Summary

Jacket designed and made in Melbourne by fashion designer Jenny Bannister in the early 1980s.

Multi-coloured jacket made of feather-filled quilted clear plastic.

Quilted jackets usually conceal their feather padding behind the outer layer, but not Jenny's. She celebrated the inner construction by dyeing her feathers in bright colours and putting them on display behind windows of thick clear plastic.

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

Black padded jacket with front part of jacket quilted with clear plastic and filled with coloured feathers. The quilted sections are triangular in shape and the coloured feathers are in blocks of blue, green red and white.

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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