrown the crazy fashion system into chaos, maybe it’s time to look back at our history for ideas and lessons that could apply to the now challenged industry. Some may think that it all began here with the advent of Australian Fashion Week 25 years ago. As fashion editor of The Sydney Morning Herald at the time, I know there was already a roll call of designers who had developed the professional industry locally. Many of those key players were European immigrants to this country who brought international notions of style and innovative survival concepts to these shores.
That generation of designer labels has virtually disappeared and already many of the names are forgotten, except by fashion writers and historians or vintage hunters. The recent death of Peter Weiss in June this year has us reflecting on our country’s creative past. Dubbed ‘the godfather of Australian fashion’, Weiss was known for his innovative businesses, his generous mentoring and his philanthropic legacy in art and music.
Other fashion names of the same generation include Hungarian-born George Gross, whose designer partner Harry Watt died last year, as well as the label Simona, whose creator, Austrian-born Inge Fonagy, died earlier this year. One of the last designer labels of that generation, which is still in existence, is of course the legendary Italian-born Carla Zampatti.
Weiss himself is remembered as a trailblazer, not because he was the designer (that was his first wife, Irish-born Adele), but rather because he was such an innovative merchant. Weiss, who was born in Vienna in 1935, emigrated to Sydney in 1939 with his parents. In order to survive, his father worked in an apron business (which he later bought) and his mother sewed. The seeds of the Weiss business began there. As a cellist, Weiss’s abiding passion was music, but it was fashion and those early lessons in survival that created his brand, which continued through clever incarnations over three decades.
Peter and Adele began the company in 1973 and one of their early design ideas in the 70s was a collection of pre-cut and ready-to-sew garments sold on a mail-order basis, which The Australian Women’s Weekly used as a privilege offer for its readers.
The Weiss design enterprise prospered in the big-shouldered boom time of the 80s, with more than 40 stores in Australia. Weiss was an instinctive collaborator, producing uniforms for the now defunct Ansett Airlines. The lucrative business model is still followed, with the Qantas uniform currently being designed by Paris-based Australian Martin Grant.
A collaboration with prestigious Scottish knitwear label Pringle garnered a highly successful company known as Weiss Pringle with a ‘store within a store concept’ in David Jones. His Weiss Art concept, started in 1987 based on strong calligraphic motifs, is still so memorable that even now my own daughter Emily, who was a child at the time, commented: “Oh yes, those little black and white koalas” when I mentioned writing this piece.
Public relations consultant Adam Worling, who worked with Weiss in earlier years, says of him: “He taught me the importance of generosity. He came from the generation that believed in ‘paying it forward’ before the term even existed. He had the ability to acknowledge all the people in the room and make things happen. He was the ringmaster.”
When he and his first wife Adele divorced in 1990, he had no hesitation in shuttering his fashion business. First the fashion and gradually Weiss Art and Weiss Pringle followed. It was
Weiss’s ability to ‘pivot’ – the buzzword of the current crisis – that allowed him to be successful over the years.
It is Weiss’s cultural interests and generous philanthropic gestures that will leave a lasting legacy. With his second wife Doris (also born in Vienna in the same year) by his side for 30 years, Weiss had a wonderful time giving away the financial gains he had made, in generous gifts to art and music. His passion for music came to the fore with his championing and sponsorship of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and his most recent million-dollar donation to build rehearsal rooms in the Sydney Opera House.
His advice always proved an inspiration to designer Collette Dinnigan, even when she decided to close her fashion business after 23 years in 2013 to follow her passion for interior design and property: “Which became my new business model,” she says. “He was a very much a part of our family. He and Doris stayed with us in Rome for a month. He was a great sounding board. For younger people he made the time. He always made you feel like the most important person. At the same time, it was okay if he said ‘next’ or ‘moving right along’ when he was no longer interested in what you were saying. His help wasn’t just financial, it was his time and his generosity of spirit that really mattered. That’s what is so much more important and more special”. Talking of Weiss’s ability to ‘pivot’, she says: “I understand that too. You need to listen to the people around you, to your customers and see what is happening and change. It’s common sense and good manners, really.”
In the new world order of post-pandemic fashion, Plato’s concept “Our need will be the real creator”, is as true for the current design generation as it was for Weiss and his mother and father before him. Start small, come up with clever ideas and have a meaningful involvement in the broader cultural life of your society. Work hard and reinvent yourself in line with the zeitgeist of the day. It could even take the form of Weiss pre-cut designs for home sewing or its updated version of 3D printing technology to create face masks or your own clothes.
Now a fashion-led economic recovery could be possible. By pivoting, collaborating and reinventing, there are now many new/old pathways to making clothes. This time around the zeitgeist is moving all towards a more Earth-sustainable and less wasteful model. Pamela Easton, after the closure of the Easton Pearson label with Lydia Pearson, now produces her small range of artisanal garments ordered by her clients through private showings. Her beautiful detailing is created, in social enterprise mode, by generations of Indian craftspeople.
Or the model could be to manufacture again in Australia, as did Weiss for many decades, which is the slow fashion model of Good Day Girl designed by Alexia Spalding and Sophie Toohey, who produce a tight edit of pre-ordered contemporary classics from T-shirts to trenches.
Acknowledging and collaborating with the ‘greats’ that came before is the path that Romance is Born took when they collaborated with Jenny Kee to reimagine her incredible prints for their designs.
Mixing philanthropy and fashion is a path that Weiss understood. One of his last ideas before he died was to revive Weiss Art koala T-shirts to fund koala regeneration. Take for example The Social Outfit in Sydney’s Newtown, which uses remnant fabric to fashion everything from face masks to dresses by training and employing refugees and new migrants.
It’s full circle from the Weiss aprons and home sewing, giving a new twist to the notion of a circular economy. It’s circular fashion history in the making.
“It was his time and his generosity of spirit that really mattered”