Chanel 去悉尼之前，澳大利亚印花早已登上它的 T 台

November 3, 2026

Model Pat Cleveland walks in the Chanel Spring 1982 Ready to Wear Runway Show on October 19, 1981, in Paris, France. (Photo by Guy Marineau/Penske Media via Getty Images)Penske Media/Getty Images

It's everything that anyone who loves fashion Down Under can talk about right now: when Matthieu Blazy brings his resort collection to Sydney this November, it will be the first time Chanel has ever shown in Australia.

What relatively few people know, however, is that this landmark moment will not, by a long shot, be the first time Australia has shown in Chanel.

That moment happened 44 years ago, on October 18, 1982, at the Louvre in Paris. Halfway through a Chanel show that, until then, had been dominated by powerfully pastel and friskily high-hemmed interpretations of Coco Chanel’s canonical bouclé suit, something never before seen began to appear on the models who walked out in front of a line of Chanel-branded wardrobes.

It was a print, mostly on white, but sometimes on black, composed of an apparently haphazard accumulation of shapes. Their interiors were fractured into visually immersive pools and veins of cobalt, scarlet, yellow and blue. This pattern appeared first in flashes, then took over entire dresses, as well as jackets, bags, shoes and more. And then, on one white background ruffle-detailed dress, the apparent abstraction resolved itself into something very tangible: across a model’s torso ran the unmistakable outline of Australia.

The print was the creation of the then-35-year-old Bondi-born fashion trailblazer Jenny Kee, who is of Chinese, Italian and English heritage, and deeply Australian in sensibility. Kee has been acknowledged in the past—not least, and quite rightly, by herself—as the author of the prints Chanel used that season. In 1983, the year of Coco Chanel’s centenary, the house presented, through Vogue Australia, a Chanel suit featuring Kee’s Opal print in the lining and lapels to the National Gallery of Victoria, where it is displayed online with full and correct attribution.

Yet the story of how an Australian designer came to play a key role in a Chanel collection that, despite being largely forgotten, was one of the most significant in its entire history has, until now, never been fully told. Fashion moves fast and always faces forward; unless preserved, details will fall away as freely as loosely applied sequins from a dress in motion.

Back in 1982, I was living with my mother in the Blue Mountains, where Kee was a neighbour and close family friend. Her brush with Chanel was probably the first fashion story I ever encountered. So, to mark Blazy’s arrival in Sydney, I decided to try to piece it back together and, in the process, discovered a few details even Kee herself was unaware of. As she said when I called her at home up in the mountains this October: “Darl, I had no bloody idea!”

Unlocking the circumstances behind Kee’s cameo for Chanel takes us first to London, where, by 1968, she was living. That December, she appeared naked on the cover of Oz magazine—edited by my late uncle Richard Neville—while working with fellow Australian Vernon Lambert, the visionary vintage dealer whose stall at the Chelsea Antique Market on the King’s Road was helping to rewrite the rules of fashion. Lambert was Kee’s mentor, and when she returned to Australia in 1972, she was ready to start something new.

She opened the Flamingo Park Frock Salon in Sydney’s Strand Arcade and, together with Linda Jackson, began building a fashion language whose point of reference was Australia itself: its opals, native flowers, fauna, bushfires, rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef. “We were doing a completely Australian beauty,” she says. “We were so fresh and so completely pure and so in love with Australia. We were devoted to our country and making beauty of it.”

When Kee and Jackson took that work to Milan in 1977, it caused a sensation. Kee remembers arriving at a party thrown by the Italian stylist and publicist Nally Bellati: “Linda and I walked in and, honestly and truly, they all started jumping on the tables and clapping us, because they’d never seen anything like it,” Kee recalls.

Among those who applauded was Anna Piaggi, the Italian fashion editor who happened to be another one of Lambert’s protégées. In a 1977 issue of Vogue Italia, Piaggi dedicated a double-page spread to Kee and Jackson’s designs under the headline: ‘Fashion arrived from another hemisphere.’ “Anna was bedazzled by what Linda and I were doing back in Australia,” says Kee. The article was accompanied by a sketch of Piaggi wearing Kee’s wool designs—it was drawn by Karl Lagerfeld.

Piaggi and Lambert were extremely close to Lagerfeld, who was inspired by Lambert’s habit of always carrying a vintage fan and regularly drew the elaborate outfits Piaggi assembled each day. Kee was entering a tight creative orbit whose members were already constantly looking at, wearing and exchanging one another’s discoveries. In 1977, Kee and her 22-month-old daughter Grace—my oldest friend—were also on a train between Sydney and the Blue Mountains that crashed, killing 83 of their fellow passengers. During their recovery from that neardeath experience, Kee was inspired to sketch Opal and several of her other most famous designs.

Back in Milan in 1980, Kee remembers showing these designs at the home of Piaggi and Lambert, with Manolo Blahnik also present. Lambert then introduced her to Fabio Bellotti of Rainbow Fabrics in Milan. As Kee’s graphics became too detailed and elaborate to realise in knitwear alone, Bellotti—who had long worked with designers including Giorgio Armani and Lagerfeld—was the perfect partner for transferring those designs into print.

One of those designs was Opal. Developed around the shimmering colours and fractured structures of the Australian gemstone, it became central to Kee and Jackson’s 1981 Flaming Opal collection. This was the print that eventually caught Lagerfeld’s eye one day when he was in the Rainbow Fabrics office looking for fabrics for a very important new collection.

Daniela Morera, Bellotti’s wife, remembers Lagerfeld encountering Kee’s samples through her husband. “Karl fell in love,” she says of the Opal design. Like Kee, she also suggests that Piaggi and Lambert may have helped draw Lagerfeld’s attention to her work.

Kee remembers what happened next very clearly. Bellotti called her in Australia to say Lagerfeld wanted to use the print for Chanel. She immediately agreed. “Apparently, when Karl saw Opal, that’s when he went, ‘Bingo, I want that,’” she says. “And then he proceeded to do it in 65 different ways.”

Which leads us back to the Louvre.

By October 1982, Chanel itself was in transition. The house had launched ready-to-wear under Philippe Guibourgé in 1978, but its owner, Alain Wertheimer, was already looking for a designer who could rejuvenate a fashion image that had become dusty and out of touch following the death of Coco Chanel in 1971 and amid the emergence of the Japanese new wave and homegrown upstarts such as Jean Paul Gaultier. Wertheimer’s eye settled on Lagerfeld and, in September 1982, Chanel announced that Lagerfeld would become its designer of couture, starting in January 1983. According to MarieLouise de Clermont-Tonnerre, then a senior Chanel communications executive, Lagerfeld ghost-designed the October 1982 collection, with Hervé Léger and Eva Campocasso—previously both assistants of Lagerfeld at Fendi and Chloé respectively—serving as its public-facing designers as his contract with Chloé wound down.

This subterfuge was only casually maintained. Writing in The New York Times on the day of the show, Bernadine Morris reported: “Merely a whisper of a Karl Lagerfeld connection was enough to bring out the crowds and the tension … it has been rumoured that he had something to do with the ready-to-wear presented this morning as part of the spring and summer showings here … The Lagerfeld touch seems apparent in the pearl earrings in the shape of the numbers 5 and 19, both names of Chanel perfumes. For the rest, no-one is saying just how much he did. ‘Consultant’ is as far as his friends will go.”

Back in Blackheath, Kee had no idea any of this was happening. When I tell her that the Chanel collection in which her Opal print appeared was, in effect, Lagerfeld’s covert first act for the house, she laughs. “Darl, I had no bloody idea!” Then, delighted: “I love the fact he was ghosting it. It makes it even more interesting—and it means that my print played a part in his first-ever work for Chanel.”

I also show her a picture from a misdated cache of runway images that appears to show a second Kee print, Mali Oz, on the Chanel runway in a dress and handbag worn with an Opal jacket. Kee is astonished. “I’ve never seen that before!” she says. The National Gallery of Australia records that Chanel also used Kee’s Mali Oz fabric.

Whatever the details, Kee’s role also hints at Lagerfeld’s larger creative project: keeping the codes of Chanel intact while applying startling points of difference to push them into another register. “He thought, I’ll just do something really outrageous here,” Kee says, remembering the collision of her print with “that pale pink, old-fashioned Chanel”.

The result changed Kee’s life. “It helped me enormously,” she says. “In that one year, 1982, I was showing at Chanel, and a few months earlier Princess Di was wearing my koala jumper. So those two moments really helped set me on the road. I’m eternally grateful to Chanel and Karl, to Fabio and Daniela, to Anna and Vern. One way or another, they all helped lift me up.”

The Kee Chanel connection was well reported in Australia at the time, and cemented by the Vogue Australia-facilitated Chanel x Kee donation to the NGV. Outside of Australia, however, the strongest contemporary credit to Kee was delivered by another old friend, photographer Bill Cunningham, who dedicated one of his New York Times pages in August 1984 to Kee’s designs for Chanel citing her prominently. One of his photographs was of then Chanel American president Kitty D’Alessio wearing a Kee/Lagerfeld/Chanel spring/summer ’83 jacket. The page features Kee’s Opal and Mali Oz prints on Chanel pieces.

Nearly half a century later, Chanel is finally touching down in the country that inspired the prints in the first collection Lagerfeld created as he set the house towards its current position at the pinnacle of fashion. Kee is a huge fan of Blazy. “I love his work,” she says. “He’s really standing up to Karl and doing his own thing now.” Coming from Kee—a woman who has spent her very big life doing her very unique thing—that is high praise indeed.

This story appears in Vogue Australia’s November 2026 issue, on sale from November 2.