‘This one’s a good shape for you,’ she says, pointing at the illustration on the front. ‘A little puff sleeve, that high collar, coming in at the waist, the flare in the skirt. Mm.’ She nods, as if giving some serious advice. ‘For your first dress, Lucy-Lu, I think it’s fine. I’ll give you the name of a fabric shop in town – tell them I sent you and say you need a Christmassy fabric.’
Lucy takes the pattern. It looks like it’s written in a foreign language but she’s determined to give it a try. Plus she can probably ask Daphne for help if she needs it.
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘How much does it cost?’
Daphne waves a hand. ‘On me. Consider it a contribution to your brilliant career.’
Lucy blushes. She’s not sure how brilliant she’s going to be but she’s touched that Daphne thinks she might be.
Then she checks her watch and sees it’s seven minutes until the end of lunch and she hasn’t eaten her sandwich yet. She can’t eat in class because that will get her a detention, which would mean missing work, and that would set up a whole chain of consequences that she doesn’t want to contemplate.
‘I have to go,’ she says.
Daphne pats her shoulder. ‘Off you run, love.’
‘See you soon!’ Lucy calls as she scoots out of the shop.
She crosses Military Road against the lights, pulls her sandwich from her bag and stuffs half of it in her mouth as she runs in the school gates.
She’ll go into the city on Saturday and find her fabric. Maybe Poppy will come with her – she always likes going into town. And then Lucy can start making her very first dress.
Maybe her last too, if it’s a disaster. But she can’twait. A dress. Her own dress. She’s going to make something for the very first time.
THE
1960s MOSS-GREEN PANTSUIT
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.
The teenage girl, who asked her mother if she could borrow her sewing machine, had found this pattern in a local haberdashery and decided it would be her first attempt at making clothes. She wanted a pantsuit as in 1967 they were all the rage, even if it was potentially a too-sophisticated look for a girl of her age. But she thought that if it didn’t look right on her, her mother might wear it. They were the same height and around the same weight. Very definitely the same shape – tall and lean.
‘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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the six weeks since she came home, Christina has watched as the flowers have bloomed and the days have lengthened, the light becoming more golden. Sydney spring light, holding so much promise. Los Angeles light is different – harder-edged, somehow. Or maybe that’s just how it seems in her memory.
She’s wearing some capri pants that she last wore when she was a teenager – her mother pulled them out of a wardrobe somewhere. Christina left her summery clothes behind in her Los Angeles home, thinking she wouldn’t be gone that long. Just long enough for things to blow over. It turns out there’s no fixed time for that.
A pot of tea is on the table next to her, and her favourite cup is half full of cooling liquid. She’s dragged the phone over from its spot next to the sofa – thankfully her mum has a long cord for it – and is talking to her agent at the end of his day and the start of hers.