There’s no question that two of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s side hustles, Rossi Boots and Driza-Bone coats, make quality clobber, but fashion-forward youth brands they ain’t. So CBD is delighted to see Australia’s richest person get down with the kids, with Rinehart’s company Hancock Prospecting sponsoring the Next Gen group show at the Brisbane Fashion Festival in August, for the third year running. Now, it wouldn’t be controversial by now to observe that Hancock’s sponsorship deals can come with a layer of complexity.
This masthead recently revealed an intriguing list of demands delivered to Swimming Australia in 2021 by Hancock as part of a proposed sponsorship deal. So we naturally wondered whether there were any threads attached to Hancock’s assistance for those fledgling fashionistas in Brisbane. The company told us nothing, though a spokesperson for the festival organisers indicated that the sponsorship was enviably uncomplicated.
“Our relationship with Mrs Rinehart has been nothing but positive and she is a wonderful ambassador of the Australian fashion industry,” the spokesperson said. The billionaire’s relations with Australia’s premier art galleries are a little messier. In Senate Estimates last week, it emerged that the National Portrait Gallery was still negotiating the conditions for accepting from Rinehart an officially approved portrait of herself – five years after talks on the gift opened.
That portrait, which CBD revealed re.