desihner

Paula Stafford and her baby son Michael, ca. 1948

from State Library of Queensland

• Vesna Verencevic said:

  Paula Stafford was born in Willaura, Country Victoria, in 1921. She moved into Melbourne City at thirteen years of age to attend school. Originally, she wanted to be an architect. However, her teacher advised her to consider a more ‘feminine’ line of work. Paula had always enjoyed making clothes for her dolls, and herself, so she went on to receive Diploma in Fashion Design at Melbourne Technical College. Paula moved to Queensland in 1939, stationed as an army nurse in Toowoomba during World War II. It was there she met her husband Beverly. He was a Gold Coast local, so in 1943 when the two wed, they returned to the coast to live in an old kiosk on Main Beach. By 1948, Paula and Bev had four children – Frances, Susan, Sibyl, and Michael – and were running a beach-hire service, renting umbrellas and surf floats. They relocated and built a house on Cavill Avenue, Surfers Paradise, in 1949. Frenchman Louis Rèard is widely credited with inventing the skimpy bikini in 1946. However, Paula had been cutting swimsuits in half for herself since 1936 for comfort and calling it a two-piece. She wore her sliced bathers to the beach and made some for her daughters too. Tourists and locals, who would frequent their store to hire beach products, saw Paula and her children clad in her innovative designs and asked her to make some for them. In under a month in 1949, Paula’s business grew from one machinist to produce garments, to fourteen – a number that would eventually rise to over sixty. However, in a still rather conservative culture, Paula’s two-piece was met with a slew of disapproval. Paula recounts in an article how the Catholic Mothers club had said, “we definitely think bikinis lower the resistance of young people to temptation”. The Surfers Paradise Roman Catholic Priest Father J.N Shannon told news reporters that, “the bikini type of costume often worn here lowers the dignity of Christian womanhood”. On Bondi Beach, a Local Government act was in place to ensure that swimwear remained ‘decent’. The act stated that swimsuits should cover the whole front of the body, have straps to keep in place the garment, and have legs at least three inches long. Archival ABC footage shows how the ‘Beach Inspectors’ would walk around with measuring tapes to assess women’s swimsuits. In 1945, when a young woman donned a bikini along the popular beach strip, infamous Beach Inspector Aub Laidlaw told her she was ‘indecently’ attired and ordered her to put on more clothes. The woman was charged with offensive behavior. In a moment of what Paula called “righteous indignation”, she spoke to a friend at the local paper. The day after Anne’s run-in with Moffat, Paula sent five models down to the same beach, all dressed in her bikinis. It attracted an immense amount of media coverage, and Paula received a plethora of orders. Despite the raised eyebrows, Paula continued selling and heavily promoting, her two pieces. Outnumbered by the women donning them, eventually, the local priest, police, town clerk and Mayor declared their approval of the swimwear, and Beach Inspector Johnny Moffat publically stated that he would no longer object to a women’s attire. By 1967, the aforementioned Aub Laidlaw even attended – and approved of – a fashion parade of Stafford’s swimwear. Paula had championed a movement for women – more than simply providing sparser beach attire and a better tan, bikinis represented a change in society’s ideals, and empowered women in their attire choices. Surfers Paradise became the home of the bikini, which bolstered tourism as well as trade. Source: thefressh.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/a-fashionable-history-...