Jenny Kee was born in Bondi on 24 January 1947, to an Australian-born Chinese father and a sixth-generation Australian mother of Italian and English descent; her great-grandparents had come from Guangdong to Cooktown during the gold rush of the 1870s. She studied at East Sydney Technical College without completing the course and modelled before leaving for London.
In 1965 she arrived in London and joined the city's underground scene, selling second-hand clothes at the Chelsea Antique Market for Vern Lambert. She returned to Australia in 1972 and in 1973 opened Flamingo Park, a boutique in Sydney's Strand Arcade, and began working with the designer Linda Jackson with a shared purpose: to create a national fashion identity.
The partnership produced some of the most recognisable Australian clothes of the period. Kee's brightly coloured knitwear in pure Australian wool, patterned with native flora and fauna, became emblematic; the waratah recurs throughout her work. One koala jumper, nicknamed "Blinky", belonged to Diana, Princess of Wales, who wore it at a polo match at Windsor in 1982. That October, Karl Lagerfeld incorporated Kee's designs in his first Chanel collection. Kee and Jackson worked with artists including David McDiarmid and Peter Tully, who hand-painted fabrics and made jewellery for their clothes. Flamingo Park closed in 1995.
In 2006 she published A Big Life, an autobiography that includes her years in Swinging London. In 2012 she staged her first solo show in more than three decades at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia, and in 2013 she received the Australian Fashion Laureate. In 2015 she partnered with Woolmark on a merino capsule revisiting her archive, including Diana's jumper.
Her work with Jackson featured in the National Gallery of Victoria's 200 Years of Australian Fashion in 2016, and the Powerhouse Museum devoted Step Into Paradise to the pair in 2019. In 2018 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.
For almost fifty years Kee has lived in the same house at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, looking out over the Grose Valley. Her personal emblem is the waratah: after bushfires in the 1980s she painted the flowers returning, a series that became her Waratah and Blackboy prints, and her flame-red pattern Kali Waratah, she told Broadsheet, is "all about destruction and regeneration". In 2023 Sydney Festival dressed two giant inflatable figures, The Aunties, in her Uni Oz stripe, a Fair Isle reimagined as Australian, in memory of two women who had helped her sew in the early years. "People knew where Australia was after Linda and I started our art clothing designs," she has said, "because they were all based on the beauty of this country."
In 2025 the National Gallery of Australia acquired the personal fashion collections of Kee and Jackson, one of the largest of its kind, and showed some 80 of their works in Know My Name: Kee, Jackson and Delaunay, alongside the French artist Sonia Delaunay. "I didn't want my art to be on the wall," Kee said. "I wanted my art to be on the body." Kee's legacy is an unmistakably Australian vocabulary of colour and motif, carried from a Strand Arcade boutique to Chanel's runway.
Kee's legacy is an unmistakably Australian vocabulary of colour and motif, carried from a Strand Arcade boutique to Chanel's runway.