From Melbourne shop floors to the boardroom of a 130-year-old football club, Julie Anne Quay’s journey combines fashion, family, and a refusal to accept the status quo.
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When the opportunity to buy an English football club, Barnsley FC, came to Julie Anne Quay and her husband, Matt Edmonds, in 2017, the first thing the New York-based Australian did was to apply lessons she’d learnt as a shopgirl on Melbourne’s Lygon Street in the 1990s.
Quay had led a storied life in the ragtrade, from Esprit and Country Road to Vogue in New York and Tokyo, going on to found the fashion disruptor VFiles in 2012, all the while leading a double life as the ultimate soccer mom.
She didn’t know exactly where Barnsley was.
“But I did all the research. Who are they? What do they stand for? Founded in 1887. Over 130 years old. FA Cup winners in 1912. A proper club with a deep Championship history – more seasons in that league [the second tier] than any other English team. And just an incredible brand.”
Barnsley FC ticked the boxes she’d learned to tick sitting at the feet of fashion legends. Now, as a board member and 11% stakeholder – one of only two Australians with shareholdings in English football clubs – she’s copped barrages from the game’s less elegant stakeholders. Still, she’s taken inspiration from its many classier folk to found a new label in cahoots with FIFA.
Wanting what you are not
Quay sets out from the beginning that she doesn’t want to talk about her age. “Being a woman in business and a woman in sport, you find that everyone’s always like, well, how old is she?”
What she does want to talk about – what she comes alive about – is origin. In her case, that’s Melbourne shops. “No matter where I go,” she says, “that comes with me.”
Quay started with Doncaster Shoppingtown in the city’s, doing laps with her dad, absorbing floor layouts, mannequin changes, and markdowns. “I didn’t realise it at the time,” she says, “but I was learning everything.”
She studied arts at the University of Melbourne, but learned everything that mattered on Lygon Street, Carlton, she says on a Zoom call from New York. Esprit had just launched in Australia. “I started working there in my second year of uni,” she says. “By the time I graduated, I was full-time. I was trained by Doug Tompkins, the founder of Esprit and The North Face, who is one of the great brand creators in the world.”
Quay was part of the San Francisco-based company’s local expansion, absorbing lessons about retail, design and storytelling – and about energy. “No detail is too small. It’s an attitude, not an age,” she says.
By her early twenties, she’d held senior roles, moved to New York, and was orbiting names she didn’t yet recognise, like artist Julian Schnabel, photographer Bruce Weber. Schnabel sketched her portrait on a napkin at the Plaza Hotel. She threw it away unaware of its value.
Back in Australia, she worked with Country Road founder Stephen Bennett, then returned to New York – newly married, newly pregnant – and, a week after giving birth, interviewed for a job with Steven Meisel, the reclusive fashion photographer. She got it. “I was shocked,” she says. “I was his studio manager.”
Quay ended up as executive editor of Vogue Japan, where she learned that Japan didn’t want Japan. Neither cherry blossoms nor geishas. “They wanted Marlboro men and Times Square.” It wasn’t lost on her that everybody wanted to be someone they were not.
A chance meeting at Tokyo airport with Stephen Gan, founder of Visionaire and V Magazine, led to an offer to work at V in New York. She took it, finding herself immersed in the edgy, underground world of fashion and music, this time with an internet-age urgency.
Young Matilda
And through all of this, she was raising a daughter, Penelope Edmonds, who was turning into a handy soccer player. Quay was a vocal sideline presence at the camps, tournaments and weekends on the road at three-star hotels all over the country. “I’m a professional soccer mum,” she says.
But Quay’s patriotism kicked in when Penelope got selected to attend a US national youth camp. “I was like, ‘No way! Australia all the way’.”
That ended with multiple trips to the Australian Institute of Sport.
“Penelope played for the Young Matildas in China [at the under-16 Asian Championships in 2011]. A really big life experience for her.”
Inside the velvet rope
When not on the road, Quay had entrée to the best parties and the hippest fashion shows, but, as an Australian, never felt like an insider. She started to notice a bunch of super hip millennials who were not getting past the velvet rope. “They were amazing-looking kids, but they weren’t in the conversation. I realised we needed to have a place on the internet for them.”
She hired programmers and launched VFiles in 2012, leasing a grimy shopfront in SoHo. “I was trying to build a social media platform, a fashion incubator, and a content studio at the same time,” she says. “With a team of five people.”
They started selling things out of the shopfront. The first drop was by streetwear brand Hood By Air, with a party that drew a pre-fame rapper, “A$AP Rocky”, and a crew of kids who looked like the future.
VFiles exploded. By 2020, she had 330,000 users on the platform and partnerships with Nike, Meta, Adidas, and Sprite. “We sold opportunity,” she says. “We sold energy. We sold belonging.”
Quay’s husband, Matthew Edmonds, was then a senior advisor for the family office of Timothy Barakett, founder and CEO of TRB Advisors. A friend of Edmonds brought the Barnsley opportunity to them. “My husband and I used to talk about how amazing it would be to invest in a team one day,” she says.
They agreed to the deal in 2017 and closed in 2018. But the original investment group splintered. Some members wanted out. Quay and Edmonds stayed on and stepped up, joining forces with the current chairman to help reorient Barnsley’s future.
The tone shifted when Barnsley’s form dipped and the club faced relegation.
“Some of the group that had been running the football side got distracted. They were doing a lot of different things. And in football, if you take your eyes off it for even a moment, everything can change. Managers didn’t work out. We started losing games. That’s when I got more involved. We made changes.”
She also went public-facing. And for that, she paid a price. “When you meet English football fans for the first time – it’s something else,” she says. “It’s a tough crowd. We’re custodians of this badge. It’s 137 years old. It doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to them. It belongs to the town.
“I had to delete my Twitter,” she says. “I saved some of the comments – I’ll share them one day. They were slandering me, my family, and my daughter. ‘Penel’ was working at the club for free, and they went after her. Grown men. It’s embarrassing.”
Nevertheless, Quay gets it. “This is their club. It’s generational – like my family with [AFL club] Carlton. I understand the passion. But I wish I could talk to them about it without getting torn apart.”
One of her proudest achievements is helping professionalise Barnsley’s women’s team. And she’s got her eye on their kit. “VFiles designed the kit last season. I talked to people around the club, and it was hugely contentious because we didn’t do white shorts for the home team. We did red. Even for our ladies in the laundry, having anything white is a real problem, but the fans didn’t like that. So, we’ve changed the kit for next season.”
These things move slowly, but she can see a complete change in the women’s uniforms. “We need to work with the players, but I know when I’m running, I like to wear fitted clothes. I don’t want things flapping around.”
She says she brings a “fresh opinion” and refuses to accept cynicism as the status quo. “There’s this one line I hate in football. People say, ‘That’s just football.’ When something awful happens – a bad call, an injury, a loss – they shrug and say it like it’s inevitable. Don’t give me that. It’s not ‘just football’. It’s life. And life’s a game – but it’s also something we can shape.”
FIFA 1904
Hanging out in top-level soccer, fashionista Julie Anne Quay noticed something she hadn’t expected. “If you look at football, you look at all the executives, you look at the coaches, players arriving – they all have a certain elegance,” says the founder of VFiles and a Barnsley FC board member.
She wanted to capture that aesthetic of energy and refinement in a label and took the idea to FIFA. “Someone there told me, ‘But we have a merchandise deal with Adidas.’ And I was like, ‘I’m not talking merchandise. I’m talking suits, I’m talking workwear, I’m talking technically advanced performance wear for the people who work in football.’”
They did a licensing deal. Co-founded with Leonardo Lawson, former president of Kanye West’s Yeezy, the new label, FIFA 1904, was developed under Quay’s creative incubator VFiles and was unveiled in July.
The label sees itself as landing where sport meets style, in time for the US co-hosting the 2026 football World Cup next June and July.
“This is where it all comes together,” says Quay.
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