Beril Jents

Beril Jents (1918 – 8 June 2013) was an Australian fashion designer. She is recognized as "Australia’s first queen of haute couture" and specialized in evening and bridal wear, although the term "haute couture" is not strictly correct in this context as it refers to high-end made-to-measure fashion design.

Jents did not advertise, preferring to promote herself though word of mouth recommendations. The media reported on her enthusiastically and regularly. It was they who crowned her “Australia’s Queen of Haute Couture” and in 1972 fashion journalist Glenys Bell hailed her as “the sole survivor of Haute Couture in Australia”.

In 1952 she was acknowledged as the ‘pre eminent Australian Fashion Designer’ and invited to represent Australia in an international fashion show in New York City where Norman Hartnell represented England and Givenchy represented France. This indicates of the calibre of designers invited to participate.

Her most notable and original collections include the Potato Sack of 1947 and Pan Am collection of 1948. Important designs included the peg-bottom trousers inspired by the Zoot Suit.

In 1944 the business was formally registered and located in King's Cross, at the time a very bohemian area.

She was noted in hundreds of features in newspapers and advertisements during her career from the 1930s to 1980s and was patronized by socialites and creatives; the majority from Sydney and Brisbane. International clients included Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Gaynor, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Vivien Leigh, Eartha Kitt, Bo Derek and Winifred Atwell.

Jents was inspired by the rarefied glamour associated with Hollywood films and its stars in the 1930s. The costumes Adrian designed for the 1932 film Letty Lynton were very influential, especially one gown of white organdy with large puffed sleeves which sold over 500,000 dresses in the U.S. Jents reproduced this dress in Australia. She said of the design “It planted in my mind another seed for the future, to go on and create glamorous clothes”.

Jents came from a modest background in Sydney, born in 1918. She assisted her mother, Alice Strudwick, in dressmaking and thus first learnt her skills at her side, also acquiring her mother's knowledge of materials. She was an outsider and initially unfamiliar with the high society that she would one day serve. Her next role was as a trainee lithographic artist at Hollander and Govett, Sydney. She then undertook an apprenticeship with Sydney-based French dressmaker Madame Gallet. Here she learnt to cut without a pattern. Gallet closed the business and returned to France in 1934.