Zimmerman goes back to the Aussie beach on the Paris runway

With their first runway show in Paris, sister act Nicky and Simone Zimmermann made it clear they still call Australia home, stopping just short of playing the classic Peter Allen song inside the ornate Beaux-Arts setting of the Petite Palais.

Instead, the voices of Kylie Minogue, Naomi Watts, Thelma Plum, Rose Byrne and author Sophie Lee were mixed into a poppy soundscape by Sydney-raised DJ Mimi Xu, providing a backdrop to Zimmermann creative director Nicky’s nostalgic love letter to Tamarama Beach, just an Australian crawl south of Bondi Beach and 9,148 nautical miles from Paris.

“It started with my late nanny’s stories of Wonderland City, an amusement park at Tamarama Beach in the early 1900s,” Nicky said before the show. “I lived in the area for years and I just became intrigued with the idea of the huge rollercoaster and the fairground on the beach. It was so different from the beach scene at Tama today.”

“We used some of the workmanship and craft in the Edwardian details of the time (I love a corset and boning) and melded those with today’s beach lifestyle. The colours and artwork of Wonderland City started coming through in the palette of the collection, with some silhouettes that mirrored both the undulating forms of the rollercoaster and the circus tents but also the waves and surf. It all feels very Australian and optimistic.”

Nicky and Simone, who is the chief operating officer for the business, have reason to feel optimistic as they prepare to open their 44th store in Florence next week, after a string of European store openings, including Madrid, Paris and Rome.

The company was bought by Milan-based Style Capital in 2020, in a transaction that valued the brand at $446 million. The growing European focus of the label, founded at Sydney’s Paddington Market in 1991, will see a sister design studio to its Sydney operation opening in Paris.

“Our Paris office will become a sort of second home to the creative process and really helps us with some of the new things we are working on, particularly around accessories and other growing parts of our brand vision,” Nicky says. “It’s an exciting next step.”

Since 2013 Zimmermann had shown their romantic dresses and dynamic prints at New York Fashion Week, before entering the digital landscape with their seasonal shows because of COVID-19 lockdowns.