Summary

Sleeveless, multicoloured maxi coat with machine appliqué designed and made by Jenny Bannister in 1971 while she was a student at Red Cliffs High School in northwest Victoria.

Jenny made this coat in Form 5 (or Year 11) and it is one of Jenny's favourite garments from this period. The coat draws heavily from the bohemian styling of the American blues and rock singers Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

The woollen maxi coat uses fabric offcuts to create the surface pattern, and it is an early example of Jenny's formative commitment to using scraps of fabric in the production of her unique clothing. Jenny was greatly influenced by her paternal grandmother, who was a soldier settler's wife and first lived in a humpy on the river bank down past Mildura. As Jenny recalls in a 1982 newspaper article, 'They had no money for clothes so she would cut up worn-out dresses and shirts to make new ones.' The coat also features stars as a key motif, a design that Jenny returns to in her Cosmic Collection of the 1980s.

It forms part of the Jenny Bannister archives which document her fashion design education and vocational life from the late 1960s until 2009.

Physical Description

Floor length multicoloured sleeveless coat or vest made of wool. The garment is made of panels with different types of fabrics applied with machine applique in various shapes including stars. Colours include red, purple, green and crimson.

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 was recognised by the National Library of Australia, who collected the bulk of her business and manufacture archival material, including 100 of patterns. It was only the second such collection to enter the institution, after that of 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'.

More Information