After years working in the shadow of fashion icon Carla Zampatti and alongside sister Allegra, Bianca Spender is finally seeing her own vision take shape – and learning that success sometimes means stepping back.
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When Allegra and Bianca Spender shared a bedroom growing up, the extrovert, perfectionist Bianca felt the need to put masking tape down the middle of the room to protect her side, and especially her clothes, from the chaos of her quieter, more contemplative little sister.
“I was messy, and she was tidy, and it was exhausting,” recalls Allegra. “I would drive her crazy because I’d borrow her clothes and then just not look after them with the care they deserved.”
You can imagine how things went when, 20 years later, Allegra parachuted into the family business, Carla Zampatti Pty Ltd, as CEO, the nominal boss of both her big sister and their fashion-industry legend mother, Carla.
“Family business is not for the faint-hearted,” says Allegra.
When Allegra left Carla Zampatti in 2017 to pursue politics, Bianca left soon after to run her eponymous label as her own company.
Only now, almost a decade after taking that plunge, is Bianca coming up for air, she says.
And while Allegra outlined a brave tax plan before the recent federal budget that would have hit her own constituents hard in an attempt to make taxation fairer for those earning income through their toil, Bianca has been toiling.
Bianca Spender sales are up 22 per cent across the business in the past 12 months, with online revenue climbing 29 per cent year on year. Her boutiques have grown 45 per cent over the past three years, she says, while international wholesale has grown 64 per cent off a small base.
She is finally seeing the lessons coalesce from her various business coaches, her sister and her mother. And she’s brought out the metaphorical masking tape again to draw a line through her business to protect her staff from her unhelpful desire to help.
A familial noncompete
As the daughter of power-dressing pioneer Carla Zampatti and Liberal Party luminary John Spender, Bianca Spender always had eyes upon her.
Spender studied commerce at the University of NSW. She figured she’d do something in business, but her friends would look at her a little disbelieving when she declared that she’d never go into fashion – this from a young woman who didn’t own a pair of jeans in the 90s and who turned up for lectures in maxi dresses.
“It’s not easy working with anyone in a creative environment, and then it’s even harder to work with your family, because all the baggage and hang-ups of family life get inside. It’s hard not to bring them into the business.”
Bianca Spender
“My family has achieved a level that is intimidating to me,” says Bianca, “and I am not competitive. I’m the only non-competitive person in my family.
“My sister was an astounding academic [Allegra was dux and school captain at private girls’ school Ascham]. I had to find my own space because there were a lot of big achievers making deep impressions in their worlds.”
She and Allegra had been hanging out at Carla’s fashion business ever since they stopped having a full-time nanny, around age 9.
“You would pick up the post. You would go to the bank or walk things to the accountant,” says Bianca.
By the time she was at university, they let her in the design room where she was allowed to cut fabric because they knew she was pernickety and precise.
At the end of her degree, she dipped her toe in fashion with a two-week TAFE course and realised that she did, in fact, love it. “I had closed that door to myself because of my hatred of competition,” she says. But also, because she knew how hard fashion was. It wasn’t just about talent and business savvy. Stars needed aligning. And it took so much work and determination.
“I was just not sure I could line all those things up. But once I started, I was hooked.”
When she left East Sydney Fashion Design School in 1999, her father, having lost his erstwhile safe seat of North Sydney to independent Ted Mack, was the Australian ambassador to France.
So, she didn’t go to Paris.
She headed to Italy and landed a traineeship with a pattern maker outside Milan.
“You’re thinking about how to create form and body,” she says. “It’s the engineering of it. I had very ambitious creative ideas, and I had seen that people would say, ‘You can’t do that.’ And I thought, ‘No, I think you can. I don’t have the skill to work out how to do that yet, but I know there is a way.’”
She found the Italian style a little flashy and fleshy for her taste, however, and thought the French aesthetic might be a better fit. She moved to Paris in 2000, the month John Spender left the embassy. “He said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And I said, ‘Dad, I went to Italy because you were in Paris. Paris is more my style. But I need to find my identity and prove myself to me.’”
Spender found work as a nanny until she landed a retail job with the Martine Sitborn label, before moving into design for Sitborn. She remembers telling Sitborn that a particular garment would be too complicated for the makers: “And it’s going to become very expensive.”
To which the designer replied: “We dream first. And then we work out how to make it happen.”
Pragmatists align
Martine Sitborn went into receivership in 2003. Spender went back to the shop. Back to writing applications for a design job. She loved Europe and wanted to stay there on the pulse of fashion, but Zampatti visited in 2003 and asked the daughter to come home and work for her.
Spender agreed. “We had a strict deal. I had three months to produce a 20-piece collection on a lean budget. If it sold, I stayed. If it didn’t, I left.”
Their sense of style did not align. “I was a coat person, she was a jacket person,” says Spender. “I was a skirt person, she was a pant person. I was a dress person, she was a jumpsuit person.”
Zampatti thought the points of difference between her and her daughter would be useful. Both pragmatists, they saw an opportunity to grow sales by having a wider range with a fresh aesthetic.
Spender’s collection was more muted than her mother’s – softer, differentiated on the rack by just a white label to her mother’s black.
About half her pieces sold poorly, but the other half did well enough for her to keep the job. And, curiously for her, it was the more tailored pieces, the less draped, that did best. The “romantic dresses” she saw as her signature did not resonate with the market.
“But if I put my softness into structure – which is tailoring – that was the sweet point for the Carla Zampatti brand.”
And so began a dance between the commercial and creative, between mother and daughter. But it was a dance that Carla led. If she didn’t like something, it didn’t get made. This led to tension.
“I think I could have done with a lot more humour,” says Spender. “I probably was defensive or just not confident. Sometimes we could laugh at it. She’d say, ‘You need to do this and this to the jacket’, and I would say, ‘Then it’ll be a Carla jacket, and you’ve already got three great ones in your collection.’”
Spender found an ally in Carla’s confidante and buyer, Wendy Abiraj. “She knew if we kept my product true enough to the Carla brand, but atypical enough to be a different point of view, then it would be successful.”
And then there were three
In early 2008, after a Sunday lunch at Zampatti’s Italianate mansion in Woollahra, Zampatti pulled her three children, including her son by her first marriage, Alex Schuman, in for a meeting.
She announced that she needed to step away from the day-to-day of the business. She was 68 [though she told people she was 66], and she didn’t want a stranger taking over.
“If you want to keep the company in the family, you have to commit to it,” she said to the three “silent” board members.
That’s when the youngest, Allegra – who’d done economics at Cambridge, worked at McKinsey, the UK Treasury, nine months volunteering in Kenya, and been “change leader” at King’s College Hospital in London – put her hand up and said she’d do it for two years.
Plans were already underway to launch a new label, Bianca Spender for Carla Zampatti, which was rolled out to retailer David Jones as its own entity.
Space for magic
But Carla still held sway over what got made, says Bianca. “It wasn’t just visual. She had to put it on. She had to feel a certain way in it.”
Allegra came in and, aside from bringing a more structured business plan, she bought her own “felt sense” of what they should make. It shifted the balance of power. But she didn’t give her big sister any favours. “The figures don’t lie,” says Bianca. “If I sold, I sold. If we had a target and I didn’t hit it, that was the number. It was tough on both of us.”
For her part, Allegra recalls some eye rolling from both her sister and mother when she’d offer her more conservative views on a piece. “What I was good at was saying was: ‘I can’t get into this jacket.’ Or, ‘If I sit down in this at a business meeting, I’m going to flash too much leg’.” The conversations were robust.
There was counselling. Allegra doesn’t remember the specifics, but it centred on how to talk to each other in that clash of analytics and creativity.
“It’s not easy working with anyone in a creative environment, and then it’s even harder to work with your family, because all the baggage and hang-ups of family life get inside. It’s hard not to bring them into the business.”
Bianca remembers her first big standalone collection at Fashion Week, where she pushed her creative boundaries, wanting to define what her label stood for.
“It had elements that sold really well and elements that didn’t. It didn’t hit financials, and Mum was like, ‘Allegra, you didn’t hold Bianca to creating a commercial enough range. And Bianca, you didn’t hold yourself to a balance between creativity and commerciality. You need to do better.’”
It wasn’t the last time that conversation was had.
Old patterns
Having promised two years, Allegra stayed for nine, announcing she was leaving the business in 2017 to pursue the more social goals that culminated in her being part of the Teal Revolution, winning the until then safe Liberal seat of Wentworth in the 2022 federal election.
Without Allegra, Bianca and Carla reverted to old patterns and soon sat down to talk it through. The business was endangering the relationship.
Bianca wanted to separate the label and the businesses. “I owned my own decision,” she says. “I paid for my decisions. If they worked, I got the rewards and if it didn’t work, it was my money – and then I could have a mum rather than a boss.”
Carla would ask Bianca for design advice, but Bianca never found herself asking her mother for hers. Carla noticed this and asked why.
“Mum, trust me. You’re there in every fitting, in every design decision I make. I don’t need to ask.”
The experience of going out on her own gave Bianca a newfound appreciation for what her mother had achieved. Carla arrived in Australia from Italy, aged 10, in 1950. She got herself from a small West Australian mining town to her first boutique, in Sydney’s Surry Hills, in 1972, soon building a chain of 30 shops by the time Bianca was born in 1977.
Now, out on her own, Bianca had never had more creative freedom, but just as Carla knew, the commercial imperatives were inescapable, especially the “deep responsibility” for the staff.
“If I did these really ambitious designs, just seeing how hard it was for production to achieve it, if I was wildly creative, just seeing how much it took for the retail team to translate that vision to a customer.
“It was a maturing time where I had a much deeper felt sense not only for the creativity I wanted, but for how that went through the whole ecosystem of the business.”
These were tumultuous years. While contending with COVID-19 disruptions, the seemingly indomitable force of Carla was no more. She fell down the stairs at the Sydney Opera House and died a week later in April 2021.
Allegra was elected in May 2022, then their father died in October 2022.
“Losing two parents in a short period of time is an intense experience and probably a very private one,” says Bianca. “I’m usually an extrovert, but it was a time that I went into my shell, and I also had a lot to learn about managing a team, a business and people.”
And as that business grew, her micromanaging became a problem.
She hired a couple of business coaches. One lesson she took to heart was removing the “I” from her thinking and language. It had to be the “we”. If she had her time over, she would not have called the label Bianca Spender because separating the person from the label from the business was a layer of complication she didn’t need.
She remembered how important it was for her when Carla gave her autonomy over a small percentage of the collection each season. She realised she had to do the same for her team, giving them that 10% room to play in whatever job they did.
She’s taken on a general manager and a designer so she can sit more easily in a role as creative director. And she’s put that metaphorical tape down to keep herself out of her staff’s stuff.
We talk in a small plain room out the back of the main operation over her table, which is the most workaday of plywood contraptions.
“We created this space so that I wouldn’t have to be on top of everyone all of the time,” she laughs, loudly. “We had to make sure that I didn’t hear all the conversations, because as soon as I’d hear them, I’d want to give my two cents and help, and that wasn’t helpful. I could give everyone the autonomy and, like, the air. And the business has just flourished with that air. The creativity flourished, the reach, the distillation of the vision.”
The theme of her 2025 Fashion Week collection was Letting Go. “It was a real metaphor for me. I had to let go of all the control. I wasn’t in the weekly meetings. I went from being everything to meeting with them once a month, and I have a weekly WIP [work in progress] with the general manager. It was a huge shift, and it took a deep commitment from me and [general manager] Tulia [Wilson].”
She’s still on the board of Carla Zampatti, which is being run by elder sibling Alex Schuman, who left the NSW Premier’s office to become CEO in 2019. Allegra relinquished her board seat when she took her parliamentary one but remains a shareholder.
Bianca feels the climax of her story is right now. “I’ve had some family time, and I’ve had some distance, and I can actually look at my work for the first time and see its strength and its identity and its power.”
The Spender-Zampatti Family Timeline
Year | Event |
1941 | Domenico Zampatti is interned as an enemy alien after migrating from Italy to Australia during World War II. |
1941 | Sir Percy Spender serves as Australia’s Minister for War. |
1940s | Guiseppina Zampatti raises Carla and her siblings alone in war-torn Italy while Domenico remains in Australia. |
1950 | Carla Zampatti migrates to Australia and meets her father for the first time. |
1950s | Sir Percy Spender serves as Australia’s ambassador to the United States. |
1964 | Carla Zampatti marries Leo Schuman. |
1965 | Carla Zampatti launches her first fashion collection. |
1969 | Alex Schuman is born. |
1970 | Carla Zampatti and Leo Schuman divorce. |
1975 | Carla Zampatti marries John Spender. |
1977 | Bianca Spender is born. |
1978 | Allegra Spender is born. |
1980 | John Spender is elected member for North Sydney. |
1996 | John Spender is appointed Australian ambassador to France. |
Spenders echo through history
Allegra Spender was 44 when elected to parliament as an independent in an erstwhile safe conservative seat.
Her grandfather, barrister Percy Spender, was 40 when he ran as an independent against the long-time conservative cabinet minister, Sir Archdale Parkhill, to win the safe conservative seat of Warringah. [The seat where the Teal revolution began, in 2019, when Zali Steggall displaced former PM Tony Abbott].
Percy, who became Sir Percy in 1952, married an artistic type, crime novelist Jean Spender.
Much like his granddaughter, Percy was determined to curb the rich profiting from investments while the poor paid the price for World War 2. As Minister for War he fought to keep interest paid on war loans to just 3%.
Percy and Jean’s son, John Spender, also became a barrister and married an artistic type – fashion legend Carla Zampatti – before entering politics. John Spender was elected to the safe Liberal seat of North Sydney in 1980 and was a shadow cabinet minister during the Hawke government until he lost his seat to an independent, Ted Mack, in 1990.
The same year he was elected, his first cousin Dale Spender, released her seminal feminist book, Man Made Language, which made her an international celebrity and which took aim at the use of words like “seminal” as demonstrating the way language was constructed by men to reflect male experience.
John Spender fully supported Allegra in her ambition to take the seat of Wentworth from his old party. He died five months after she achieved it.
“I feel like I’ve done both of my parents’ careers,” says Allegra, “because I’ve spent time in the fashion industry and in politics. Fashion taught me a lot – about the value of creativity and the value of trying things. In business, you’ve got to try stuff. You have to keep on reinventing yourself and it’s your customers who judge you. I feel the same with politics, but it’s your voters who get to be the judge.”
Indeed, with talk of the Teal independents forming a new centrist political party, she’s also echoing her grandfather who, first as Independent member for Warringah, then as an expelled member of the United Australia Party, was instrumental in forming the Liberal Party with Robert Menzies in 1944.
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