Philanthropist, academic and expert on art, fashion and architecture Dr Gene Sherman has just lost her husband of 54 years, but she has lost none of her zeal for her many passions
October 27, 2022 14:15
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.
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.
Sherman
