Flamingo Park – Circa Vintage Clothing

Hi all,

I’m really enjoying going through the archive, uncovering or rediscovering treasures. One of the latter is this 1980 handknit jumper/dress by Jan Ayres for Jenny Kee’s Flamingo Park label.

I spent a chunk of my childhood in McMahon’s Point, the shadow of Sydney’s Luna Park, and family mythology even has a catastrophic event happening there in the ’70s, so this was a particularly resonant find to uncover this week.

It was part of the original stock buy that started Circa: when I bought the contents of Glebe, Sydney vintage clothing shop ‘Albert and Gladys’ (a shop I had managed during the ’80s), this was one of the pieces that we packed up and shipped south to Melbourne in 2004. And it lay hidden for many years as I sorted and sold the vintage. It appeared again in about 2010, to my great delight – but was then packed away again. A downside of having too much vintage to manage.

It was a wonderful surprise to see again, and document it so that I won’t mislay it again. My collection is an everyday fashion collection, telling stories of ordinary people and their lives, but there are a few museum-worthy pieces and this is one.

Flamingo Park, and the designs of Jenny and Linda Jackson, was the focus of a wonderful exhibition in 2019-2020 at the Powerhouse Museum called ‘Step Into Paradise’: I was lucky to catch it just before we started to go into the pandemic, and here’s a photo of the Powerhouse’s Luna Park dress that was on display. It has a darker blue background than mine!

ABC iview has a short film on the label, you can see it here.

During the 1970s, Jenny collaborated with Jan Ayres to produce a series of spectacular hand-knits: here’s another in the exhibition, inspired by Matisse’s ‘The Snail’ 1953, (the original collage lives in London’s Tate Modern).

I’m not sure where Penny, Albert and Glady’s owner sourced the jumper originally, but it’s likely that it came via an op shop: Penny would source a lot of her stock this way, back in the years when it wasn’t unusual to find amazing things on the racks.

But great finds are still out there, and this is why I love to shop second-hand – you just don’t know what will turn up, they truly are like Aladdin’s caves of random, hidden delights.

Meanwhile, tomorrow (Thursday May 1st) is the last day for Circa’s pop-up sale and so we’re marking everything down to half price – some tickets for the morning are still available or you can just walk in at 12noon and have your pick. We’ll close at 1pm but you can keep shopping if you get there before then.

Thank you to everyone who’s been helping me document my collection – and to everyone who’s popped by to North Melbourne and found something to smile about. It’s funding my research into Australian fashion history and enables me to keep doing what I love.

Nicole