Designer is beating the odds
Kym Ellery has sleep in her voice at 7am Perth time, despite the more reasonable hour in her adopted hometown of Sydney.
With just days between the fashion designer and the show that will open Australian Fashion Week in Sydney on Sunday, it is not champagne and parties keeping her awake at night.
"Sorry, I'm a little bit not coherent - I just woke up," Ellery apologises. "I was at work until 3 o'clock last night."
The Perth-born 31-year-old has checked off an enviable number of items from any would-be designer's bucket list. She was one of a handful of Australian designers invited to show in Paris and was the subject of a documentary, Premiere, last year.
But opening Fashion Week, which this year celebrates 20 years, comes with its own high stakes - her family will be flying in to watch.
"My brother and his wife will be here for the first time," Ellery said. "It will be their first Ellery show I think."
Eight years after launching her eponymous brand, and two years after settling a messy legal dispute with Myer, Ellery appears to be having a moment.
"It's really exciting in that people are getting to know the brand in more regions," she said.
"I just spent a couple of days in London after Paris Fashion Week and met with some editors there and that was exciting to meet people that knew the brand.
"I'm still just a girl from Perth doing what I like to do, so to go and fly 24 hours across the world and meet strangers who know what I'm doing is a little surreal."
Ellery's international fans include influential fashion blogger Leandra Medine, best known for The Man Repeller blog.
"It's much more about the fantasy of fashion than it is about the reality of fashion," Medine told Premiere.
"One of the things I really like about Ellery is she doesn't seem to take fashion too seriously."
This year Ellery will move to Los Angeles with pro-surfer partner Luke Stedman.
It is as much about a lifestyle change as it is about her ambitions for the brand.
"I travel a lot but I've never lived overseas," she said.
"I didn't get to do that whole two years in London that everyone does. I pretty much moved to Sydney 11 years ago and started the brand at a very young age and with that came responsibility. This will be a move for my business but also a move for me to be able to experience something different."
Ellery has a presence in the US through distribution deals. She said longer term it would be "a dream" to open a store in New York or Los Angeles. But caution, even pessimism, is integral to the way Ellery runs her business.
"It's definitely a tough industry," she said.
"There's so many opportunities for things to not come in your favour and over the years it's been learning about how to mitigate risk and be one step ahead. My constant thought is just to be completely pessimistic and think about what could go wrong and try to pre-empt it before it does go wrong.
"It's definitely not about being positive because the odds are stacked against you. I understand why people struggle. I have struggled over the years."
Australia's fashion landscape is littered with successful designers whose companies have gone under. In February, Sydney designer Josh Groot added his name to a list that includes Lisa Ho, Ruth Tarvydas, Bettina Liano and Ksubi when his business briefly went into administration.
With Australia increasingly a target for overseas fashion brands, Ellery said it was important to appreciate homegrown designers.
"I think Australians love to look out across the water to what's happening overseas," she said.
"I feel like we've got to be a little bit more passionate about (our own designers) as a nation.
"Especially in Perth, I found that people feel like, 'What could I know, I'm living in the most isolated city in the world, what's happening in Melbourne, what's happening in London?' There's always this obsession, which is fine, but it's like, guess what Perth, you've produced some of the best creatives in the world, so we've got to be proud of that."
