Recognition sought for Melbourne ‘pioneer’ fashion designer Charlotte Blau

In Melbourne fashion designer Charlotte Blau’s heyday, her elegant gowns were sold in prestigious US stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue in New York.

In the 1950s and 1960s her creations were appreciated by Melbourne’s Society Belles and captured by photographers such as Helmut Newton and Athol Smith.

Fashion historian Tom McEvoy said Blau, who died in 1996, deserved recognition as one of Australia’s finest designers and her pieces should be preserved by the National Gallery of Victoria.

McEvoy urged those who own a Charlotte Blau piece to get in touch. He’s only seen four since he began documenting Australian fashion history six years ago.

In the late 1950s, Blau and her husband Willy Blau ran their Charlotte Fifth Avenue Gown fashion label from their Oliver Lane factory in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane fashion district.

They employed 26 machinists, 14 finishers, two pressers and two in dispatch, and sold pieces to Georges and Myer department stores and boutiques.

A few years earlier, a fire had destroyed the German immigrant’s first collection on the eve of its presentation at the Menzies Hotel, when Blau, exhausted, had left the iron on at home in Heidelberg.

Blue caught on again, and in 1954, Charlotte Fifth Avenue Gowns were launched. Within a few years, her husband had been selling pieces to US stores such as Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles, where her clothes were displayed in all six storefronts.