JENNY: ARTIST, PARTY GIRL, LEGEND

Philip Boon Presents: Jenny Bannister A Retrospective Fashion Show, will animate more than 60 archival ensembles by the iconic designer. Miss Bannister’s work is recognised in public and private collections around the world including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australian National Gallery, Powerhouse Museum, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and Washington’s Smithsonian.

Main photo, top: Monty Coles
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On the outside, Jenny Bannister’s house in the Melbourne suburb of Windsor is a scruffy Victorian sprawler with a jungle garden and wonky gate. Inside, it’s another story; light and lofty ceilings, polished floors, a shamozzle of quirky decor, a moveable forest of wheelie fashion racks, and an elegant jigsaw of art on all the walls leading to a cool courtyard pool out the back. It’s a lot like Jenny; surprising, contradictory, loaded with history, rather exotic, and ultimately a joy to discover.

We’re here – photographer Monty Coles and I – for a final fossick in her archive ahead of next week’s historic retrospective show. Jenny is her usual, ebullient self, though we find out later, she’s been laid up with the flu and feeling crappy all week. But, that’s Jenny; relentlessly, raucously upbeat, eccentrically blunt, the life and colour of Melbourne’s avante garde fashion and party scene since 1976.
So, that’s where we start. And, she’s already at the racks, pulling out mad things, wild things, plastic dresses dangling with Barbie doll bits, huge striped canvas pants (“All the art students wore these in the ‘70s; my unisex period..), horned headdresses, coconut brassieres. “This is from 1976…this is winter 1977…this is from the Clarence Chai parade in ’78…those are from summer 1980, no, ’81, no, ’80, no…”

She’s a stickler for accurate provenance, recalls often trivial scraps of fashion history so joyfully you can’t help but build a Big Picture: what it was like Back Then, back in the elbow of Australia’s fashion history when enfants terrible like Jenny Bannister stuck crackers up a culture rooted in fashions copied from overseas. “This is what started it all,” she says, and pulls out an extravagant, paint-spattered glass-plastic dress with full fifties-esque skirts and strapless bodice.

It’s not the first time I’ve met this frock. Years ago, it revealed Jenny to me, after a fashion. I’d arrived to interview her for The Age and asked if she wouldn’t mind popping it on for a portrait by photographer Angela Wylie. Well. In a heartbeart, Jenny had wriggled into the plastic fantastic, plunged into her swimming pool and was floating like a giant starfish, teeth chattering, blonde hair swirling, puppydog yapping fretfully from the side as Angela hovered over her on a not-so-stable ladder, both flummoxed and delighted at such chutzpah, coaxing her to manoeuvre this way and that in the water.

So, that was Jenny. Still is Jenny, though, her close circle of nearest and dearest is also painfully aware that that very industry, the one renowned for nurturing and feting her as blessed and rare – even celebrating her life as artist and designer on a special, limited edition postage stamp –  evolved into an over-regulated, mean-spirited complicated bureaucracy that strangled her wholesale/retail business, drove her into early retirement, and left her prone to occasional bitter outbursts about the whole sorry business. But, we’ll dwell on that another day.

Today, Joyful Jenny is here and hell bent on wrapping 40 rollercoaster years into a single afternoon especially for Voxfrock. We are enchanted. Hopelessly unable to cram it all in here, but enchanted nonetheless. Names, dates, shows, parties, career breaks, spill thick and fast as Monty snaps and snaps and Jenny and I plough through the racks. The wild-heart Mildura teenager who lobbed into Melbourne in 1972 with her soon-to-be-famous-model sister, Wendy, has indeed lived a legendary life. From Emily McPherson (now RMIT) fashion school, to recycling denim into exotic ensembles for South Yarra brand Blues Point, flogging her punk couture “art clothes” on consignment, later galvanising Melbourne’s sartorial affair with black fashion by injecting quirk into her own versions, and in her final decade of business, selling artfully tempered glamour out of her eponymous store on Chapel Street and around on Australia to likeminded buyers, she has built a reputation unmatched in Australian fashion history.

Jenny Bannister clothes were artfully avante garde, sophisticated punk, very cool, very edgy. Her fanlist hasn’t stopped stretching since she punked up her first bolts of vintage material from Melbourne’s infamous Jobs Warehouse, cut up old jumpers, rescued jungle greens and leather offcuts, and dangled found objects, opshop tat and scraps from her cutting table off the extraordinary, mind-blowing results because….That was Jenny.

“I liked plastic and wetlook PVC,” she says. “I loved scraps of leather…” She loved stiffness and the way she could sculpt and control some materials. Designers now use fabrics such as neoprene for a similar effect but, back then, the raw stuff of Jenny’s work was often weird and brave and bloody marvellous. She’d use anything to persue one of her creative whims to its zenith, once scavenging surgical stuff for an exhibit at London’s V&A museum, wetting the sheets then moulding them around models’ breasts, nipples erect, to create possibly the hottest bikinis ever invented. Today, Monty remembers photographing one for Vogue.

Jenny Bannister was recycling before there was a name for it and decades before the word “celebrity” was in common usage, was the unoffical honeypot for any Fabulous and Famous person hungry to stand out from their crowd. To list all her fans would take a post far longer than this but, here’s a taste: Debbie Harry, Rudolphe Nureyev, Naomi Campbell, Nadja Auermann, Pamela Stephenson, Kylie Minogue, Tina Turner, Tina Arena, plus a global host of private fashion collectors and art gallery and museum curators including those mentioned in our introduction, and a bevy of devoted fashion editors who regularly chose Jenny Bannister designs to represent the best of Australian fashion on their sojourns to Paris, Milan, New York.

“I call her the last of the originals,” says her friend, the stylist, creative director and sometime fashion impresario Philip Boon.  She was also the first. “Jenny’s an artist, but she’s always also had a rock edge, a punk edge, that made her designs cool.” Philip is widely acknowledged as the one who knows Jenny better than anyone other than her affable husband, retired economist Paul “Mongoose” Belin. Jenny and Philip have run Melbourne’s popular cult forum Fashion Torque for industry players and wannabes for four years. Their bantering affection for each other is obvious, as is Philip’s near-motherly intuition around Jenny’s soft centre and occasional fragile moments. She is prone, like many creative types, to self-doubts and admits fear made her run from several solid offers that might have altered her career path, specifically in the direction of Paris and Europe, the US, and Hong Kong. “I got scared,” she says. “I sort of have regrets now…” It’s tempting to wonder how the Jenny Bannister legend might have evolved if her “wingman” Philip were around a decade or three ago.

Next Tuesday, Philip says he’s particularly excited to host the rare retrospective show Philip Boon Presents: Jenny Bannister for his regular event series in aid of Prahran Mission. “It’s known for its creative and innovative ways of helping people with mental health issues. At last count 60 ensembles, 20 models and a backstage crew of 50 is confirmed.”It’s going to be spectacular. What she deserves.” The night will also include an exhibition and sale of works by internationally renowned artists commissioned to create a piece inspired by Jenny Bannister, the fashion legend, a prize for the best Jenny Bannister outfit in the room, and a special surprise musical performance.

Philip Boon Presents: Jenny Bannister A Retrospective, Tuesday May 20, 7 pm., Deutscher & Hackett, 105 Commercial Road, South Yarra, Tickets $95, book here