When IMG announced in November 2024 that it was withdrawing from operating Australian Fashion Week after nearly two decades, the country's fashion industry faced a genuine crisis. The event that had launched the careers of models Miranda Kerr and Abbey Lee, and showcased designers like Zimmermann and Sass and Bide to the world, looked like it might simply cease to exist.
Enter Marianne Perkovic, a 53-year-old banking executive who had never worked in fashion.
Taking on AFW, Perkovic said in a statement: "The time has come for Australian fashion to be represented by those who know it best—our own community." What Perkovic brought to the Australian Fashion Council was not creative credentials but something the embattled industry desperately needed: operational discipline, strategic thinking, and a network of business contacts.
Perkovic's career trajectory reads like a manual for navigating Australia's corporate establishment. In 2006, she became the youngest female chief executive of an ASX-listed company at Count Financial Limited. Senior roles at Commonwealth Bank followed, though her profile during that period included less glamorous headlines. As a senior CBA executive, she faced the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry in 2018, where she was grilled repeatedly on fees for no service.
Rather than retreat, Perkovic embraced the experience as a lesson in institutional accountability. "For me, it reinforced the importance of listening carefully to customers and understanding the real impact decisions can have on people's lives," she said. "Many declined [to appear at the commission], but from my values base it was important to show up, even if the problems were historic."
When the AFW crisis hit, Perkovic spotted what others missed: an opportunity. The AFC said that Australian Fashion Week 2025 would proceed as planned in Sydney in May but with a "new vision" designed to evolve the fashion week into a platform that "elevates Australian fashion on the global stage, benefits designers, and prioritises the unique needs of local industry," which generates more than 28 billion Australian dollars for the Australian economy.
The shift to a not-for-profit model proved decisive. Alex Schuman, chief executive of Carla Zampatti, noted: "Having a not-for-profit organise Australian Fashion Week will be a game-changer and it's how other successful fashion weeks like Milan and Paris operate."
Perkovic recruited Kellie Hush, former editor of Harper's Bazaar Australia, as fashion director. Together they stabilised the 2025 event at Carriageworks in Sydney. But Perkovic had already identified a bigger opportunity: repositioning AFW itself.
In 2026, AFW will take place 11-15 May as a city-wide platform anchored at the Museum of Contemporary Art and supported by satellite activations across Sydney. Australian Fashion Week was established in 1996, and the move back to Sydney Harbour marks a conscious return to the event's origins while signalling ambition for its future.
What's striking about Perkovic's appointment is how openly the fashion industry embraced a non-fashion executive. Kellie Hush returns as Fashion Director for AFW, overseeing designer and industry relations, while Perkovic oversees an Executive Board that includes the CEO of Carla Zampatti, co-founders of Aje and Christian Kimber, and executives from RMIT University and David Jones.
Her unconventional background proves to be precisely what the industry needed. A cornerstone of AFW 2026 will be a strengthened First Nations program delivered in partnership with acclaimed designer Grace Lillian Lee, which will embed First Nations designers, models and storytelling at the heart of Fashion Week and establish a platform to support long-term participation, cultural authority and global visibility.
There's a useful lesson embedded in Perkovic's sudden emergence as the most powerful figure in Australian fashion. Sometimes institutions need outsiders who ask obvious questions that insiders never think to ask. In Perkovic's case, the question was simple: "Why don't we run Fashion Week?" The answer, it turned out, was that nobody had bothered to try.