The print was the creation of the then-35-year-old Bondi-born fashion trailblazer Jenny Kee, who is of Chinese, Italian and English heritage, and deeply Australian in sensibility. Kee has been acknowledged in the past—not least, and quite rightly, by herself—as the author of the prints Chanel used that season. In 1983, the year of Coco Chanel’s centenary, the house presented, through Vogue Australia, a Chanel suit featuring Kee’s Opal print in the lining and lapels to the National Gallery of Victoria, where it is displayed online with full and correct attribution.
Yet the story of how an Australian designer came to play a key role in a Chanel collection that, despite being largely forgotten, was one of the most significant in its entire history has, until now, never been fully told. Fashion moves fast and always faces forward; unless preserved, details will fall away as freely as loosely applied sequins from a dress in motion.
Back in 1982, I was living with my mother in the Blue Mountains, where Kee was a neighbour and close family friend. Her brush with Chanel was probably the first fashion story I ever encountered. So, to mark Blazy’s arrival in Sydney, I decided to try to piece it back together and, in the process, discovered a few details even Kee herself was unaware of. As she said when I called her at home up in the mountains this October: “Darl, I had no bloody idea!”
Unlocking the circumstances behind Kee’s cameo for Chanel takes us first to London, where, by 1968, she was living. That December, she appeared naked on the cover of Oz magazine—edited by my late uncle Richard Neville—while working with fellow Australian Vernon Lambert, the visionary vintage dealer whose stall at the Chelsea Antique Market on the King’s Road was helping to rewrite the rules of fashion. Lambert was Kee’s mentor, and when she returned to Australia in 1972, she was ready to start something new.
