In Living colour

When Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson met, the connection was instant. They’ve stood by each other through weddings, funerals, fires and near-fatal disasters. And on the way, writes Samantha Trenoweth, they’ve changed Australian fashion, and each other.

Jenny Kee had a cold. It was a bitter Sunday morning in the winter of 1973 and she would much rather have stayed in bed but a friend had called to tell her about a young Melbourne designer, Linda Jackson, who was in Sydney just for the weekend, showing a collection of her clothes at the ultra-chic Bonython Gallery. Jenny was about to open Flamingo Park – a frock shop like no other – and was on the lookout for mind-blowing designers. It was her lucky day.

“Half an hour later,” she remembers, still a little breathlessly, “I was at the gallery, stopped in my tracks by a row of ’50s Hawaiian print skirts with matching bra tops. I knew that this girl and I were on the same wavelength.

“Then I saw Linda: her perfect sharp, chiselled features and huge, intense eyes that darted like a currawong’s; her hair that flowed Titian-red, curly and thick. She was beautiful and petite and measured. You know me – I’m a big, cackling kookaburra – but Linda commands respect in a very quiet way, and I was intrigued by that. Our eyes met and in that split second we both knew this was the beginning of something big.”

Indeed it was. Between them, Linda and Jenny were about to reinvent – some would say invent – Australian fashion, and begin a friendship that would see them through the dizzy triumphs of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and some devastating personal trials.