Australia’s fashion events can struggle to find adequate and affordable cover and often present steep challenges for brokers and insurers. The growing risk profile of these shows - well beyond the catwalk - is increasing these insurance strains. Australian Fashion Week, the fashion calendar’s biggest annual event, takes over Sydney's Carriageworks venue each May with a dense hub of runway shows, talks and workshops. In Melbourne, the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival runs more than 100 events across two weeks including panel discussions and performances.
These shows sprawl across multiple venues and formats – runway spectaculars, public activations, music performances, workshops – backed by powerful sponsors and global production companies. They’re a branding dream, but from an insurance perspective they’re a complex mix of alcohol‑fuelled crowds, heavy production rigs and overlapping contracts. It’s the kind of environment where an online package policy can quickly fall apart.
One broker who has leaned into that complexity is James Still (main picture), managing director of Still Insured Insurance Brokers and the 2025 NIBA–Vero National Young Broker of the Year. Working on fashion events staged at Carriageworks, he has effectively built his own event‑insurance blueprint from the ground up.
Still’s entry into fashion events came via his sister, who works on the production side. What he found was a risk environment that bore little resemblance to the tidy assumptions of standard liability or personal accident cover.
“There was no cookie cutter, one size fits all liability or personal accident for this so we had to create our own specialist insurance line,” he said.
It was a gap in the market that he’s managed to cover, starting with the alcohol challenge.
“You need coverage for alcohol‑based incidents and that’s a big one, especially if you’re dealing with 15,000 event goers a day,” said Still.
The exposures run through the entire production ecosystem. At the top are global production companies and local venue operators like Carriageworks. Then come show organisers, model agencies, fashion designers and all the staff building textiles and sets. Still points to scenarios where a model slips in a designer’s garment, comes off the runway and injures a guest; suddenly, the designer is exposed to a liability claim because the garment itself may be alleged to have contributed to the fall.
“The risk side of it is big and I’ve been to a lot of the events now and seen how they all work and what happens when something goes wrong,” he said.
Still said his firm has been able to create specific tailored solutions that cover every fashion event risk.
But early on, Still’s approach looked much like a lot of other insurance offerings in the events space based on standard online policies that often don’t fit the risks.
“You realise very quickly that that has a lot of gaps in it so you tailor the offering to make it better,” he said.
What followed was four years of trial‑and‑error, built on two disciplines: being physically present at events and relentlessly interrogating clients for feedback.
He would place a policy, then ask every stakeholder – producer, venue, designer, sponsor – whether it actually responded to their contract and operational reality. Inevitably, gaps emerged: new alcohol clauses, stricter safety obligations, indemnity wording no generic package had anticipated. That meant repeated renegotiations with underwriters, and often starting over with a new market when the first said “out of scope”.
“If the client wants cover for something new then we get given the contracts so now we’re way more involved in the contracts than initially,” said Still.
Over time, Still’s persistence began to reverse the power dynamic. Rather than chasing capacity, he found offshore markets coming to him.
“Now we’ve got a direct connection with London,” he says. “We’ve got the managing directors of HWS London that are reaching out now and saying they’ve got a market for this.”
Still’s experience suggests that if brokers want markets to follow them into these high‑profile, high‑exposure events, they need to speak directly to underwriters’ core anxieties.
“Injury and alcohol were the two biggest,” said Still, when asked what keeps underwriters awake on fashion events. “How to safeguard that, including what safety measures have been put in place, who organises it and are they international or are they here on the ground?”
For Still, the solution for these events was to make operational detail part of the insurance product.
“A lot of times you put something together and it’s half‑arsed,” he said without mincing words. “Then something does happen and no one can actually contact the people that they need to contact.”
Policies are backed by documented safety plans and clear lines of responsibility with contact details – not just vague assurances that “the venue handles that”. He said this is a “massive undertaking” but once it’s in place, some of the biggest risk management challenges are under control.
Still also insists on mapping exactly who is responsible when something does go wrong: venue management, security firms, ushers, first‑aid teams, international producers and local subcontractors.
When these events are bumping in, Still works with his sister - who is on the ground managing these shows at Carriageworks - and on‑site safety teams. When he flags a risk trend, it’s fed straight back into physical mitigation.
“If they need rails up within 48 hours, the rails are up or if they need extra safety cables on the massive winding booms, because they do break, those safety measures are then implemented,” said Still.
As shows scale up, so do the stakes. Fashion shows are elaborate productions with complicated set‑pieces and tonnes of lighting and rigging over an audience sitting in tightly packed rows or standing in crowds. Still talks matter‑of‑factly about the need to convince insurers that those lights “won’t just give”. That’s where his role as broker becomes less about price and more about engineering a risk story the market can believe in.
“It was a rough start but year on year we’ve got better and better and better at it,” he said.
He is quick to point out that he doesn’t design the technical fixes; his job is to force the conversation about a risk that needs mitigating.
“Generally, it falls on the venue staff so if something goes wrong the venue is also up for a lawsuit, so they want to make sure everyone’s going to walk back out of an event in one piece,” said Still.
Ultimately, he frames event insurance not as a shield against bad headlines, but as part of a broader safety culture that accepts some incidents are inevitable.
“You can’t just completely avoid all the risk but you can mitigate it if something bad happens,” he said.
This blend of on‑the‑ground risk insights, close attention to contracts and underwriting credibility is a competitive differentiator. In a space where one misstep can turn a glittering show into a costly legal saga, brokers who can do what Still has done – build specialist solutions where no cookie‑cutter exists – are likely to find themselves in growing demand from event organisers who know the stakes of getting their cover wrong.
