" title="the map village street editors"> the map village street editors

Two’s company; three’s a crowd. So what does four make? If the four are the ‘Fat 4’ – Melbourne fashion retailers Rachael Cotra, Sarah Hamilton, Kym Purtell and Bianca Wiegard of the iconic Fat boutiques – it makes a poetic creative synergy still thriving ten years after they opened their first store in Fitzroy. Here, they provide a forum for promising young designers that was once missing in an otherwise burgeoning music, art and cultural scene. With little more than $6,000 among them, the Fat ‘thing’ – something unattainable, based on gut feeling and intuition, unable to be replicated – was conceived.

A decade on, the City of Melbourne has saluted the pioneering ways of the sartorial quartet by naming them Ambassadors for Spring Fashion Week, in honour of their impact on the city’s fashion culture and mentoring of new design talent. Their daring in taking on cutting-edge yet ‘untested’ designers such as Ksubi and Sass & Bide in Fat’s early days earned the retailers a reputation for foresight. With four boutiques gracing the fashion-forward capital (on Fitzroy’s effortlessly hip Brunswick Street, Prahran’s Chapel Street strip, in the grand GPO building in Melbourne’s CBD and, most recently, in suburban fashion capital Chadstone Shopping Centre), Fat have helped launch more than 70 designers, including Obus, Antipodium, Claude Maus, Kate Hurst, Alpha 60, Schwipe and Nudie.
“It’s this continual momentum to keep it different, keep moving, and keep being the next thing that’s going to be inspiring to other people,” Bianca says of their overriding motivation. “Let’s always be different, that one step ahead. Let’s always be creating that next new thing. That’s a great energy for us to keep moving on.”
In their Brunswick Street store, where the Fat 4 are headquartered, vines creep up the wall from a planter box in the front window. An eclectic range of edgy, limited-edition pieces in winter blacks, navies and greys invites inspection, while jewellery, shoes and bright ceramic rabbits beckon from the shelves. A pinky-red back wall harmonises with the patterned floor, and a woodland motif sprawls across the ceiling. Each retail space is unique in its design, but has common elements that identify it as a Fat store, such as the signature floor pattern inspired by a Mark Ryden painting. The Fat store model has certain parameters such as square meterage, Bianca explains, that are necessary in order to display and ‘communicate’ the clothes how the quartet want to.
Behind the scenes, the present three of the welcoming Fat 4 (Rachael is absent) exude a casual cool – Bianca, layered in black; Sarah, a splash of colour around her neck; Kym sporting a beanie. Kym’s office companion, a French bulldog called Louie, bounces about as Kym talks about the group dynamic. “One of the amazing things about the four of us is that, creatively, we all tend to agree on the same things, which is really incredible because we’re all very strong women, all very opinionated, but when it comes down to choosing a paint colour or the look of something, we all go ‘yep, that’s it’ together.” Bianca contributes playfully: “There’s never a middle child with four.”
Bianca and Sarah met in the Austrian ski fields before they set up a juice bar together in Central East Africa, which they ran for two years. Meanwhile, their future business partners Kym and Rachael (themselves old friends), launched a fashion-based skincare range back home, but discovered very few stores stocked a range of quality fashion products, contrary to what they had conceptualised. Bianca and Sarah, who’d enrolled in gold- and silver-smithing on their return from Malawi, noticed the same thing when they started selling their designs to retailers.
Not long after their four paths crossed during the girls’ mid-twenties, Fat 52 (named after a baseline from drum and bass music and the store’s street number) opened, in the words of a staff member, on a budget “better fit for a second-hand car”. Financing their growth has been an enduring challenge – the banks wouldn’t lend them money for about eight years, Sarah volunteers, so they started out by selling on consignment.
The girls’ individual roles within the business were defined over time. “People were predisposed to certain roles in the business, but that came about quite organically,” explains Bianca, a natural spokesperson who looks after the PR, marketing and the brand’s imaginatively interactive website. “In the beginning we all charged around to appointments together and saw ranges, but over time those roles became more clearly defined as our strengths and weaknesses became clearer.” Kym (“Miss Moneypenny,” interjects Sarah) looks after finance and denim, both numbers games. Sarah, a self-declared “handyman”, looks after accessories, kids, human resources and managing projects such as new shop fit-outs, while Rachael is the main fashion buyer. The beauty of four? “You can rely on each other because you’re never firing on all four cylinders at once,” says Kym. Bianca agrees, “There’s always the sense of ‘what are we going to do?’ rather than ‘what am I going to do?’”
One such decision was closing their Sydney store on the Oxford Street strip when the lease came up for renewal and they opted to focus instead on the Chadstone opportunity, which came without freight issues or a need to ‘babysit’ the store. The differing fashion styles between the two capitals were duly noted by Sarah. “People in Melbourne go out of their way to be an individual in the way they dress and the way they accessorise their outfits, whereas Sydney likes to fit in with everyone else. I think a lot of the stock
we had up there was a little bit frightening – a little bit Melbourne, a little bit black.”
In media profiles, ‘naive’ is a word the girls have used to describe their start in business. They may debate whether the world is a tougher place today, but all are firm believers in following your instincts and not being driven by making money. “What drives us is the integrity of the business and that’s not often what’s going to make us the most money,” Bianca elaborates. “It’s doing things and working with people because it feels good or it’s a nice thing to do, and it’s a good collaboration. Those things are really important to us for keeping our interest in running it.”
Does that mean they buy their stock from an artistic point of view? “There are always the things that we get into the store like Romance Was Born – pieces that one percent of the population can actually wear – but it’s so important to us to stock them. But then, of course, there’s the business side of it – what do people wear? So there is that balance in the buy,” says Bianca. Now in charge of 45 staff, the Fat 4 have also created their own product-driven label, Rainer, which rounds out the store’s collection, whether it be t-shirts, skirts or evening wear they feel is absent.

In further respects, such as pausing recently to implement a new point-of-sale system, their business is a juggling act between creative and business sensibilities. “You’re always in a rush to get the new thing happening. But after a while, you have to stop for a second and build the infrastructure around where you’re going to go,” explains Bianca. “That’s where we’re smart and have become good business people, and it feels mature to make those decisions.”

Interview by Sally Brown