FlashBack!
	The Size of the treasure trove came to light only after Mary Lipshut moved her company, Meredith, to spacious new premises in Richmond. “Our old warehouse was on land owned by a property developer who needed our site immediately … and we had to move fast,” the Melbourne fashion veteran recalls. “It was chaos. Boxes were mislabelled or not labelled at all. I didn’t have a clue what was in some of them until I finally started unpacking.”
The boxes filled with two seasons’ worth of Courreges recalled an earlier trauma. Ah, yes: the ill-fated collections hit by the wharfies’ 1972 ban on French goods after the first atomic tests in the Pacific. Then there was the rest – unsold stock, showroom samples, forgotten lay-bys – which had accumulated since the late ‘60s: Missoni, Versace, Pucci, Krizia, Armani and more. A cache of luxury garments, all in mint condition. “I first learned about the worldwide demand for vintage garments from Anna Piaggi and Vern Lambert in the mid-‘70s. On one of his trips to his hometown of Melbourne, Vern came to see me because he wanted a Pucci for Anna. Then he saw a 1966 Missoni and said, “Put these clothes away. They’ll be worth a fortune.”
“Vern was going to sell my collection for me in Europe, but then I stopped hearing from him. Anna told me why when I saw her in Milan soon after, that Vern had suddenly died.” Piaggi, of course, is the Milanese fashion writer whose eccentricities and vintage couture collection are legendary. “Anna met Vern in London,” Lipshut says. “He always said he fell madly in love with her when she walked into his Chelsea antique fashion shop.” For more than 30 years, the world’s fashion capitals have been the stamping grounds of this shrewd entrepreneur who has made her indelible mark on the ragtrade.
“It all started in the early ‘60s when Hall Ludlow (the late Australian couturier) made me a white sharkskin pantsuit. The bottoms were stretch stirrup pants and the top was trimmed with guipure lace – just fabulous,” Lipshut says with a smile. The daughter of Morris Plotkin, the elastic fabric tycoon of the pre-lycra days, she went into business with elder sister, Edith, in 1962. They combined their names to form Meredith and used their father’s fabrics for stretch pants which they called “pantastics”. “At first, we operated from my rumpus room at home,” Lipshut says. Her next move was to import, then manufacture, beaded evening tops from Hong Kong. Major department stores were clients by the time she accompanied her businessman husband, Phillip, on a world trip in 1966. The Myer Emporium decided to capitalise on it.
“They asked me to bring back an international knitwear collection – something from every country I visited,” Lipshut says. Florence stopped her in her tracks. It was the hub of Italian fashion before the exodus to Milan and she was captivated. Back home, reality set in. The reaction to a stunning halter-top with matching flares in emerald and lime lurex, which Emmanuelle Khan had designed for Missoni, was typical, Lipshut says. “Id bought that outfit from Tai Missoni himself, but in Melbourne I was told, ‘You can’t mix these greens. You can’t have a top cut away from the arms like that’.”
Vindication finally came in 1996 when the two-tone dazzler starred in the National Gallery of Victoria’s tribute to 20th-century fashion, Couture to Chaos. The Missoni is one of several French and Italian numbers the NGV has acquired from Lipshut over the years. “I couldn’t convince the stores that fashion was changing, so I opened two adjoining boutiques in South Yarra – Tempo, for the dressier European labels like Genny, Callaghan and Complice, and Sportempo, for Courreges, Italian knitwear and the sportier lines like Gaston Jaunet. “The response was unbelievable and not only from customers. Every fashion editor in town was on my doorstep.” By the mid-‘70s, she had bought out Edith – “she found the fashion industry too demanding” – though her late husband and, increasingly, her sons, Alan, Peter and David, pitched in.
Twin sister Rae Rothfield also joined forces. “Rae came in as a fashion consultant and was brilliant. During her eight years with us, she was responsible for many of Melbourne’s best-dressed women.” Born in Poland, Mary Lipshut was two when she arrived in Australia with her family, 19 when she married the love of her life and changed her destiny. “Phil and I married two months before I was due to sit for my finals, so I never finished my degree,” says the one-time Melbourne University science student who had planned to specialise in bacteriology. The research career which never eventuated is one of her few regrets, though Lipshut has never seen fashion as frivolous. Wholesaler, retailer, designer; she has done it all in a career which also saw her ground-breaking International Department at Myer and Innovation at the old Georges Store. TRANSCRIPT FROM ‘SUNDAY MAGAZINE’ SUNDAY HERALD SUN FEBRUARY 22 1998