‘Unimaginable’: Bianca Spender on losing her mother, Carla Zampatti

Designer Bianca Spender has expressed the “unimaginable” pain of losing her mother, fashion icon Carla Zampatti, in a new short film.

“This moment, it’s unimaginable, in its beauty, in its pain. There are no words, it’s just in the body,” Spender says in the opening seconds of the one-minute movie she has released through her website and social media today, exactly nine weeks since the death of her mother, at age 78.

Spender made the film, released the day after the closure of Australian Fashion Week, to fulfil her need “to mark this moment in time”.

“As a creative I felt the story, the way I could express it, was in movement, and music and dance because that’s what inspires me,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Friday. “There are no words.”

As the family continues to grieve and, in time, determine who will creatively helm the Carla Zampatti brand, Spender says the film was her way to respond to the many people who had reached out since her mother suffered a fall at the opera on Sydney Harbour on March 26. She died at St Vincent’s Private Hospital one week later.

“I don’t have the words to say how I feel but I just want to connect to them because there is so much love [for Mum] and I want to respond to all that love,” she said.

The film, by Jasmin Tarasin, opens with magnolia unfurling, which Spender says reminds her of the giant tree that grew in the garden of the family’s home, in Sydney’s east. Once cut, magnolias only last for days, she says, and was drawn to the “strength of this flower, its beauty, purity, sculptural form that was just so … Mum”.