Inflation 1986: Girls’ Night On the Town

It’s 1986, and Birdie is in her mid twenties. It’s the era of big hair, and big shoulder pads. Never one to hide her light under a bushel, Birdie sports both, with her hair wrapped in a high Madonna-style ponytail, and shoulders clad in a massive leopard print coat. “I loved that coat,” Birdie says. It came from Clarence Chai, an ‘amazing’ shop in Collins St, Melbourne. Her girlfriend Louise made her earrings from black resin and rhinestones. (Big earrings were big then too.)

It’s a girls’ night out on the town, and Birdie is at Inflation nightclub with three friends. Two of them – Zan and Sherine, sisters – were singers in hot bands: Zan in funk-rock band I’m Talking, and Sherine in the seven-piece pop/rock band Big Pig. It was Zan’s big night: she was recording a film clip for the song Trust Me, a current hit – hence the enormous sequinned stars! Her other friend Jasmine, Birdie adds, always sported a great pillbox hat. All are wearing that other Eighties staple: frosty eyeshadow.

Birdie herself was staying at the Regency Hotel with her friend who was a music reporter for the National Times. She was on the road with Cyndi Lauper, so she and Birdie were hanging out in an all-expenses-paid hotel room waiting to chat to Cyndi. Ah, good times. 

The Sartorial Adventures of Edith, Schoolgirl, c. 1926

Many years ago I purchased a handful of packets of old photographs in a store that sold all sorts of ephemera. Snatched from hundreds of family coffers and thrown into an enormous box all higgledy-piggledy are these early twentieth century Australian memories. Yesterday whilst rummaging around in my storage room, I found the album I had stored them in.

This young lady of the 1920s (whom I shall call Edith) has kindly left for posterity documentation of her summer and winter sartorial choices.

Here is Edith on her way to the tennis club, sensibly attired in her calf-length tennis dress, white bobby socks and possibly plimsolls. She has not forgotten her hat to shield her complexion from the harsh Australian sunlight. It promises to be a fine day, and she is determined today to beat Bert hollow! 

A few months later Edith is off for a country stroll with her sweetheart Bert, again coat sensibly belted, with thick stockings under her skirt to keep her warm (and socks under those beige stockings!); a knitted beret covers her bobbed hair. Nor is there any nonsense about her flat mary-janes. Her one concession to fashionable frivolity: gauntlets with enormous embroidered cuffs! The cold snap however does not daunt her good spirits.

And here is Edith once more, far left, with her schoolfriends Betty and Catherine, sitting on a wicker couch on her back porch. They are all school prefects together, and quite grown up now. Despite the uniformity of their school dress, and the fact they all wear a bob, they manage to keep a point of difference: Edith sweeps her fringe to one side, Betty lifts her bob with a few curls, and Cathy keeps her bangs quite straight. They are going to be friends forever!

Not Made For Wallflowers

Birdie is 19 here in 1980, nonchalantly holding up a brick wall in her shiny stretch lycra leggings. This is how leggings were worn the first time around! None of these demure hotpants or miniskirts on top like girls wear today; they were for fearless fashionistas. Not for wallflowers.

A long shirt or sweater was permissible though. Birdie tells me this purple and black, striped see-through shirt was from Blonde Venus (still open for business today on Crossley St, down the lane from Melbourne’s iconic Pellegrini’s).

Ankle boots were huge in the Eighties. I particularly remember white leather ones with little cutouts; and short suede pixie boots with the tops folded down. They came in bright jewel colours and I had a pair in jade green. These metallic gold winklepickers were Birdie’s favourite. She says everyone stared at those – as well they might!

The Blue Angels

Although these days I moonlight as winged creatures of various sorts only on these pages, there was a favourite dress from my childhood that I always thought of as my ‘angel’ dress. When I lifted my arms, the short sleeves would fall like little wings. I loved it.

Pale Alice blue with white piping, I thought I was so special whenever I wore it, which was often as possible.

Here I am with my sisters and my niece, all of us together frocked in blue … a veritable flock of angels! Navy, stripes, denim, and sprigs of flowers – they’re all there in their 70s glory.

What is even funnier in an earlier photo in this series, is that I was clothed quite differently (although still in blue). I must have foreseen the photo op, and gone quickly to change into my favourite dress.

Here I am wearing a favourite, and faded, Abba t-shirt, and a cotton skirt trimmed with a flounce. I remember the pale blue, white and grey floral print so well. I am even wearing blue bobbles in my hair.

I love this candid photo, from my sister Lily giving Blossom rabbit ears; my own observation of this same event as I swing from a pole; the blue VW in the driveway; the totem tennis pole in the foreground; even my sister Star just visible through the flyscreen watching through my bedroom window.

Poses With Posies

This is my sister Star and me way back in the Seventies. We are in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens on a family outing. Dad was always accompanied by his camera on these excursions and enjoyed taking photos of us standing in front of the local flora. (And fauna when it was available.)

I have to admit I was a bit of a tomboy when I was young: I enjoyed climbing trees and rooves (garages, houses – whatever I could access) and tearing around barefoot. Why walk when you can run? However, that hairstyle was NOT of my choosing. One of my aunts did that to me. I very much disliked the fact that I looked like a boy – ludicrously dressed in a green frock in this instance.

I AM highly amused, though,
by the way I am posing here…

I AM highly amused, though, by the way I am posing here, imitating a fashion model and displaying the sprigged pattern of my dress! I must have felt it deserved particular attention.

I am also enjoying Star’s combination of floral print skirt with photographic print tee. You could totally wear that now with nonchalant cool.

Below, a page out of summers past:

The gum’s all yellowed, and the prints are charmingly stuck down with no care for straight lines, but the sunshiny happiness of my childhood rises as I flip the pages of the family album.