Second Hand Rose

On Barbie Fashion, Vintage Style, Australian Designers & Liberty Scarves

Downtown

Laura Brown

’s recent treatise on early fashion obsession stirrings inspired me to reflect on my own fascination with the world of beautiful clothing.

I recalled talking about clothes with my daughter’s best friend Pia, aged 11, many years ago, and her telling me she was ‘really getting into labels’. Oh like who? I enquired. She proudly told me Dotti (a bargain fashion franchise) was her favourite. As one of the few fashion forward retailers I could afford, I had to concur they were pretty good. She wanted to know what designers I loved, and I had to tell her that I pretty much only wore hand-me-downs, second-hand or vintage clothes. She thought that was pretty weird.

All the designer labels that I coveted were long dead and gone. But I could flick through a rack of vintage clothes at lightning speed and identify a dress by House of Merivale (who made ‘modern clothes for people with a zest for life’), John J Hilton (who had the winning motto on their labels ‘It’s A Honey, Its A Hilton!’) or Tullo anywhere. The superior style, cut and fabrics of dresses bearing these labels would always stand out from the crowd.

House of Merivale - with its men’s label offshoot Mr John - was THE cutting edge Swinging London inspired youth fashion label in the 60s and 70s - and the first store to sell miniskirts in Australia. As much a destination as a fashion house stocking all the hip young designers like Tullo alongside their own brand, young people would line up to get into their groovy stores in Sydney and Melbourne, with pop hits blasting, incense burning, curated makeup and art selections, even a Thai tea cafe in one of their three Sydney stores. Young Chrissy Amphlett was a salesgirl there (and a laneway where she used to watch the buskers in her lunch breaks was named Amphlett Lane in 2014). In her memoir ‘Pleasure & Pain’, Chrissy called it ‘Melbourne’s most out there fashion emporium, a place for the most fashionable girls to work and shop’ and described all the salesgirls having to line up in the mornings so that Mr John could inspect them for requisite amazingness, sergeant-major style. When I was a teenager, and Chrissy visited our house for costume fittings with my mum Mouse (a seamstress), we bonded over a slinky green paisley Merivale nylon wiggle dress I was wearing that I’d found in an op shop (thrift store for my American readers). Sadly, as with most of my beloved vintage collection, I wore it to death, or until the seams ripped apart and it was no longer even salvageable with patches or darning by my lovely mother, from whom I inherited my love of beautifully made clothes, and who still patches and repairs the dresses I somehow always manage to destroy. But it did start a private obsession with finding more Merivale fashion. Muriel’s Wedding producer Lynda House later gave me a few of her treasured Merivale minis. They were gorgeous but VERY MINI! I destroyed them too.

Merivale & John Hemmes and their creations - look at those go go boots, I want them all!

Veruschka in Tullo

Born in Budapest, Gyula Heitler, aged 32 was rounded up by Nazis and narrowly escaped Auschwitz. His friend had hidden tools and they were able to remove enough of the wooden floor from the wagon they were loaded into to make a getaway. He and his brother Emil ended up in Australia, sponsored by Olympia Fashions, a Sydney dress shop. He changed his name and became John J Hilton, one of Australia’s most popular designers in the 1970s, exporting around the world to Paris, New York and London, and pioneering exports to Japan and the use of wool in his dresses. I have owned a sizeable collection of Hiltons in my day, though I think I wore them all til they fell apart at the seams too.

It's A Honey It's A Hilton! Look at the gorgeous detail in that aqua number.

In the mid 2000s, a couple of girlfriends and I started a short lived vintage clothing ‘home shopping experience’ business, like a Tupperware party for dresses. We called ourselves The Ladies Collective (TLC for short) and we’d turn up at our hosts’ houses in a car laden to the hilt, dressed to the nines hauling suitcases full of beautiful vintage fashion, jewellery and homewares that we’d set up in their living rooms. Champagne and canapés were served, and we’d help the attendees find the perfect fit. Unfortunately our exquisite taste in vintage finery was far more refined than our business acumen and we worked our asses off for around a year while barely making a cent. But we did make it into two issues of Shop Til You Drop magazine and end up almalgamating all the gorgeous leftover stock into our personal wardrobes, because why wouldn’t we?

We started our business with an incredible stroke of luck after going to a garage sale in Paddington that turned out to be a deceased estate sale of an elderly fashion obsessive. Alina had been a desperately poor Hungarian refugee, sent to Australia by boat, by herself, as a teenager in the late 60s, in the hope she could make a better life for herself. Amazingly, she met and marrried a millionaire and went on to purchase everything her heart ever desired. Rooms in this crumbling mansion were jam packed with what were once the latest fashions, strewn around in mountainous piles. Sadly, much of the stunning clothing had succumbed to age, time and moths, and was stained, dirty and in a state of general disrepair. We offered our services to her very overwhelmed husband to take care of dealing with her wardrobe in return for a cheap deal on what we liked and could sell and he gratefully agreed. The three of us spent days there, filling garbage bags with ruined-once-divine dresses from Biba and Merivale and David Jones pants suits and lingerie and most heartbreakingly, about 400 pairs of expensive shoes and boots in my size. Her experience with utter poverty had made her so paranoid that people would try to steal her gorgeous covetable collection that she had a batshit crazy solution of keeping one shoe from each pair inside the house, and the other shoe outside in the garage, so they would be harder to rob. Every inside shoe was buttery soft and perfect and every matching one that she’d kept in the garage was completely beyond rescue from mould.

The Ladies Collective in action

I suspect I can blame my love for a beautifully cut and detailed dress on vintage Barbie. Our family friend Adrienne gave me her childhood Barbie collection from the 50s and 60s and I would get lost in dressing and undressing Barbies for imaginary wild parties, jobs and events for days on end, marvelling over the tiny gold metal zippers and slip on stilettos, pin-tucked town dresses and satin evening wear. I can easily trace my love of a long floral cotton peasant dress to Barbie. I had a Donny Osmond doll to be the ‘man Barbie’ to be the ‘date’ that was occasionally required for my hot posse of fashion vixens. Sadly this fabulous collection also succumbed to mould and ended up in the trash. I kept one modern Barbie that I later called ‘Junkie Barbie’ due to her defective eye and general dishevelled appearance.

I remember loving all these Barbie outfits and dreaming of human sized versions

When I was little, I used to beg my friend Gilda’s mum to get out her collection of Liberty scarves just so I could stroke them and admire the exquisite feel, patterns and colours. I’m excited now to have found Saloon Design House, a modern Australian label that takes all the elements of vintage style I love and adds their own distinctive touch, all in Liberty fabrics. This Saloon dress I’m sporting below reminds me of the red Barbie dress above that was my very favourite. It’s cut impeccably and fits like a dream.

I still wear mainly hand-me-downs, second-hand and vintage, still dream of human sized Barbie dresses and owning a floral silk Liberty scarf. And anything by John J Hilton, House of Merivale or Tullo. If you ever stumble across any cheap in an op-shop please buy for me and I’ll pay you back! x

Dressed by Saloon Design House and Liberty fabric

NB: For further info on great Australian designers, see fashion historian Nicole Jenkins’ lovingly researched blog Circa Vintage Clothing and you can attend her talk on both Tullo and Merivale at Glen Eira Library in Melbourne via Zoom here.