Wild at heart: Jenny Kee shares her final showstopper dress with Vogue

The irrepressible Jenny Kee, who exploded onto the Australian fashion scene in the 1970s, has created her final showstopper dress. She reflects how a creation can capture a life’s memories. 

The irrepressible Jenny Kee, who exploded onto the Australian fashion scene in the 1970s, has created her final showstopper dress. She reflects how a creation can capture a life’s memories. 

As you might guess from her lysergic, frenetically patterned prints, relaxation doesn’t come naturally to Jenny Kee. But it wasn’t until recent months at the age of 76 that she began to contemplate life at a slower pace.

“I can’t get too excited [about work], or I’ll get exhausted,” she caveats on a call from Blackheath, the town in New South Wales’s Blue Mountains where she’s lived for almost 50 years. Anyone who knows the breadth and length of her career will know little would stop Kee.

Sharing a brand-new piece she considers “a self-portrait” of her creative life, she says it will be the last of her dramatic art-meets-fashion dresses as she enters a reflective phase. “I’m not going to create those pieces again. I’m growing older, it’s very beautiful ... I like to feel like I’m leaving behind my legacy [in] my body of work.” From living in 1960s London to meeting collaborator Linda Jackson on her return to Australia, to designing knitwear worn by Princess Diana, Kee has relied on intuition. Her new creation coincides with preparations to sell a large share of her work to museums across Australia, and this new creative endeavour marks a capstone on an era of creativity. “Is there a right time for anything? It’s passion that drives me,” she says decisively.

Both passion and experience shine through in Kee’s Kali Waratah gown, a wearable art piece that comprises of a fascinator and dress with pleats, evoking the native bush flower. The bright colours and structured shape nod to her historic works, like the Earth First scarf and phantasmagorical wattle knits that channel Australian flora and fauna, and the Kali dress itself took six months to craft. “I feel like I’ve had a second coming since having that wonderful time with Linda, which was 50 years ago,” she remembers. 

“There was this amazing fire that came right to the door of my property, and that was such an awakening for me”

The Kali Waratah Gown. Photographed by Joshua Bentley. Styled by Harriet Crawford.

But aside from the waratah, the most obvious visual reference here are flames. Kali shares its name with the Hindu Goddess of Fire, and Kee reveals that the piece was informed by her experience with bushfires, which present a danger in summer. “In 1982, there was this amazing fire that came right to the door of my property, and that was such an awakening for me,” she recalls. “Out of observing the terror of fire, but also ... the beauty of fire.”

Most see terror in blazes, but Kee became enamoured with the regenerative process that starts when the inferno departs and plants bloom again. The prehistoric waratah, which dates back millions of years, often rebounds first in charred landscapes, and to Kee, they symbolise resilience and strength. “I call them ‘creatures in nature’. I used to just sit in the bush and be with them; they were my meditation, they calmed my troubles,” she recalls. 

“Is there a right time for anything? It’s passion that drives me”

Kee’s forthcoming archive release is another reason for this nostalgia. While Kee can’t yet share the details of which local museums will be acquiring her many personal pieces, she can reveal that she’s parting with some of her dearest knits and silks. In her words, museums “very particular with what they like, but it’s me who has to curate it”.

Kee on the runway at Iordanes Spyridon Gogos in 2022. Image credit: GoRunway.com

While working, she was reminded of designing for the Sydney 2000 Olympics Opening Ceremony, where she was tasked with channelling the visuals of Africa and the Americas, doing so through similarly effervescent patterned dresses and costumes. “Working on those costumes was the highlight of my life,” she shares, adding that the colours she was instructed to work with were red and black—a parallel with the red of the waratah, and the ashy black charring of burned trees. “There was a complete higher power involved,” Kee muses wistfully.

Working alongside milliner Chloe Simcox during the Olympics added to the magic of her experience. Now, 23 years later, Kee consulted with Simcox to make the headpiece that accompanies her Kali dress and discovered she had archived rolls of the fabric Kee used for her Olympic gowns. These were then naturally woven into the composition of the dress as a nod to the past. “She’s the technical and brilliant extension of my hand—I can’t say anything about her that isn’t poetry,” she says. Kee may be contemplating life in a slower lane, but the fire inside her will always be alight. 

This article originally appeared in Vogue’s October 2023 issue, on sale now. 

Originally published as Wild at heart: Jenny Kee shares her final showstopper dress with Vogue