Summary

Large ballerina style dress designed and made by Jenny Bannister in Melbourne in 1976.

It was based on similar dresses from the 1950s, but using plastics rather than fabrics. Designed for a 1950s themed party, with the idea that drink spills and other stained could be removed by simply hosing it down after use.

In 2005, Jenny wore this floating in the swimming pool at her St Kilda home, to illustrate a newspaper article in The Age newspaper, entitled `Staying Afloat', which looked at the challenges her business was facing at the time.

It is part of the archives of Jenny Bannister, documenting her fashion design educational and vocational life, from the late 1960s until 2009.

Physical Description

Dress made up of a white fishnet skirt and black fishnet bodice covered in clear plastic which has been splashed with red, yellow and black Dulux paint. The dress has an inside tie at the waist and a red tie at the top with red trimming at the neckline.

Significance

The Jenny Bannister archive is of national significance, and is arguably the most important fashion design, manufacture and retailing archive still in existence. It documents the career of one of Australia's most significant designers and business women, who kept a thriving company going for almost 40 years, long after her contemporaries had retired or gone bankrupt.

No other collection documents this significant period in Australian fashion and clothing manufacturing so completely and succinctly; from the rise of an independent fashion industry in the 1960s and 70s, complimented by a strong local manufacturing sector, to the moving offshore of most of the manufacture as costs rosed to the eventual bankruptcy and closure of many local labels due to an increased overseas retail presence and rise of online consumerism.

Its importance has been recognised by the National Library of Australia, who will be collecting the bulk of her business and manufacture archival material, including 100 of patterns, and will be only the second such collection to enter the institution, after prominent Sydney designer Linda Jackson.

She was the master of creativity and diversity, able to capture numerous markets, producing the most outlandish and artistic garments as well as highly commercial clothing. as renowned fashion historian and academic Professor Robyn Healy wrote `Art Clothes, body sculpture, craft, theatrical costume, party clothes or serious fashion - Jenny Bannister's work transcends categorization. Like a New Age traveller, she explores the extraordinary, the primitive and the futuristic, to create garments for for kings, the Mardi Gras of the hip crowd'.

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