HIGH TIMES AND WILD COLONIAL GIRLS; OZ FASHION'S BRIGHTEST BLIPS FROM FIRST SETTLERS TO GLOBAL MOVERS

The National Gallery of Victoria’s 200 YEARS OF AUSTRALIAN FASHION exhibition, part of the 20^th Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival’s 2016 Cultural Programme, opens at The Ian Potter Centre, next Friday, March 5 and runs till July 31. Today, Voxfrock editor Janice Breen Burns picks her way through some of the sparklier blips on our fashionable timeline. (Longform post: allow 10 minutes read time. This story first appeared in Spectrum, The Age, February 26)

 On a sunny day in 1976, when and government funds were sloshing like free beer around the arts, and the youthquakes and civil rights and women’s lib and gay movements were evolving and frothing into a kind of all-purpose mass- productive socio-political joie de vivre among Australia’s Young People, especially cash-strapped students, a young fashion-legend-in-the-bud, Jenny Bannister, putt-putted on her 100cc Suzuki motorbike from slum digs in Carlton to a rag merchants in Abbotsford to buy some old jumpers.

 “They sold them by the bale. I knew what I wanted. I picked out the most unusual colourways: pale green and jacaranda, black with a yellow spot on it ….” Bannister fished the woolly rags she wanted out of the piles, lashed them onto her Suzuki, and cheerfully putt-putted back to the slum where she stuffed them into a near-clapped-out washing machine, chopped them up and sewed them into her own unique rehashed fashion garments.

 And so it was; voila, a fashion movement triggered by a certain socio-economic cultural soup of circumstances, gathering momentum. A pod of seriously avante-garde patchwork jumpers defining precisely where Australian fashion history was in that moment: its most significant since the first free settlers sailed from England, was ready for sale to the first revolutionaries at an eccentric little shop called Chai in Melbourne’s CBD. “Not a shop for the masses,” onwer Clarence Chai pointed out at the time, “People who don’t understand our designs come in for a laugh.”

 Welcome to the best years of Australian fashion; the 1970s and 80s when, as NGV curator of 200 Years of Australian Fashion, Paola Di Trocchio puts it; “There was a joy around creativity; art was mixing into fashion, fashion was mixing into art…a new generation of visionaries, makers and designers was feeling empowered by the social climate, and what else was possible…”

Anything. Everything. They made such an almighty fuss with their lush, vivid, crazy-gorgeous clothes, these exotic young iconoclasts including Jenny Bannister, Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Martin Grant, Katie Pye, Christopher Graf, Gavin Brown, Fiona Scanlan, Richard Nylon (then, Neylon), Kate Durham, dozens of others in Sydney and Melbourne, that for the first time, fashionable Australians’ gaze swung away, en masse, from Paris.

Mon dieu! For 170-odd years white settlers had bridged the oceans between them and the world by carefully replicating the Parisian modes favoured by those “back home” and “overseas”. Now, suddenly “Australian-ness” – off-beat and arty like Bannister’s, uniquely flamboyantly Antipodean like Kee’s and Jackson’s – was not gimmicky or a cringingly parochial. Au contraire, it was a source of some pride for all and de rigueur for anyone who dared to wear it.

Bannister’s patchwork jumpers are long gone, but many of her joyously shocking art-fashions – trash plastic, leather offcuts and found objects incorporated – are cherished in galleries, museums and private collections as markers of the amazing 1970s and 1980s.

 They were a revelation after almost two centuries of essentially French-inspired Australian fashion or, as Di Trocchio puts it, “English via Paris” fashion. “News about fashion came by a constant exchange of letters and newspapers from “home”,” she says of the earliest days of European settlement. Every morsel was ravenously adopted. “Australians have always been incredibly receptive to international ideas…I think it’s a thirst, a hunger to be involved and connected to the rest of the world.”

 In 1805, for example, a convict seamstress (any woman who could cut a frock pattern by eyeballing a newspaper illustration was in hot demand) ran up a particular, gobsmackingly lovely pale Indian muslin empire dress with hand embroidered pattern of silvery floral sprigs, for one Anna Josepha King.

 At the time, according to Di Trocchio, modes were occasionally copied with a decorative local touch: a cockatoo feather here, platypus fur there, here a wattle, there a kangaroo, (what academic Margaret Maynard describes in the exhibition notes as: “A characteristic colonial waywardness of taste…”). But, not this one.

 This one was tres chic a la mode. It is the oldest dress in the exhibition, and probably the country. In 200 Years of Australian Fashion, the flimsy femininity and simple elegance of Mrs. King’s frock, with its short, bust-puffing, décolleté-enhancing bodice and slipper-grazing skirt, is exhibited in fascinating contrast to the robust corsetry, ostentatious ruffles, bows and buttons, enormous crinolines and elaborate bustles that evolved in its wake.

 

 The “tall, dark haired and vivacious” Mrs. King was 40 and well known for kicking up her heels at parties in 1805. Her husband was Philip King, governor of the baby colony from 1800 to 1806 but she wasn’t high born by any English standard.

 But this dress, Anna King was everything she wanted to be: the height of fashion, youthful, feminine, a woman of the world, and queenly among the rabble of convict and social-striving free settlers in Sydney.

 Fashion could imply all it does today, and more, in Anna Josepha King’s colonial orbit so it’s no surprise it would be another 120 years before the first chinks appeared in Australia’s besottedness with overseas trends.In the meantime, the flow of international trends into the colony strengthened and became more sophisticated.

 In 1878 a certain Madame Weigal of Melbourne began publishing a paper pattern catalogue (Di Trocchio describes it as “the first fashion magazine”) making it even easier to copy modes from “home” (as England was known).

 By the 1930s, passion for Parisian fashion was cranked to the max. Australian cities bristled with French-style fashion salons. In department stores and boutiques they peddled Parisian modes by appointment and at a packed calendar of glamourous soirees. The designs were copied under license, or just copied. (And, no shame or mischief about this practice is evident in the historic records.)

 So besotted with the French were Australians that, from 1946, barely a year after the years of deprivation and dull, militaristic modes of World War Two, the Australian Women’s Weekly bankrolled regular planeloads of glamourous Parisian originals; Patou, Balmain, Fath, Dior, Lanvin, among them, models included, to sate them.

 “Parisian fashions for all!” was David Jones’ 1948 slogan. The store collaborated with Christian Dior to fly his entire New Look collection from Paris, with seven house mannequins to walk it, for a calendar of soirees in its Sydney flagship.

 Back in 1929, couturier Mavis Ripper had been a lone voice for “original Australian” fashion designs. Two more decades, however, and her idea was gaining patchy traction. Couturiers, Beryl Jents and Hall Ludlow fired up the notion of an Aussie aesthetic through the 1950s and, by the 1960s, momentum gathered around names such as Norma Tullo, Prue Acton, Carla Zampatti.

 These first genuine legends of Aussie fashion sold collections overseas; early proof the flow of fashion was switching. The local rag trade however, was still based and thrived by aping (garment samples from Europe and the US, habitually picked apart and copied), or making under license to international fashion houses.

 Then the 1970s. Jenny Bannister booked into fashion school in 1972. Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson returned from travels, met, clicked, and launched their first collaborative fashions the next year. And, in 1976, June McCallum arrived, mid career from some of London’s top magazines, to edit Vogue Australia.

 She remembers revolutions going off in all directions; lifestyles, food, women’s work, finances… “There was a lot happening.” But, most interesting, she remembers a distinctly Australian aesthetic was crystalising and, not only that; “(Australian) fashion was becoming less dependant on overseas trends”.

 This was music to McCallum who planned; “to knock the French and Italian Vogues off Australian coffee tables” with a magazine as sophisticated as Vogue ever was, but also, uniquely Australian.

 She assigned photographers Patrick Russell and Monty Coles, recently arrived from England, to “get the look” she wanted, a look that would depict an iconic Australian style, in an iconic Australian way.

 “It was like arriving on the edge of the world,” Coles, now an adjunct professor of photography at RMIT, remembers of his arrival from England. “All the photographers at the time were using orange filters; maybe to warm up the colours, but I don’t know why. The harshness was what was Australian.”

 Coles left the orange filters at home and often shot on locations where the colours were bleached and dirt and dust and wind dominated. One, the sand dunes where Mad Max was filmed, was particularly perfect in a particularly Aussie way: “A hot, kind of Limbo place; hard natural light, hard shadows. Very Australian.”

 Coles’ assignments ran the gamut of Australian style at the time, from the breezy freshness of neo-classic brands Simona and Trent Nathan, to the vivid iconoclastic designs of Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, and their expanding band of followers.

 “Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson were leading the way,” McCallum recalls. “They designed these pieces that were so covetable and flambouyant and fresh. There was a lovely feeling of being creative but, not in a parochial way…there was a lot of clever designing behind it.”

 Kee and Jackson’s original print patterns were inspired by Australian flora, fauna, land and sea and skies but, also key to their explosive success, was their resonance with familiar ideas from Asia, Africa, New Guinea, Europe, and indigenous communities in outback Australia. The result was clothes not seen before: vivid, graphic, often hand painted, with lush, fastidiously finished layers, but connected at some cerebral level, to the rest of humanity. They defined a new kind of luxury and, for the first time, an “Australian” aesthetic.

 “We’d both been travelling and got back with fresh eyes,” Jackson says of her return to Australian in 1972 after a year in Papua New Guinea. “And we plugged into the beauty of this country.”

 It had been done before, in art (Margaret Preston, Arthur Boyd, Sydney Nolan) but, only haphazardly, with a sense of gimmick, in fashion. “We looked around and thought why NOT be inspired by waratah, or by opals, or the Barrier Reef..?”

 Their collaborations with other artists; jeweller Peter Tully, for example, and artist David McDiarmid, according to Jackson, added layers and texture to their work. “We were multi-media artists before there was even a word for it.”

 (Forty years later, Jackson and Kee would collaborate with, and inspire, Luke Sales and Anna Plunkett of Romance Was Born, in a thrilling new chapter of the artisanal multi-media, multi-disciplinary fashion that still resonates as uniquely Australian. Today’s Spectrum cover features an example of RWB’s work inspired by Jackson.)

 By 1980, there was enough precocious fashion talent in Australia to dedicate the first exhibition of its kind; Art Clothes in the Gallery of New South Wales. And, by 1982, enough rudely talented enfants terrible had also accumulated in Melbourne to sustain a decade of the gloriously decadent fashion shows produced under the banners of, first, Party Architecture (1982-83) followed by the Fashion Design Council of Australia (1984-93).

 Bannister remembers being rocked by the first show she saw. “One dress with plastic pockets and goldfish swimming in them, and an aluminium dress on wheels. (The model) sort of rolled down the runway in this long Victoriana thing, and I knew I just had to be a part of this.” She did the following year, hiring muscle men to walk her segment in lap-laps, models hoisted onto their shoulders.

 In 1986 Australian fashion – the colourful, artful, artisanal kind – was unique and peaking. Kee, Jackson and Bannister were in a mixed bag of Aussie icons including Prue Acton, Hall Ludlow and Country Road, invited to Australian Fortnight by Neiman Marcus stores in the US.

 And three years later in 1989, they joined the most significant celebration of Antipodean fashion to that date. The Victoria and Albert invited June McCallum and Vogue Australia to collaborate on its first ever exhibition of contemporary fashion. Ever. And, they wanted it to be Australian fashion.

 “British Vogue was furious!” laughs McCallum. She commissioned 52 studio-based designers to exhibit in the V&A’s Australian Fashion: The Contemporary Art. Among them; Kee, Jackson and Bannister as well as Kara Baker, Gavin Brown, Susan Cohn, Dinosaur Designs, Peter Morrissey, Leona Edmiston and Fiona Scanlan.

 The show was a hit, but timing not terrific. After a summer season at the V&A, it toured to its final destination at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and its stars hunkered down for the worst economic recession in Australia’s history.

Fashion commentators have described what came next as; “when the world went black”. The Japanese moved their sombre, intellectual aesthetic – just right for the global mood – onto the runways of Paris, and colour drained from fashion almost entirely. (This was also the decade Melbourne acquired its taste for black, and hasn’t surrendered it since.)

 But, the same era also ushered in a remarkable new generation of wily, global-thinking Australian designers and sophisticated studio-based artisans, forearmed with the lessons of the past.

They’re business-savvy, commercial operators with one eye on their creative muse and one eye on their bottom line and they keep on coming despite the ficklest, most difficult market in fashion’s history. Kym Ellery, Strateas.Carlucci, Collette Dinnigan, Martin Grant, Akira Isogawa, Romance Was Born (their contemporary design, developed in collaboration with Linda Jackson and referencing her 1980s work, is our main photo, top), Sass & Bide, Yeojin Bae, Willow, Josh Goot, Lui Hon, Dion Lee, Easton Pearson, Di$count Universe; they’re just a few of the many.

 Melbourne Fashion Festival CEO Graeme Lewsey, says they’re uniquely advantaged to take on world. “It comes down to classic marketing: what’s the unique selling point of our industry? It’s that we are really great at this look of casual sophistication. We’re not just another nouveau riche country giving fashion a crack, we are really good at turning everything good about Australia – our weather, environment, our art, multiculturalism, our lifestyle – into innovative and really interesting fashion. It’s about Brand Australia.”

 

Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au