Fashion legend Jenny Kee interpreted the Australian landscape in an unapologetic way – and it made her famous around the world.

From her waratah dresses to a princess-worthy ‘Koala’ jumper, Jenny’s unique designs are a tribute to the environment and her drive to be different. “I never wanted to look like anyone else,” Jenny says.

One-of-a-kind style

At 76 years old, the designer remains famous for her bright, vivacious imagery celebrating our flora and fauna. Recognised as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2018 for her contribution to fashion, Jenny’s one-of-a-kind style has also turned heads around the world: when Princess Di wore her ‘Koala’ jumper at a polo match in 1982, it became an international media sensation. Karl Lagerfeld paid tribute to Kee’s Opal print in his first Chanel collection. Her work has featured in the pages of Italian Vogue and Vanity Fair and among displays at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and Tokyo's Morimura Museum. The opening ceremony at the 2000 Sydney Olympics served as a dazzling runway for her costumes, too.

Jenny’s effervescent style was cultivated early on in life. Growing up in Sydney’s Bondi in the 1950s, she experienced prejudice about the way she looked, but decided to overpower this by adopting a bold personality. “I was determined that people were going to be mesmerised [by] this larger-than-life, loud person,” she says.

Jenny embraced her parents’ heritage – her father’s Chinese background and mum’s Italian-British roots – at full volume, too. That meant rebelling against the bland lessons of design school and celebrating her mum’s style (“she was the complete fashionista”) and her aunties’ skills as couture sewers. (Jenny recently honoured her Auntie Una and Auntie Marge at a Sydney Festival installation this year: they were presented in giant, inflatable form and decorated in the designer’s signature ultra-busy style.) 

It also meant tapping into her Asian roots: her first fashion parade took place in Chinatown, in 1974. The location? Hingara, a restaurant where she often ate with her family. Attendees were first treated to dumplings and other dishes. “Then off came the tablecloths and then it became the catwalk,” she says. A dress featuring the recently opened Sydney Opera House was a highlight. The event was a massive PR coup for Flamingo Park, the fashion salon Jenny ran with fellow designer Linda Jackson at The Strand Arcade. “Flamingo Park was on the radar after that show.”

Stepping into paradise

Jenny and Linda’s longstanding collaboration – and decades-spanning friendship – was the focus of ‘Step Into Paradise’, a 2019 exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, and a documentary of the same name, which debuted in 2021. The name refers to a sign at their Flamingo Park door: ‘Step Into Paradise’ aptly captured the wild, bright wonders inside. Their first winter collection was a runaway hit: pure-wool knits that unapologetically celebrated Australian nature, featuring koalas, kangaroos and kookaburras. “Took about two weeks to make and five minutes to sell,” Jenny says. “Australia was ready and proud and nationalistic at that time. We were creating clothing that was coming from out of this country and those knits really personified that.”

Decades on and the Australian landscape still dominates Jenny’s designs, which she now works on from a studio on her property in the Blue Mountains. We made the 90-minute drive west of Sydney in the Mercedes-Benz GLB and discovered a breathtaking retreat full of the bush motifs that appears in many of her designs.

The red spiky waratahs that have long featured on her dresses appear in the thousands on her property in spring. “The waratah, she just rises like a phoenix out of the ashes. I always feel like she’s my symbol and her passion and her strength is a testament to how I feel as a person,” says Jenny.

The Australian landscape has also inspired her environmental activism; the designer took part in a protest in 1989 for old-growth forests being logged for wood chips, and used her famous ‘Koala’ jumper to raise funds for bushfire-affected animals in 2020.

“I couldn’t love nature and be inspired by nature without wanting to fight the fight,” she says. “When you live in this environment and you put koalas on your knits, obviously you’re going to fight for their survival.”

Like the waratahs, Jenny still thrives – five decades on. She is currently working on her archive and her work features in the exhibition ‘Australiana: Designing a Nation’, which opens at Bendigo Art Gallery in March. She sees a parallel between the aforementioned native flower and how resilient it can be. “She rises so tall after a fire,” the designer says. And it endures as her muse. “Jen, that’s why you’re still making waratah dresses,” she tells herself.

By Lee Tran Lam