It was coming to the end of Karen Webster’s successful five-year tenure as L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival (LMFF) director, and the LMFF board was faced with a difficult decision.
In her final year, the event reportedly contributed $63 million to the Victorian economy, drawing a record 422,000 interstate and overseas visitors to its mass of runway shows, business seminars, workshops, forums and retail activations. But it wasn’t logistics which concerned LMFF chairman Laura Anderson and her board in 2010.
In Webster’s final year, the board had promoted much of its senior executive team to assume the day-to-day management of the festival.
“So the question was, what kind of skills do we need for the next generation of the festival?” Anderson says. “We believed we needed to further our strategy of global branding, tourism, creating opportunities for our designers, not just locally but interstate and internationally. So we went on a search, we looked for the best of the best and we didn’t have any boundaries.”
There are 13 people sitting on the festival board, including Target managing director Launa Inman, Pacific Brands chief executive Sue Morphet and General Pants Group managing director Howard Goldberg. Five members form the remuneration and nomination committee, which was charged with selecting Webster’s successor.
The committee started by compiling a universe of potential candidates, a six-month process which reached its final stages in early 2010. By the time LMFF kicked off in March, the number of finalists had been reduced from eight to four.
“There were all sorts of candidates, from media, retailing backgrounds, all top performers and all had either been born in Australia or lived here for a significant amount of time,” Anderson says. “We invited all of them to the festival last year – without the others necessarily knowing they were there – so they participated and just had a feel for it, so that they knew what they would inherit.”
Anderson believes each candidate could have done an “amazing” job but it was esteemed publishing executive Grant Pearce who secured the top position. Pearce is the editorial director for GQ - Conde Nast Asia Pacific, responsible for the overall editorial direction of GQ China and GQ Japan. Prior to this, he was a publisher for Vogue Australia, GQ Australia and Vogue Girl, a position backed by solid years in media, advertising, promotions, events and public relations. Pearce has attended the festival for the last 15 years as part of these commitments.
“Initially it was a question of would I be interested in being involved in that role,” he says of the initial approach from LMFF. “I was currently at that time based in Hong Kong and I’d been in the Asian market for two and a half years. I’d been considering different projects back in Australia and I guess this offer was quite opportune.”
Pearce has had to negotiate some reduced responsibilities with Conde Nast in order to fulfill his commitments with the festival. On the day Ragtrader contacts Pearce, he is in Melbourne meeting with several event sponsors, touching base with choreographers for the event’s launch party and judging the prestigious LMFF Designer Award in conjunction with Vogue and Woolmark. That weekend, he left for Tokyo and New York before arriving back in Melbourne for the lead up to the festival.
“I think one of the important things that I offer is exposure to the international market and that keeps me very much a part of the industry, so it was essential from my point of view that I maintained my position with Conde Nast as well as work on the festival,” he says of his loaded schedule.
Pearce has already won praise for launching a multitude of new initiatives to the festival. Anderson cites the LMFF2011 creative with Australian actress Melissa George as a strong starting point, followed by the introduction of a high-profile menswear parade and of course, the LMFF opening party ‘Fashion Full Stop’.
The gala is open to the general public and features live music, dancing and fashion from the 1960s to today. The initiative is also a source of pride for Pearce, who wanted to share iconic Australian fashion moments with everyday consumers. But he also sees it as the biggest challenge since his appointment.
“It’s not as simple as going to a designer and saying, ‘well we want to use your winter collection,” he explains. “We’re talking about researching back to collections that don’t exist anymore. That’s one of the sad things about a lot of designers, in that they don’t keep an archive. It’s very hard to get your hands on samples that represent those moments, those eras, so we’ve had to go lengths to track things down. It’s a massive project and one that takes involvement from a lot of different people.”
His predecessor Webster, who recalls first meeting him “in nightclubs in the 1980s” before admiring his work as a fashion executive for the iconic Mode magazine, believes these efforts have not gone unnoticed.
“I am so excited to see the evolution of this amazing event,” she says. “I love the ideas around engaging with a broader customer base and reinvigorating a stand-alone men’s event, these are great initiatives. [LMFF] is part of my DNA but it’s time to step back and let the new team create magic.”