By travelling Lombardy, designer Bianca Spender understood her mother Carla Zampatti’s inspiration
It took going back to an Italian mountain top village where her mother Carla Zampatti was born for Bianca Spender to understand what inspired her work.
Australian fashion designer Bianca Spender followed in the sartorial steps of her mother — the late fashion icon Carla Zampatti — a world where draping, architecture and dreamy silhouettes informed seasonal collections.
It took going back to the Italian mountain top village of Lovero in the Valtellina region of Lombardy where her mother was born and raised until the age of nine, for Spender to truly inhale the Italian way of life and understand what inspired her mother.
“I had always wanted to go to Italy with my mum and my children to really understand what it meant to be Italian. I think intrinsically you only really know how Italian you are until you are there. It’s an incredible feeling, like a life force and that’s what I felt when I arrived in her town in the winter of 2024-25
Italy has always held a really deep significance for me as a result of my maternal connection. Moving from Rome to Florence to Verona and then all the way up to Bormio, near mum’s hometown in Lovero, allowed us to experience the richness of these old cities.
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Upon arriving in Lovero, I saw a Zampatti bar and a Zampatti supermarket — it’s a very popular name here. Bormio, 25km away, is where they hold the Winter Olympics, so you can imagine the landscape is breathtaking. There’s a soccer field with a backdrop of the incredible alpine mountains covered in snow, it’s wildly picturesque.
We went to the QC Terme Bagni Vecchi — an ancient Roman spa house. They give you a towel and white robe on arrival and drink an aperitivo — it felt like I was in a scene of a Tarantino movie, with other couples sitting around in their white dressing gowns. This is where word has it Julius Caesar frequented. It’s a very sacred place.
The locals love it because it’s not a big tourist attraction. And of course, it wouldn’t be Italy without a Campari bar, Italo-disco music playing and an atmosphere that’s full of energy.
You can also explore the grottos, hand-carved from Roman times, and you’re literally walking through these deep, dark caves and it feels very wild.
The Stelvio National Park, one of largest nature reserves of Europe is nearby. We did the Bormio 2000 and took a lift to 2000 feet. When you get to the top there’s an abundance of trattorias and bars.
You are literally in the clouds in the mountains. We ate at Vecchia Combo. Try the pizzocherri dish, it’s quite grainy and you shave all your cheeses on top. They add anything green from the garden, like chard or spinach — it’s dense and beautiful; a very earthy meal you find at any trattoria.
We are not a religious family but were totally spellbound by the churches we visited in Lombardy. There are many layers to these institutions — from the stained-glass windows, the soaring arches, the incredible art, the mosaics and tiles.
The way the shafts of light move through the church with music playing, it’s impressive and really draws you in. The silence had a powerful reverence that I felt immensely when I visited.
My older brother Alex is named after a church called Santa Alessandro in Lovero. It’s a humble church in mum’s village, and she named her firstborn in honour of it.
She would tell me stories of her sitting in church looking at the paintings on the wall and being taken in by the beautiful draping. That’s what really drew her into clothing.
All the beautiful religious iconography is filled with much poetry and incredible composition — it caught my mother’s attention as a young child and was the starting point for her decision to become a fashion designer.
Mum told me she would visit a dressmaker every year to get a new dress made for church in Lovero when she was a child. She would get lost in the fabrics and textures each time. I didn’t find any dressmakers while I was visiting — life has changed a lot here now, but there’s that sense of imagining what it was like for her in the 1940s.
At the heart of what I do as a designer is all about a hand touch and a felt sense of the human behind all of the work, as opposed to the mechanisation of fashion.
There’s such a felt sense of that in Italy and I felt in symbiosis with it in these towns. You can’t help but notice the warmth — the way they render, whether it is in buildings, art, sculpture, food — there is a human dimension to all that they do and you feel it in these quiet places immensely.”
Bianca Spender is showing at Australian Fashion Week, May 11-15; australianfashionweek.org
