Women’s work – and office fashion – has changed radically over the last 60 years. Cue couldn’t keep up

Australian fashion brand Cue and its sister label Veronika Maine have entered receivership.

At first glance, it looks like another chapter in Australia’s difficult retail economy and the merciless churn of global fashion. But Cue was never just another retailer.

Founded in Sydney in 1968, it dressed Australian women through almost six decades of change in their working lives: from expanding professional employment, to 1980s power suits, to today’s more liberal yet no less professional female corporate attire.

Its sister brand, Veronika Maine, was introduced in 1998, with softer lines and fluid fabrications offering a contemporary alternative to Cue’s structured tailoring.

Crafting the women’s professional wardrobe

Cue arrived at a critical historical moment for Australian women.

In 1968, women made up about 30% of Australia’s paid workforce and were common in offices, mostly as typists, clerks and secretaries rather than managers.

The barriers were beginning to fall. The Commonwealth Public Service marriage bar, which had forced many women to resign when they married, was abolished in 1966.

Access to the contraceptive pill was expanding women’s control over fertility. And second-wave feminism was challenging old assumptions about work and independence.

Rod Levis opened Cue’s first store in Sydney’s Strand Arcade in 1968 after encountering the exhilaration of Swinging London. From Mary Quant and Carnaby Street to the Beatles, the new youth culture made self-invention feel newly possible.

Cue provided the emerging working woman with a way to look modern without appearing frivolous, fashionable without sacrificing seriousness, and increasingly authoritative without simply dressing like a man.

From its early years, Cue’s look was youthful but polished: neatly tailored jackets, skirts and coordinated separates, with more colour and fashion detail than its contemporaries in officewear.

Shifting fashion standards

Throughout the ‘70s, women’s role in corporate shifted from predominantly secretarial roles to minor management positions. To the office, women wore feminine blouses with knee-length skirts or skirt suits, often in the brighter colours, prints and synthetic fabrics fashionable at the time.

The ’80s saw women take on leadership roles, and the power suit became their sartorial shorthand for authority: broad shoulders, sharply tailored jackets and straight skirts borrowed the visual language of the male executive while reshaping it for women.

In the 1990s, women’s office wear shifted again, to a darker minimalism: black and navy suits, slimmer silhouettes and cleaner lines replaced the more conspicuous power dressing of the ’80s. It was something of a golden age for Cue, which in 1997 even booked German supermodel Claudia Schiffer for a campaign.

By the new millennium, the rules were loosening. Veronika Maine, launched in 1998, offered softer silhouettes and more fluid fabrics alongside Cue’s sharper tailoring.

During the 2000s and 2010s, trousers, knitwear and eventually sneakers became increasingly acceptable, particularly in creative and technology workplaces.

Women still faced a more complicated dress code than men: they were expected to look professional and authoritative, but also fashionable and appropriately feminine.

In 2019, Cue received one of the clearest honours an Australian label could hope for: a major Powerhouse Museum exhibition.

The timing was almost painfully apt.

Just as Cue’s role in dressing Australian women was being formally recognised, the pandemic was about to unsettle the office wardrobe, accelerating the shift to more comfortable, casual work clothing that could move between home, office and social life.

A changing niche

Formal workwear still matters. Lawyers still need suits and executives still buy beautifully cut jackets and dresses.

What has weakened is “categorical dressing”: the assumption that women need separate wardrobes for work, weekends and social life. The same clothes increasingly travel between all three.

Marianne Perkovic, chair of the Australian Fashion Council, remembers Cue as “the go-to place” and bought her first corporate suit there. But, she says, “casualisation for women is a really hard concept” for designers, and for the women who are navigating this new landscape.

Kellie Hush, fashion director of Australian Fashion Week, told us when Cue moved beyond the chic tailoring and polished workwear into denim and more trend-led casual fashion, it blurred its signature and “got confusing for the customer”.

Cue struggled to keep pace with professional women, while a blurred brand identity and weak social media presence made it harder to reach younger consumers.

A global shopfront

For much of Cue’s history, an Australian woman’s shopping world was bounded by the department store and local shopping centre. Today the shopfront is global.

Online retail, international chains and ultra-fast fashion have created almost limitless competition on price, speed and choice while cost-of-living pressures have made discretionary purchases harder.

Hush told us “the business outgrew the customer base”. A large retail footprint created pressure, while mid-market fashion became squeezed between fast-fashion giants and more tightly defined designer labels.

Recent Cue collections appeared to be returning to the customer it knew best: the professional woman looking for polished, fashion-conscious tailoring that could still work beyond the office. But improved sales and smaller losses were not enough to offset overheads.

For nearly 60 years, Cue translated changes in Australian women’s lives into clothes. That is not merely a retail achievement. Fashion is one of the ways a society understands itself: a system through which we try out identities, negotiate changing roles and make social change visible.

Cue did not simply sell Australian women clothes for work. At its best, it helped them dress for lives that were themselves being reinvented.

Dijanna Mulhearn receives funding from the Australian Government Research Training Program stipend.

Toby Slade does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.