Interview #221 — Jenny Kee

by Emma Do

You can’t talk about Australian fashion history without delving into Jenny Kee’s oeuvre and the kitsch Australiana identity she and Linda Jackson made world-famous.

As a designer and the owner of the Flamingo Park boutique, which ran from 1973 to 1995, Jenny channelled her deep love for Australia’s landscape into wearable creations, first through knitwear studded with native flora and fauna, then later through printed silks she made from her own kaleidoscopic paintings.

Over the years, her work has been constantly rediscovered, referenced and revered by new generations—including in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian National Gallery, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Tokyo’s Marimura Museum and Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. Jenny revisits her work, all the moments that inspired her to create and more in her autobiography, A Big Life (2006).

Jenny speaks to Emma about her lifelong love of fashion, taking the time to create fashion which doesn’t result in large environmental impacts, and choosing to live simply.

This interview was conducted in 2021, for Liminal Volume II.

Jenny at the Living Plastics exhibition, 1977. Photograph by William Yang.

What has your experience of lockdown been like?

I was so relieved to have this time. The bushfires of 2019–2020 really knocked us all around. And, for the last two years, I’d been working so hard on the show Step into Paradise for the Powerhouse Museum: going through my life, picking out the best work, everything had to be searched for. These days, I get up later. Because I can’t do swimming for my chronic back injury from 43 years ago, I do pilates reformer then go on very long walks, sometimes for three hours, into the burnt bush. I do this fantastic Buddhist practice when I go walking; it’s all about pacifying turmoil—both the turmoil inside and the turmoil we’re going through across the planet. You’re thinking of the bush healing and looking at regeneration, and that translates onto the planet, on a grander scale.

I haven’t been making masses of art or anything. I’ve done things, but I haven’t been manically inspired like I would have been 40, 30 or 15 years ago. I feel like I’m in recovery mode right now. I’ve been using it as a time for deep reflection and thinking of others, the planet and the animals—rather than me and my needs, my work and my being driven. It’s rather nice not to feel that I have to do anything. But I think an artist never actually retires or stops. I’m just on go-slow mode. And I’m very happy about it.

You’re often referred to as “famous fashion designer Jenny Kee”. Do you see yourself as an artist or a designer? I recall, for instance, 1981’s Black Opal print, which Karl Lagerfeld used for his first collection for Chanel.

I think of myself as a designer; I feel that my art makes my designs. Art is expressed in so many different ways and forms—you’re wearing a piece of art when you’re wearing my silk, but I see it as more of a design that’s made from pieces of art. I make collages from my art by tearing it and all sorts of things up, like how the Opal happened: all the bits got torn up and became something else. I look at the knits I did with these beautiful graphics on them and think of all the artists I was influenced by. That was a walking piece of art. But call it what you want; I’m really not precious about it.

How did your appreciation for clothing start?

I think I was born like that. In A Big Life, you can see a picture of my mother and father: he looks like a Chinese gangster with his beautiful Ciccuto suit, Akubra hat and the gold Rolex, smoking a cigarette, and Mum was a glamorous, divinely stylish woman. Mum would dream up these outfits and her sisters would make them all so exquisitely. So that sense of perfection and style was just bred into me with Mum.

I used to dream things up—I never sewed, I never knitted, I never did anything. I was just the ideas person who was always dreaming. And Mum made a beautiful sewing lady available for me. I’d just go there with all my ideas and she’d make them. My mother would raid my father’s gambling pockets to take out a few pound notes to go and buy me Charles Jourdan shoes; when I was 13, Charles Jourdan was the shoe designer.

Your dad had such a colourful life growing up during the gold rush. What kinds of stories did you hear about his life?

His family came here for the gold rushes and ran the shop in town, making their own ice blocks and ice-cream. They were so industrious. Dad lived in Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland, and was a drover’s cook at the age of 13. He’d tell us that he had a dingo that fought kangaroos and crocodiles, that he slept outside under the stars. He had a really rugged life as a little Chinese boy making his way in the world, forced to work at the age of five. And all his brothers and uncles were jockeys. They were known as the famous bareback horsemen of the north. They used to win all the races because they were little and nimble.

Jenny Kee, Jude Kuring and Linda Jackson, 1977. Photograph by William Yang.

What was it like for you growing up in 1950s Bondi as a mixed-race Chinese-Italian girl?

It was very racist. There was everything happening with Indigenous people. Then there was also the White Australia policy that was enforced in 1901, which lasted until the ’70s. Because my brother was very badly mistreated, I was determined it wasn’t going to happen to me. My coping mechanism was to develop a very strong personality—one with an ‘I’ll show you’ quality, which I had a lot of in me, and which has been a really good thing because it really did make me show everyone. That personality transcended my face, which was very Chinese.

When do you think you became proud of your Chinese heritage?

When I was a little girl, I used to cry when Dad would take me to Chinatown to get jook—Chinese porridge with char siu and shallots and a bit of green—on a Sunday night in the billy can. When we’d get to Chinatown, all his friends would be speaking Chinese to me and I used to cry.

I also always felt that I could be attacked, that I would be. And I was. On firecracker night, they threw a big bunger and it went right into my chest. I was very young—only about five. I’ve still got the scar; it was a big scar then and, now that I’m grown up, it’s still a big scar. It really burnt into me. I felt that I was branded for being Asian.

Anyway, I wanted to be like Jennifer Ackroyd, a schoolmate who was completely blond with the whitest teeth and the bluest eyes; she was my ideal. But that changed quickly when I turned into a teenager, because then I was exotic to the opposite sex.

I can see why you would have tried to reject your Asianness when the world was telling you that you’re not worthy.

Yes, because everything was white-bread. Thank god I had Jewish girlfriends, because the white ones were really boring!

Everything I ate was exotic. My mum didn’t cook Italian, but she made really beautiful food all the time. And my father was a brilliant cook. Even though they weren’t happy and were ill-matched as a couple, every weekend, Dad made us the most extraordinary banquet of Chinese dishes. Everyone in the market knew Dad’s cooking. He used to go to the old Tai Ping restaurant in Chinatown to make a big feast every Thursday for all the market men. That was the best part of the week for them—they even named a dish after him in Chinatown. It was an awful dish, but they just wanted to have something that was Billy Kee.

So your dad was quite notorious down in Chinatown, then.

He sort of was, because he was a gambler as well. When Dad was in his early 20s, his brother went to China for an education and came back an opium addict. There were opium houses all over Surry Hills, plus Chinese opium dens and mahjong houses. Everything to do with Chinatown was all closed doors. The whole of that precinct was big business! And inside the markets, it was all dark—they had these rickety offices made of wood, sitting on stilts.

You got on a boat to London in 1965, when you were 18. Did you go there with the thought that you might become an artist?

I just wanted to go somewhere where there was action—action with music, fashion, everything creative. Sydney was bland. I mean, the art crowd I hung out with wasn’t bland; it was very wild, but it was a tiny pocket. And we were just hungry. We grew up with the ideals of the ’50s—two cars, a swimming pool and a suburban house—which weren’t my ideals. I was creative!

While all of that was in me, I wasn’t thinking of achieving this and that. We were just starved for excitement, and we knew it was there. The best shop that was happening at the time was Biba—an amazing, far-out shop with velvet curtains and feather boas, a concept store—so all of us Aussie girls got jobs there with the Biba dollies. And then I moved onto the Chelsea Antique Market because that was the next thing. I was there as it was all happening—for the first time, there were boutiques. Before then, there weren’t little shops that specialised in really crazy clothing, like Biba; it was all department stores.

Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee, 1979. Photograph by William Yang.

How did your love affair with artisan textiles and ethnic prints begin?

That’s when I went to work at the Chelsea Antique Market. It was the beginning of everyone crossing over the hippie trail through to India, so all these exotic fabrics were coming back from Asia, Africa and South America. The rooms in the market were tiny, like a small bedroom. My friend Vern Lambert’s store was not made of money—just beauty and vintage pieces. All the clothes hung down from chains on the wall: Vionnet, Schiaparelli, Poiret, masses of chiffon, flowers, beautiful bias-cut dresses, floral little ’40s crepe dresses, beautiful jackets with couture labels on them.

It was like working on set for a film called The ’60s! All the stars, including Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and young creative people in music and film would gravitate towards us. We’d all be wearing vintage, but everyone wore something different and had different make-up on. You’d be walking along and see someone who looks like a ’30s film star with someone who looks like a ’50s hipster. I don’t know anywhere that was like that. And it didn’t last forever; it was only these three or four years.

Also, everyone was taking acid at the time. That was what was behind it: dope and acid. There was a very big dividing line between ‘straight’ and ‘not straight’. You can’t even imagine that now. It wasn’t like everyone was seasoned dope smokers—it was really all new. And, yes, it was too indulgent, and was a lot of people’s downfall. But, in 1967, it was the summer of love, and we were living that dream because we were young enough and silly enough to think that that was a dream. Good things came out of all of that, though: the ideals of the environment, of peace. You’ve got to think about what was going on with the Vietnam War. John Lennon was lying in bed with Yoko Ono saying, “Give peace a chance.” They were really making a potent point, as some of the greatest thinkers of the day were.

You came back to Australia in 1972 and started collaborating with Linda Jackson. What was the Australian fashion identity like before Flamingo Park? And, only being in your mid-20s at the time, how did you nurture your creative confidence?

Everyone looked to Europe. It was very bland. Because I’d come from London and Linda had been living in Asia and Paris, we had a distinct ideal—we just wanted to change things in Australia. I had been in London at the cutting edge and beginning of vintage. People just didn’t wear their grandmother’s clothes before then! I knew that, when I came back to open a shop, it had to be like nothing else. Michael Ramsden had painted his work Flamingo Park in London for his show in 1970, and that painting came back with us. It set the tone for the shop.

My confidence blossomed in London because I was with everyone who was like me. Everyone had a different thing they were brilliant at, and we all just wanted to look different. It was like your job description to come in looking different from anyone else—completely outrageously different. I was always Little Miss Ethnic, but I was so inventive in the way I wore ethnic clothes.

Today’s fashion is going through a bit of a crisis: the environment, labour, designers feeling burnt out by the ridiculous cycles. Where would you like to see fashion go?

I just think people should specialise more. If they’re very creative, they should specialise in making really beautiful things in a smaller way, so they don’t have a large imprint. I know everyone’s sort of thinking like that now—or maybe they’re not and are just saying they are.

In my career, I never thought about making lots of money; it just happened. At one point, Flamingo Park was a very successful shop, but in a very tiny way. When it was popular, there might have been 30 to 40 knits going into the shop a week because they’d take up to three weeks to make. They would all sell, but we’re talking tiny quantities here. Imagine if everyone did ‘tiny and beautiful’ and saved up to buy one thing as opposed to just buying so many things and then discarding them.

A lot of young Asian Australian designers and creatives look up to you. Do you have any words of wisdom for them?

I see so many talented young Asian designers, and we should be very proud of our genes because it’s the ancient history of what’s behind us. I feel so lucky that I was born Chinese and Italian. The more exotic genes you have, the more capable you are of using what’s inside of you—using what you don’t even know is inside of you.

I think about the Chinese and their silk and how I’ve got such a love of silk. I adore it! I did a project in 2015 with Woolmark where I made a series of knits. The design was of Australian imagery; I used this exquisite wool from Zegna Baruffa, then the knits were made by an artisan company in Hong Kong. So it went full circle: Australian design, going to Italy, made in China. And there I am. That’s me. So what can I say to young people? At my age, it’s time for the young ones to come in and show me what they can do.

You’ve mentioned before that your life motto is to live simply. What does that look like in practice?

I walk everywhere. I live in a humble place made from recycled materials. I get the bus. I get the train. I don’t spend a lot of money. I don’t buy new clothes—well, I’m lucky because Sydney label Romance Was Born give me beautiful things. There’s no big dinner parties that I go to. I don’t wear make-up when I’m at home. I do Dharma, my Buddhist practice, and I live very humbly. I live simply so others may simply live.

We don’t need excess money. Other people need our excess money to live. Why do we need money, money, money? That’s why I’m in retreat right now: because I can’t be part of this money-crazy world. In my life, I went through a time where the money just happened, and perhaps I should have managed it better. But I worked hard and got this beautiful place. It’s a humble place that happens to have a magnificent view; we bought it for nothing.

A little plot of land isn’t going to cost a lot. If you’re creative, then you can build a little house with your creative friends. I know it sounds idealistic, but it’s the way we have to start to live: closer to nature and more sustainably. It’s a requirement if we’re going to survive. But you show me. I’ve done it. You are living in different times, so show me your creativity. I want to be excited and surprised!