Flying across the world with an entourage of designers, architects and cultural thinkers to promote your country’s creative talent might be daunting for any woman of 75.
Managing it within six weeks of losing your husband, after 54 years together, takes extraordinary determination, admits Dr Gene Sherman, philanthropist, art collector and fashion connoisseur.
She’d spent several years planning this trip, but never expected that she’d be coming to London from her home in Australia just weeks after getting up from shiva.
“I’m feeling very fragile,” she tells me. She’s looking tired , which is understandable as she’s just flown in from Sydney, but nevertheless fabulous in pieces from her famed fashion and jewellery collection.
Over a signature black tunic and leggings the academic-turned-aesthete is fielding shaggy black leg-warmers by Issey Miyake, Louis Vuitton silver Archlight trainers, an Ann Demeulemeester belt trimmed with metal echoed in an exquisite chainmail bracelet by Norwegian artist Tone Vigeland and a huge silver knuckle-duster ring by jewellery designers Helge Larsen and Darani Lewers.
Some of these treasures acquired over 35 years feature in the other project Sherman will undertake between two weekends presenting the contemporary face of Australian creativity at London’s Design Museum — a launch party for her book The Spoken Object.
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Bling belle: Sherman
It’s a very personal record of her style — featuring the collection of Japanese fashion she has largely given away, her stash of international jewellery and iconic pieces of 20th-century furniture acquired over a blessed life with her husband, Brian.
We’re here to talk about the initiative to promote Australian culture that she devised and planned, a five-year project called SCCI (the Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas) — but, of course, we talk about her loss.
“You couldn’t imagine a more beautiful man,” she says. Brian was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 12 years ago and lay in a coma for 24 days at home before his death.
“I promised him he would die at home, and if he had still been in a coma I wouldn’t have left,” she says, recalling the hundreds of people who came to the shiva at their Sydney mansion, originally built for the city’s former lord mayor.
It would have been understandable if she’d called off her visit. But the cultural programme, which starts today, had been so long in the planning that she summoned up all her energy to present it in person.
She will be supported in her efforts by her son Emile, a film producer who won an Oscar and Bafta for The King’s Speech, and her daughter Ondine, an activist for animal rights, who lives in Israel. She has brought 40 speakers to London for two long weekends of talks and exhibitions at the Design Museum in Kensington.
Speakers including First Nations designers Grace Lilian Lee and Teagan Cowlishaw and the duos behind cutting-edge labels Romance Was Born and Among Equals.
Sherman may be a keen promoter of Australian culture but she started out in South Africa, where she attended a Jewish school. She met her husband, a shopkeeper’s son from a mining outpost, at the University of the Witwatersrand.
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Sherman
He also studied in Israel after volunteering in the 1967 war. They married in 1968 and moved to London in 1970, where she taught French at Watford Boys’ Grammar School, and Brian worked at the Bank of New South Wales.
“We had no money and a flat so small I had to limit my wardrobe to 32 pieces maximum,” she explains. It’s a maxim she maintained even when wealth kicked in: “I went up to 55 pieces of wearable wardrobe, and I only turn over five pieces a year.
"When a new piece is acquired, one is retired — and there are three different routes to retirement.One is the Powerhouse Museum, which is like the V&A but not as posh, another is friends the same size and shape as me, and I sell a few pieces to vintage retailers.”
She took a PhD in French, but in Australia found that students wanted to learn only Asian languages so she was stuck teaching at high school, unable to move into academia.
Meanwhile, Brian built a fortune as a successful fund manager.
“I didn’t want to be a headmistress, and what else could I do with a doctorate in French literature?” she says.
After 17 years in education, collecting and showing art was the only other career she could imagine for herself, but the complex financial business of running commercial galleries eventually led to transforming the Sherman Galleries into a foundation for contemporary art, which also incorporated architecture, inspired by the temporary pavilion at London’s Serpentine Gallery.
From 2018,she broadened her philanthropic reach via the creation of SCCI, aiming to promote creative thinking in all the applied arts.
She was able to start her collection of extraordinary Japanese clothing — Miyake, Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto were her triple passions — because in 1985, when she started travelling to Japan, those designers were still affordable.“You only needed a good eye, not a lot of money.”
Of her jewellery collection, also destined eventually for a museum, she points out it’s built on an appreciation of artistry rather than a lust for precious metals.
“Apart from one gold piece, they’re not noble materials — mainly silver, wire, aluminium, rubber and paper.”
For her wardrobe for the trip to London she commissioned five pieces from two Australian designers with Asian roots, Akira Isogawa and Alistair Trung. Highlights of their collections will be installed at the Design Museum during the two weekend hubs, the first focusing on fashion, the second on architecture.
Sherman sees this ambitious event, which is part of a UK/Australia cultural season, as her last public commission, and her thoughts are turning towards what she describes as the “last tranche” of her life.
As she contemplates leaving Braelin (bought to make life easier for Brian after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s) she says she is looking forward to to editing and consolidating her fabulous collections.
Not a balaboosta —“I have always been too busy working to cook” — she is devoted to her family and relishes spending time with her grandchildren, including Ondine’s twin sons, who have special needs and are at a school supported by their grandmother..
Spending more time in Israel, where Ondine lives with her husband, the academic and activist Dror Ben Ami, might mean getting more involved in a country that she loves — she has already asked them to help her find causes to support.
Wherever she lives, Gene Sherman believes in the principle of tikkun olam —mending the world that she has criss-crossed so many times.
Details of the SCCI events at the Design Museum can be found at designmuseum.org
