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Camilla Franks Celebrates 10 Years In The Business

Camilla Franks Celebrates 10 Years In The Business
Camilla Franks Celebrates 10 Years In The Business

Camilla Franks. Photo: Peter Brew-Bevan

For those who think that Australia’s fastest-growing designer Camilla Franks – she of the luxe boho clothing and exotic prints – spends all her time sipping herbal tea between bites of kale fritters and meditation, think again. Franks, like her prints and her personality, lives life loud.

And, as a result, extraordinary and unusual things happen to Franks. Take these three anecdotes as evidence of her spirited vibe. In 2010, superstar Beyoncé dropped into her flagship Sydney store and was quickly comfortable enough to ask Franks to model her dresses for her. “Within five minutes of meeting, I was butt naked in front of her! Forty pieces later, I took her ring off and tried it on, the one that Jay Z bought for her.” Did she mind? “I don’t think so. She invited me around for drinks that night.” Similarly, Kate Middleton wasn’t at all floored when Franks broke royal protocol and grabbed her hand at an Australian reception for designers. (“I remember being told, ‘You can’t touch royalty,’ but I forgot about that brief within two seconds and said, ‘Oh, hi beautiful!’’’)

Even on the day we meet, Franks spends time sitting with a client in the courtyard of her Melbourne Hawksburn store, both in tears. The client confesses she had been battling cancer and said Franks’s designs had impacted on her in ways she could not fathom. “I discovered Camilla when I needed it, and it made me happy to open my wardrobe every day and look at it,’’ she tells the visibly moved designer.

Franks is all about getting real. Almost a decade ago she was a theatre actress with a yen for making her own costumes, but this current incarnation – at age 39, and celebrating her label’s 10th anniversary – is her best look ever. “I’m happy,” she says, bopping around in her store. Emerging from the dressing room in just a Camilla bra top and a flowy skirt, tanned limbs akimbo, she jokes, “OK, am I ready to go out like this?”

It’s the kind of humour that’s been earned from dodging life’s curve balls: one borne less from frivolity and more from the desire to keep a smile on one’s face, no matter what. The past 18 months have been especially testing – at the end of 2013, while at her workshop in India, she suddenly felt her face completely drop, virtually mid-sentence. Within minutes, she was being rushed to hospital to be diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, a condition that caused part of her face to be paralysed for many months. It was a turning-point event that brought everything into question.

Until then, Franks had been riding a career wave. After launching modestly in 2005 with beaded, embellished kaftans, Camilla is now an empire. There are 12 Camilla stores around Australia, 350 stockists overseas, swimwear, men’s, kids’, home and accessories ranges, and legions of famous fans, including the aforementioned Beyoncé (whose Instagram account is peppered with Cambodian holiday photos of herself donning Camilla kaftans), Olivia Palermo and Kate Hudson. Not to mention that Oprah moment, which put her designs on the international stage.

But it came at a price. “I was defining myself with my business. There was no balance in my life,” says Franks, who has since stopped working weekends and includes yoga and meditation in her daily routine. Until Bell’s palsy hit, she deftly ignored the warning signs. “I look back and think, my body’s been saying it for years. I’ve had glandular fever every year. I was shaking more. But it took a big, old slap from the universe to stop me.”

Franks feels the onset of Bell’s palsy was heavily linked to unaddressed emotional pain. Her little brother – who she describes as “fearless, ambitious, kind, thoughtful” – died unexpectedly, falling from a cliff when he was 14 years old. “We’re taught in this society not to really feel our feelings, to hide them. For me, work was my addiction, and I had to get my hit. I had to stop working so hard, so I could sit there and process my feelings, my pain, my grief with my brother.

“I lost my brother when I was very young [Camilla was 17] and your life never is the same, but you learn to live with it. When Ben died, I felt like I needed to live the life of two, that there was an obligation to make Mum and Dad proud, and not fall. So I just started running and I never stopped. I guess that’s one of the reasons for the success of the label, but you hit a wall, eventually.”

Camilla Franks Celebrates 10 Years In The Business
Camilla Franks Celebrates 10 Years In The Business

Photo: Peter Brew-Bevan

Another problem, she sees now, lay in the perception others held of her, the poster girl for success. “When you’ve got everything on the surface, everyone goes, ‘Oh, life must be perfect.’ It’s really hard to be honest [and say], ‘I’m not OK. I’m not happy.’ You hide it. There’s
a stigma to [certain feelings], whether it’s depression or anxiety or whatever you have.” Franks thinks her own pain “created a form of reactive depression [and] when you’re built like me, you think you’re a failure if you fall. Now [I realise] being vulnerable is OK, being ill is OK, being perfectly imperfect is OK.”

The juxtaposition between public image and private truth is something she discussed with her friend, the late TV personality Charlotte Dawson, who battled depression and ultimately took her own life. “We weren’t best friends, but she definitely had a huge impact on my life, and losing her really made me have a good, hard look at myself. Like Charlotte, [I] put up this facade, and people forget that [those in the spotlight] are human. We all feel pain, hurt, sadness and grief.”

Looking back on how her designs have evolved, one can almost track the hurt. Although her early work was filled with vibrant, bright, happy colours, more recent seasons have seen a complexity of colours and patterns, perhaps indicating something deeper and darker. Skulls popped up all over graphic black and white clothing, and this year’s “The Road To The Blue House” collection has been dictated by Franks’s fascination with artist Frida Kahlo, who also lived with lifelong pain.

“I kept tapping into [Kahlo] because I loved the fact she was so courageous with her choices, and she in some ways celebrated her pain through her art.” But Camilla prints aren’t macabre; if anything, they’re a nod to Franks’s spirituality. “We can forget that there’s a connection bigger than us, and spirituality gives you a higher purpose.”

Franks makes it a point to nurture her customers. It’s part of her credo that “relationships are the most important things to work on”, applying the same motto to her personal life. “I made a contract to myself to cut everyone out of my life that didn’t make me happy and healthy. And I feel so much better for it.”

Travelling the world to destinations such as Morocco, Laos and India is also something that nurtures her, and she’s made peace with her unusual path. “Society dictates that by a certain age you’re supposed to have a baby, get married and do all that. It’s so much pressure. I’m coming to a point of acceptance now that my life is going to be different.”

When she’s abroad, she’s not necessarily living in five-star luxury, either. Aware of the contrast between her life and those less fortunate, she has a renewed interest in philanthropy. “[I want to] create a sanctuary for abused and exploited women in India, and rehabilitate them through textile production, giving them an income and purpose.”

Similarly, several years ago, she helped raise money for UNIFEM, the women’s fund of the UN. The funds went towards empowering women in the textile industry in the village of Paktheap in Laos. “Instead of handing a third-world country money, you give them an education and tools to create an income,” she says. “That’s what I’m really passionate about. It’s different to the feeling I get from the accomplishments of my career.

“The past few years have been rough, but I’m so blessed I went through that because I feel like my pain now has a purpose. I want to be able to nurture women who have experienced a lot of pain, so they know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s someone to hold your hand, to help you get through the hard times and the black times, and there’s beauty and light [in the world].”

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