Cue founder Rod Levis honoured as Australian Fashion Laureate

Rod Levis is a first-generation Australian, the son of Iraq-born Jews who fled Baghdad in the late 1930s. On Thursday, he became the 16th Australian Fashion Laureate, honoured for his work as founder and chairman of womenswear brand Cue Clothing Co, now in its 55th year in business.

“My family left Baghdad when the Jews were moved out,” Mr Levis said on Thursday morning ahead of the ceremony. “And to see that nearly 100 years later we are seeing demonstrations in the street, in Sydney, shouting ‘kill the Jews’ is disgusting. To allow fireworks to celebrate Hamas, a terrorist organisation, is disgusting.”

Mr Levis has family in Israel and a nephew fighting with the Israeli army; he is stationed in Gaza. “They need food, they need money,” he said. “But the Israelis are very tough. They want to protect their country.”

Winning the Australian Fashion Laureate, whose previous recipients include Carla Zampatti and Dion Lee, both of whom were supported by Cue, is a bright but bittersweet moment in a week of darkness for Mr Levis. The award is peer-voted and funded by IMG, which also runs Australian Fashion Week.

“To have this honour bestowed on us is, frankly, remarkable,” he said. “We are not a luxury store, we are not fast fashion. We are in the middle and that is a tough spot to be in. So to have this honour is truly wonderful.”

Mr Levis began his career as a lawyer but by his second year, realised it was not his calling.

“The irony of the whole thing is that I am not a fashion person,” he said. In London at the height of Beatlemania in 1964, Mr Levis saw an opportunity to create merchandise based on the band’s popularity and brought T-shirts back to Sydney. “It led me to a path of entrepreneurship, and I loved it.” That evolved to selling other designers’ wares, including Prue Acton’s, and in 1968, Levis opened the first Cue store in Sydney.

“At the time, clothing for women was daggy. London was blooming with designers like Mary Quant. Womenswear needed a change.”

Carla Zampatti was an early designer for the brand (“She would drop off samples with [son] Alex [Schuman] in her arms,” said Mr Levis) and while the 1970s was defined by disco looks for the brand, by the 1980s it had taken the temperature of Australian women and settled into what became its signature look: suiting.