‘As an outsider, I saw something different’: The finance boss shaking up Australian fashion

In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep’s character Miranda Priestly sneers at the screen, wearing clothing fit for the most influential woman in fashion. Along with dresses by Miuccia Prada, the character inspired by Vogue boss Anna Wintour dons luxurious layers of Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino and Lanvin.

For the most powerful woman in Australian fashion, Carla Zampatti is enough.

Marianne Perkovic doesn’t work for Vogue, or even media rivals Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire or Elle. Instead, the executive chair of the Australian Fashion Council (AFC) arrived at her post, which now includes overseeing Australian Fashion Week (AFW), via a career in finance.

A background in banking explains why 53-year-old Perkovic wears an unfashionable smile instead of sunglasses when she sits in the front row, as well as her preference for Carla Zampatti which, in the boardroom, still carries the same clout as a Chanel handbag at a party in Paris.

“When I started in the industry at my first job, there weren’t many women but the ones I looked up to wore Carla Zampatti,” Perkovic says, remembering her corporate career beginnings in the mid-’90s. “With my first little bonus, I headed straight to Pitt Street Mall in Sydney to get a Carla Zampatti suit.”

Perkovic quickly realised that she couldn’t afford it. She explained her situation to a woman on the shop floor, who told her that she would have to work hard and work her way up to be able to buy it.

“She took me over to a rack of more affordable items from Cue and demonstrated how to mix and match them,” she says. “As I was leaving, I asked for her name: ‘I’m Carla’ was the reply. I met Carla Zampatti again years later, but I always remembered from that encounter that people in fashion can help you – whether it’s setting goals or dressing for the corporate world where women are judged differently to men.”

The wait to afford expensive suits wasn’t long. In 2006, Perkovic became the youngest female chief executive of an ASX-listed company at Count Financial Limited. Senior roles at Commonwealth Bank followed, where as general manager of Commonwealth Private, Perkovic faced the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry in 2018. (As a senior CBA executive, Perkovic was grilled on the stand and accused of misleading the commission – asked more than 10 times to properly address questions about the flashpoint issue of fees for no service.)

‘Even five years ago, if you had told me that fashion would be a major part of my portfolio, I wouldn’t have believed you.’

Marianne Perkovic

“They were certainly not the headlines about me that I would ever have wanted,” Perkovic says. “For me, it reinforced the importance of listening carefully to customers and understanding the real impact decisions can have on people’s lives.” She adds, “I knew it was going to be the hardest thing in my career. Many declined [to appear at the commission], but from my values base it was important to show up, even if the problems were historic or not: I was an employee of the bank and leadership roles come with that obligation. You can’t step away when issues are hard or when historic problems need to be addressed.”

She left the Commonwealth Bank in 2020, consulted at accounting and auditing multinational KPMG and began joining boards with a finance bent. Then in 2023, a change of direction – Perkovic became executive chair of the AFC. It was a move that would have stunned her friends at Bankstown Girls High School, where she was school captain.

“At school I looked at fashion magazines – it was the supermodel era, after all – but I was already set on the world of economics. My friends would be surprised, but even five years ago, if you had told me that fashion would be a major part of my portfolio, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Perkovic says. “This was supposed to be my fun board.”

But when Perkovic took the reins, the AFC was about as sexy as a pair of greying Y-fronts. The voluntary not-for-profit membership organisation for the local fashion and textile industry, which contributes more than $27.2 billion to the Australian economy annually, was primarily focused on worker and sustainability issues.

Australian Fashion Week, the premier industry event for designers, had a monopoly on the enticing atmosphere of strutting models in dynamic creations that fill both social media accounts and the dreams of future designers. The event – founded three decades ago in 1996 – helped shape the international profile of success stories such as Zimmermann, Sass & Bide and Ksubi and launch the careers of models Miranda Kerr, Abbey Lee and Gemma Ward. When global entertainment organisation IMG announced that it was withdrawing from operating AFW after nearly 20 years in November 2024, just as Perkovic was setting into her style side hustle, the change-management expert saw an opportunity.

“One of the first questions I asked when I started at the AFC was, ‘Why don’t we run Fashion Week?’ ” Perkovic says. “I was used to industry associations running major events for their industries. I got different answers, including, ‘That’s not what the Fashion Council does.’ As an outsider, I saw something different.” She adds, “I’m an action-orientated person and I think people can give you excuses as to why things can’t happen. But if it’s the right thing, you’ve got to make it happen.”

Perkovic raced to have the AFC fill the XL-sized void with the support of the NSW government. Weeks later, the AFC was appointed official organiser of AFW, to be based at Carriageworks in Eveleigh.

With the assistance of the persuasive former Harper’s Bazaar editor Kellie Hush, brands such as Romance Was Born, Lee Mathews, Aje and Bianca Spender signed up to participate. There were some bumpy moments, but in the face of extinction, the Australian runway narrowly avoided reaching its end.

“What sets Marianne apart in an industry that runs on instinct and creativity is that she also runs on strategy,” says Hush, who is currently fashion director of AFW. “Transforming the AFW model is no small undertaking; it demands the kind of leader who can make a tough call on Monday, pick up the phone on Tuesday to rally the industry and open her contact book on Wednesday to bring serious business to the table. Marianne does all three with the quiet confidence of someone who knows that staying positive isn’t naivety, it’s the job.”

This year, the revitalised event relocates from the industrial setting of Carriageworks to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) on Sydney Harbour. This move harbourside holds yet another Carla Zampatti thread, with Perkovic inspired by the label’s AFW runway show last year, held outside the MCA. “The venue is the right backdrop for designers, international designers and consumers, which I want to look at bringing back to AFW with ticketed shows,” she says. “We have to be there for the industry, but consumers are just as important.”

For the event, which runs from May 11-15, there will be lessons learnt from last year’s show. “On the night of the Carla show it looked like it was going to rain, and there were stories that if the clouds opened, we would have party umbrellas or a big marquee. The truth is that we would have sat there in the rain. It would have still been spectacular.”

For the other 51 weeks of the year, Perkovic is still focused on change within the AFC, with a special interest in working with Austrade on developing new markets for designers, educating consumers on the value of local manufacturing and promoting women beyond creative positions to more senior industry roles. “It’s not glamorous but fashion is a serious business,” she says. “Of course, that’s not the part anyone wants to hear.”

Just don’t expect Perkovic to look serious in the front row when AFW celebrates its 30th anniversary in May. “I know you’re meant to be quiet, but I’m the one getting unusual looks because I’m still chatting to the person next to me,” she says. “That’s who I am.”

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