An Australian in Paris

Maggi Eckardt was still a teenager when, in 1959, she stepped through “this perfect window into the most amazing world of photography and couture”. An Australian in Europe, within months she had taken the international modelling world by storm. There were covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, she rubbed shoulders with royalty and film stars, and of all the people who will stroll through the doors of the Bendigo Art Gallery in coming months to see its fabulous Balenciaga retrospective, Maggi will surely be the only one who worked in the great designer’s studio.

It was a dizzying change of pace from Maggi’s childhood in a working-class family on Sydney’s northern beaches.

“My mother went to work to send me to a private school,” Maggi begins. “It was wonderful of her but no other girl’s mother worked and they all had so much more than we had. I couldn’t keep up with them, so