Event developer Matt Swinney had no intention of promoting modernism.
Yet all of a sudden, the founder of Austin Fashion Week, Austin Restaurant Week and Launch787 is among the nation’s most prolific pushers of the clean-lined building style.
“The biggest surprise is that we can do it,” Swinney, 37, says. “The reality is that our timing is good. Modern architecture is back in the forefront of popular imagination.”
Trim and subtly stylish, Swinney comes from a split home in more ways than one. His father, showman Mike Swinney, runs London-based Hyper Entertainment, which promotes site-based entertainment projects. His mother, Diane Mathews Swinney, is a CPA.
“She’s the rooted, grounded type,” her son says. “She’s the one who picked a stable career.”
Swinney’s sister went the stable route, too, becoming a nurse. “The apple didn’t fall far from either tree,” Swinney jokes.
Athletic but introverted, he, too, played things safe before heading to Trinity University in San Antonio.
“I didn’t become comfortable in my own skin until college,” he says. “The words ‘risk averse’ were deleted from my vocabulary. I became more like my dad.”
After college, he head to the Bay Area to work for start-up software company. In 2000, he married his high school sweetheart, now Kara Tingley Swinney, a pediatric physical therapist. They have two young children.
After the tech bubble burst, the future promoter caught the media bug working on his father-in-law’s real estate magazine. After selling his stake, Swinney started Rare magazine in 2005. Comparisons to the oblong-shaped Tribiza were inevitable.
“If I had to do it all over again I’d changed the shape,” he says. “We chose the shape because it was cost effective, not because we wanted to compete directly with Tribeza. We wanted a younger, more downtown magazine. Tribeza felt very West Austin then.”
Rare was a hit with the fast urban set, but it was tough finding advertisers geared to that tribe. After the economy tanked in 2008, he sold Rare to his then-business partner, Taylor Perkins, along with another of his creations, Restaurant Week, which promoted local eateries during a slow time of year through low-cost prix fixe menus. A few proceeds went to a nonprofit.
Swinney’s next business, events developer Launch787, was immediately confused with Do512.
“They list events,” Swinney gasps at the old confusion. “We do events!”
Nothing he had promoted would compare to the scale of Austin Fashion Week, set in motion during July 2009. The first long week was packed with events, including runway shows, leading up the Austin Fashion Awards, which improved vastly as it moved from the Long Center to ACL Live then to the Austin Music Hall over the years.
Along the way, his team collaborated with modeling agent Justin Brown, jewelry maker Kendra Scott, salon owner Allen Ruiz and radio personality J.B. Hager, as well as with major national designers and photographers.
Early on, Fashion Week appeared to compete with Tribeza’s Style Week.
“They were none too happy,” he says of Tribeza’s owners. “But it wasn’t intentional. I think what (they) have done is great. There’s a lot to go around.”
Swinney kicked off his event in August — against virtually no competition on the social scene — but he’s moving Fashion Week to May in 2013.
“We always planned on making a profit in Year 5,” he says “It’s getting there. It made a couple of nickels that we could rub together this year. I think it makes other people money. It has helped establish fashion as a realistic industry in Austin.”
The Austin Modern Home Tour came next in January 2010. He partnered with real estate broker Krisstina Wise of the Good Life Team and Ingrid Spencer, former managing editor of Architectural Record.
“Ingrid brought the houses in,” Swinney says. “Architects trusted her. And it became easier when we showed them that we weren’t going to destroy their houses.”
Austin already hosted multiple home tours. Yet there seemed to be a hunger for more.
“They’ll tell you that they want to get ideas for their own houses,” Swinney says. “At the end of the day, people love poking their noses in other people’s houses. I’m the same way. People want to know how the other half — any other half — lives.”
In June 2011, Swinney expanded the modern tour first to Houston. He doesn’t bother with insider distinctions between modern, contemporary and mixed-traditional styles.
“I’m not a purist,” he says. “It’s not a museum tour. Still a way to allow the general public to see incredibly beautiful works of art and inside the brains of people who create it.”