She’s a Logie Award winner and popular co-host on Channel Ten’s The Project. Now Carrie Bickmore can add style icon to her list of credits – and that’s without even trying.
Bickmore, 32, is one of the most talked about women on Australian television, and a lot of that’s down to what she wears on the show each night. Women around the country have become obsessed with the immaculately groomed presenter’s sartorial style, and long after the studio lights are turned off, fashion bloggers dissect every detail of her outfit – mapping her look for others to replicate.
Along with Big Brother’s Sonia Kruger, Bickmore is renowned in the fashion industry for generating a huge number of customer inquiries and purchases.
“It’s something that still seems weird to me,” says Bickmore, mother of five-year-old Oliver. She prefers to describe herself as a working mum rather than a sartorial inspiration.
“People come up to me on the street on a daily basis telling me they love what I wore on the show, where did I get it from and who is the designer. They tell me they love me in magenta. I’m like, what? I still struggle with the idea that someone wants to buy something I wore,” Bickmore says.
Thanks to her stylist, Natalie Crighton, Bickmore enjoys wearing Australian designer labels such as Alice McCall and Manning Cartell. But she also has a knack for making budget items from the likes of Lovisa and Portmans appear streets ahead of their price tag.
So it’s no surprise that this month she takes on the role of fashion and lifestyle ambassador – along with make-up artist Liz Kelsh – of the new Fashion and Beauty Uncovered campaign; a festival of workshops, runways and style tutorials being rolled out by shopping centres across Melbourne to celebrate spring and summer style.
Her number-one style tip? “Take some risks with your wardrobe,” she says, beaming, revealing that although she now swears by leather pants, she wouldn’t have considered trying them on without a bit of pushing from her stylist. “Sometimes you just need a little encouragement,” she says. “You don’t need to buy a whole new wardrobe to keep up to date with trends. Just buy a few key items you can mix and match.”
Bickmore says she was hardly fashionable in her 20s, although she’s certain at the time she thought she was. “When I look back at the outfits I wore I had no idea what I was doing. Now, being a working mum, I am not online watching trends and out shopping every weekend. It helps that I have my stylist throwing beautiful clothes at me every day,” she says.
Although you would hardly pick it, given her polished TV presence, Bickmore describes herself as shy and nervous. Yet in person, she is every bit as down to earth and warm as her on-screen persona. She’s a pocket rocket in conversation, fast and snappy as if a TV ad break is approaching, and always smiling. And she wears her heart on her sleeve.
“I come across as a very confident person but I have only started to feel comfortable in my own skin now that I am in my 30s,” she admits.
“As a teenager there was a lot of pressure to be a certain way, and add to that the fact I was very underdeveloped for a girl, I felt very shy, even though my outer personality was bright and bubbly. The real me is only starting to come out now and it’s through surviving some tough times that’s made me this way,” Bickmore says.
Born in Adelaide, Bickmore moved to Perth at five with her mother (Jennie) following her parents’ divorce. Her mum remarried and Bickmore inherited two older stepsisters.
Like many girls, she dreamed of being a ballerina, but eventually set her sights on a career in the media, inspired in part by her father, Brian – one of the founders of the Austereo Network – who worked in radio in Adelaide and now lives in Melbourne. (He has just announced his departure from the network after 24 years.) After attending an all-girls school, Perth College, where she loved performing arts, Bickmore enrolled in journalism at Curtin University.
A year before graduating she applied for, and won, a job at a Perth radio station, 92.9FM, in order to get a jump on her fellow students. It was an early sign of her drive to succeed.
A year later, in 2001 she moved to Melbourne to work on the new Nova radio station. As well as a great career opportunity, she says the decision was also partly driven by a desire to rekindle a relationship with her father.
“I always wanted to reconnect with my dad after he and mum separated,” she says.
“At the time I was telling my partner, Greg [Lange], that if I moved to Melbourne we would probably end up breaking up. He told me to not worry, everything would work out. He got a job in Melbourne and we both moved from Perth.” The couple set up home in Richmond and later in Ivanhoe.
She recalls arriving in Melbourne 12 years ago full of a lust for life. She would seldom say no to dancing the night away at a club, occasionally heading straight to work afterwards to read the morning news. “I look back at that and don’t know how I did it,” Bickmore says, recalling those 5am starts. “Being young I suppose.”
Young, smart, attractive and building a career, Bickmore appeared to have it all, but then her world came crashing down when, later that year, Greg was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He died in 2010.
Dealing with death is hard enough but Bickmore’s public profile meant that, at just 30 years of age, she became the media’s poster girl for the grieving young widow. Everyone wanted a piece of her, but all she wanted was peace of mind.
How did she come through it? “I think when you have been on the kind of ride I had in my 20s you find a certain strength within,” she says. “All the stuff that happened in my personal life, from losing Greg to having a child, I am still surprised at just how strong I was in those circumstances.
“Greg’s death taught me not to sweat the small stuff. Having lived with someone living and dying with cancer showed me the importance of not getting caught up in my world of work.
“Having Oliver has given me perspective too – he is pure joy. The best time of my day is the morning when I wake and see him and the night when I come home. We are very close; he is my little buddy. When I am not at work we hang out together all the time. I can’t imagine him not in my life.”
Her burgeoning television career also offered a chink of light – an opportunity to think ahead. With the support of her mother, who moved to Melbourne to help with Oliver, and some nannies, she was able to piece together the jigsaw of balancing work and motherhood.
Bickmore got her start on TV in 2006, while reading news at Nova, when she was offered a TV spot on Rove.
“I got a call from my agent saying someone from Roving Enterprises wanted me to come in for an audition. At the time Sandra Sully read the news headlines and I thought that’s what they asked me in to audition for, but I arrived and it was these random stories and jokes I had to deliver,” she says.
“I don’t think I really knew what the job was until I said yes.”
Since then she has interviewed celebrities such as Brad Pitt, had her patience tested by former Sex Pistol Johnny Lydon, who went on a sexist rant earlier this year in a very bizarre pre-record, and she got the nation laughing when she accidentally mixed up her news headlines when discussing cheap fares and Qantas – merging the two words, and blurting out c–tas.
Bickmore has proved she can rise above almost any circumstance – she’s not phased by celebrity status, and can handle the heat when the going gets tough. Most importantly, she knows how to laugh at herself when a broadcast is going pearshaped.
Her days start early when Oliver wakes his mum at 6.30am, tugging at her bed sheets telling her it’s time to get up. Two hours later they’re out the door of their Northcote home, sandwiches in hand, dinner planned for that night and left in the fridge. “He’s my little man,” Bickmore says.
If time permits, she will fit in a quick run, walk, or Pilates class before arriving at Channel Ten in South Yarra by 10am. Twelve hours later she’ll be asleep on the couch.
“I am pretty boring,” she says munching on a wrap sandwich, trying to fit in interviews, photo shoots and planning for the evening’s show all at the same time. “I don’t get out much at night. I just love being home.”
It has been reported she has a new boyfriend (Project producer Chris Walker), but she likes to keep her private life just that. While her job at the news desk revolves around finding out the nitty-gritty details of others, she’s not a fan of invasive journalism.
“I am very careful with questions I ask people. If I know someone doesn’t want to talk about something then I won’t push it,” Bickmore says.
“I do think it’s hard when you are a person in the limelight and people want to know things about you. I do share aspects of my life with people, it’s my nature to do so, but I have to remind myself the people around me in my personal life didn’t sign up to be exposed or be discussed.”
However, as her stakes as a style icon continue to rise, it seems inevitable Carrie Bickmore will continue to be a hot topic of conversation.
