The 1960s Moss-Green Pantsuit
THE
The pantsuit started life as a pattern. It had a Peter Pan collar joined by one button, then two more below it.
The collar was wide enough to show the wearer’s clavicles and high enough to be modest. There was a seam beneath the third button and flaps for fake pockets toward the sides.
After the third button the sides of the top sloped away from each other to a rounded edge. The sleeves ended above the wrist.
The pants themselves could have been modelled on jodhpurs, although with less fabric in the thigh. They would appear fitted on even the most slender woman, and with the taper at the ankle they gave the leg a nice line. The pants too had a visible seam, running down the front of each leg.
‘You could be sisters!’ the girl’s grandmother liked to say. They didn’t get their shape from her: she was shorter and rounder.
The moss-green fabric the girl wanted to use wasn’t cheap.
It was a shantung silk, and her mother expressed surprise that her first attempt at sewing anything would be on something so expensive.
The surprise turned into an insistence that the girl make a calico version of the suit first rather than risk ruining the silk.
She did, and it was so good that her mother couldn’t help but be impressed. The girl was happy that she’d managed to please her mother, who gave praise sparingly – just the way her own father did.
The girl followed the pattern diligently, occasionally asking her mother questions, which brought them closer for a time.
When she was finished, she had a gloriously green pantsuit that fitted her perfectly and looked far too old for her sixteen years.
She had nowhere to wear it, for one thing.
Her life was school and tennis and the beach.
‘Perhaps a dress instead,’ her mother said. ‘I’ll find you a Mary Quant pattern.’
The girl gave the pantsuit to her mother, who wore it often, which was the only sign the girl had that her mother thought she’d done a good job.
As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the pantsuit fell out of fashion as clothes tend to do.
The girl kept sewing, moving from patterns to her own designs.
She left home, started working for established designers, then branched out on her own with a little boutique in Crows Nest. It was only the start of things.
When her parents moved from their house into an apartment, her mother purged her wardrobe and the pantsuit with it. Into the charity bin went decades of sartorial history.
No one knows that the anonymously made moss-green shantung silk pantsuit – so old-fashioned, apparently, that it’s been on the rack at the charity shop for longer than it should – is actually the first work of one of Australia’s most famous designers.