Verity Mackey was just as I remembered – impossibly leggy, tall and peeking out under a fluffy blonde fringe. She has the look of someone artfully dishevelled - everything thrown together, but perfectly and gorgeously, the way Kate Moss must have looked at 18 (and still does).
The last time I saw her she was a 17-year-old Narrabundah College student and part of the design duo behind the label Zeke’s Lunchbox with friend and fellow student Julia Rich. The Facebook group of the label’s fans features an underwater shot of a girl in a pair of glasses with slinkys stuck to the lenses. The model wears a dress that looks like it’s covered in sour gummi worms. On closer inspection, the bright bits and pieces are scoubidous – plastic strings that can be woven and knotted together, a craft toy. Verity, now 18, loves surprising materials.
She was at the back of Landspeed Records in Garema Place, stitching away at an old paisley print garment and working for vintage queen Abi Barry whose one time ultra huge vintage fashion sale at the Embassy Motel drew so much attention that the designers of Sass & Bide came along for a special preview.
There’s something about Abi’s eye for clothes. It’s possible to find thoroughly eccentric dresses, 1970s hot pants, crazy 1980s party frocks and too-cool-for-school new gear. Some of the clothes have a zebra print (literally little pictures of zebras) and others are floral in a sexy Little House on the Prairie kind of way.
Verity and I exchanged greetings and I asked after the label.
“It’s good. Still writing?”
“Yup.”
“What’ve you been up to?”
“Uh, I just got back from New York two months ago.”
“Wow. Do anything special in NY?”
“Yeah.”
Special didn’t begin to describe it. It was in New York City that she had scored some amazing gigs – working with a small label in Brooklyn and doing assistant styling on two magazines.
“Any good titles?”
“A German avant-garde fashion magazine. Like a really weird magazine. And French Vogue.”
“French Vogue!”
“Oh, yeah.”
“See any famous models? Lily Cole? Kate Moss?”
“Haha, no. I just went, “Ah, you’re a model, come here so I can stick pins in you.’”
She smiled and kept stitching.
And she went on to mention that a friend of hers, Hilary Thackaway, one year older, was starting up a fashion magazine, 100 or so pages to an issue. It was to be stocked in newsagencies for about $20.
Nothing makes a 20-something feel like an ageing, inert underachiever faster than teenagers styling for fashion bibles and creating magazines.
But it was wonderful and she is wonderful. And maybe we’ll see rainbow slinky glasses in the pages of Australian fashion magazines next. Knowing Verity, it won’t take long.