Renowned Australian fashion designer Jenny Kee shares her 'godesses' on Creative Types with Virginia Trioli

Australia Broadcast Center

21-04-2025

Jenny Kee side-eyes me from behind those distinctive, red-rimmed glasses and purses her lips.
"Are you going to wear that?" she asks, emphasising "that" in a tone of voice that slices through me, and not for the only time on a several-day shoot for an episode of Creative Types.
Photo shows
On pink background, Virginia Trioli faces side and smiles, with text: Creative Types with Virginia Trioli.
She's dressed in one of her own intricately detailed patterns of bold black and white. I'm in a summer suit of oversized jacket and long shorts, made from pale-grey cool wool by the elegant Sydney designer, Gabriella Pereira.
When you're going to meet and interview one of the most distinctive and era-defining designers of modern times, one who made her multi-coloured, intricately patterned style her trademark, you put a lot of thought into what you're going to wear.
When Jenny Kee is going to look as brilliant as a bird of paradise, what's the point of trying to compete?
For more than half a century, Kee's designs have influenced the Australian fashion scene.
(
Supplied: Aaron Smith
)
The exchange is a good warm-up for the lively combat of the day.
Jenny Kee has always been an opinionated and insistent personality, a rebellious teenager and London runaway before coming home to turn fashion on its head in her long partnership with Linda Jackson.
She's now in her 70s, and says her career is coming to an end, but I see no evidence of that: her creativity seems to be reaching another, brilliant flowering.
We'll get to that but, first, there's a battle of wills to get through.
Jenny leaps on any assumption in any question, correcting errors in the timeline, clarifying history and intention. She's as petite and seemingly frail as a small bird, but she fills with energy and authority on the topic of her life's work.
She admonishes me when I get a fabric wrong — "Not denim! That's linen!" —and interrogates me on my own fashion sense of those times.
Photo shows
Virginia Trioli and Kate Ceberano stand together smiling in a room with art on wall behind them.
In the 1980s, Kate Ceberano was experiencing the wrong kind of recognition: backlash for snide comments she'd made about Kylie Minogue.
Jenny Kee may be in her 70s but I feel I'm confronting the designer at the apex of her abilities.
Nonetheless, an unavoidable softness and, as she says, even humility, has crept over Jenny as she divests herself of a lifetime of collections, and sorts her archive.
I find her approaching the threshold of a life transition that might frighten many but, as a devout Buddhist, not Jenny.
"People are so morbid," she says. "They say they're terrified of dying. I'm not terrified of dying. But you don't need the things with you when you go.
"
I'm in the process of letting go. I don't want to be encumbered when I go into my next life. I am very happy to have less.
"
While Jenny is letting go, the art and design world is receiving her work with open arms.
Jenny and Linda's work now features in a new iteration of the National Gallery of Australia's exhibition series on women artists who should be better known, Know My Name, alongside the avant-garde designer and painter Sonia Delaunay.
And Kee's works continue to be collected by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
Designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson open up on 50 years of fashion, friendship and famous fans.
In conversation off camera, Jenny and I natter about fashion, designers and clothes we love as if we were both still teenagers getting ready to go out.
She is as invigorated by fashion today as she ever was in her youth, as she remakes elaborate new gowns — her "goddesses" — from the reams of exquisite, printed silks she has designed and stored over the years.
They are her children, she says.
"
I love them. I'm so happy and passionate, and I'm so grateful because I'm 78 [and] able to create a child, which I feel like I am.
"
Later in the day, those same keen eyes of hers keep darting looks at my outfit, peering intently at the finely grained wool, and the expert tailoring of my jacket. She finally nods in appreciation: "That's a very well-made suit", she says firmly. "Very lovely." I feel as if I've been given a fashion absolution.
Watch Creative Types with Virginia Trioli: Jenny Kee on Tuesday April 22 at 8.30pm on ABC TV, or stream the whole series now on
.