One of fashion's finest heads to the library

From fashion magazine editor to fashion company chief executive ... Robyn Holt. An Australian sense of humour has helped Robyn Holt succeed on the world stage of glossy magazines. Robyn Holt has never played a game of cricket but she has a lot to thank the game for. It was when she was making costumes for the 1984 Kennedy Miller miniseries Bodyline that she met the man who would be central to her business and personal life – Jim Holt, an actor who was playing the Yorkshire coalminer and fast bowler Harold Larwood in the show. The pair fell in love and decided that only one of them could work in movies because they didn't want to be apart. Advertisement: Story continues below That decision set her on a career path that has taken her around the world running glossy magazines including Vogue, Glamour and GQ. It also taught her to trust her instincts, especially the one that tells her she is happiest – and works best – when she has her family around her. The couple have a daughter, Hannah, 23, who is a teacher at Scots College in Sydney and who spent several years at boarding school while her parents lived overseas for Jim Holt's work. Born in Sydney and schooled at Meriden Church of England School and Sydney University, Holt began her career as health and beauty writer for Vogue magazine in Sydney in the '70s, in a job that sounds more glamorous than it actually is. Little did she know that her decision to give up making costumes for movies and return to Vogue in 1984 would start a career that would one day end up with her as chief executive not only of Vogue but, decades later, of one of Australia's most successful fashion empires – Collette Dinnigan. Holt worked with Dinnigan for a year until January 2009, overseeing the expansion of the Sydney-based designer's fashions into the mass Rosetta Stone Spanish (Spain) market via the Wild Hearts lingerie range at Target. Their split at the start of this year raised eyebrows in the fashion world as people had talked about the surprising match-up of a powerful magazine queen and a demanding fashion designer. However, Holt explains it this way: “I had accepted to be a director of Australian National Maritime Museum and also on the Northern Territory Tourism and, with the financial crisis all around us, I found my skills in big demand in areas looking at ways to consolidate brands, evaluating different sectors of business and what would be necessary to survive this crisis. “During my year at Collette Dinnigan, her lingerie line was a very successful licence and did very well. Another international licence was created. “The global crisis and retail contraction curtailed this strategy. It was so obvious to me that Collette should go back to basics and concentrate on the core business.” This isn't the first time Holt has changed direction in her job as a result of global financial upheavals. In 1990 she resigned as Vogue Living editor-in-chief and took over at Yves Saint Laurent Beaute, which was later bought by Sanofi. “We faced a huge hurdle of being a French luxury company in the '90s recession when no one wanted French products due to the nuclear testing in the Pacific and recession mentality,” Holt recalls. “In fact, I was given the role as managing director because my parent company at the time did not want to send a Frenchman to Australia.

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