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Butterfly on a Pin
Unflinching, funny, shocking, inspiring and tender: this is a story like no other.
Alannah Hill, one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers, created an international fashion brand that defied trends with ornamental, sophisticated elegance, beads, bows and vintage florals. But growing up in a milk bar in Tasmania, Alannah’s childhood was one of hardship, fear and abuse. At an early age she ran away from home with eight suitcases of costumes and a fierce determination to succeed, haunted by her mother’s refrain of ‘You’ll never amount to anything, you can’t sew, nobody likes you and you’re going to end up in a shallow grave, dear!’
At the height of her success, Alannah walked the razor’s edge between two identities – the ‘good’ Alannah and the ‘mongrel bastard’ Alannah. Who was the real Alannah Hill? Reprieve came in the form of a baby boy and the realisation that becoming a mother not only changes your life, but completely refurbishes it, forever.
Yet 'having it all' turned out to be another illusion. In 2013 Alannah walked away from her eponymous brand, a departure that left her coming apart at the seams. She slowly came to understand the only way she could move forward was to go back. At the heart of it all was her mother, whose loveless marriage and disappointment in life had a powerful and long-lasting effect on her daughter. It was finally time to call a truce with the past.
This extraordinary book is the fierce and intelligent account of how a freckle-faced teenage runaway metamorphosed into a trailblazer and true original.
Alannah Hill, one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers, created an international fashion brand that defied trends with ornamental, sophisticated elegance, beads, bows and vintage florals. But growing up in a milk bar in Tasmania, Alannah’s childhood was one of hardship, fear and abuse. At an early age she ran away from home with eight suitcases of costumes and a fierce determination to succeed, haunted by her mother’s refrain of ‘You’ll never amount to anything, you can’t sew, nobody likes you and you’re going to end up in a shallow grave, dear!’
At the height of her success, Alannah walked the razor’s edge between two identities – the ‘good’ Alannah and the ‘mongrel bastard’ Alannah. Who was the real Alannah Hill? Reprieve came in the form of a baby boy and the realisation that becoming a mother not only changes your life, but completely refurbishes it, forever.
Yet 'having it all' turned out to be another illusion. In 2013 Alannah walked away from her eponymous brand, a departure that left her coming apart at the seams. She slowly came to understand the only way she could move forward was to go back. At the heart of it all was her mother, whose loveless marriage and disappointment in life had a powerful and long-lasting effect on her daughter. It was finally time to call a truce with the past.
This extraordinary book is the fierce and intelligent account of how a freckle-faced teenage runaway metamorphosed into a trailblazer and true original.
352 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2018
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June 20, 2018
I have been reading around three books a week for the past fifty years or so and avoid biographies, auto-biographies and memoirs as the few I have read, regardless of the individual they related to, have generally been self-indulgent and quite frankly, unremarkable. My daughter bought Butterfly on a Pin for my husband who is a great fan of this genre of writing. I ran out of books to read yesterday, so despite knowing very little about fashion and nothing about Alannah Hill, I picked this up to read about 7.30 pm last night and have just finished it (12 hours later). This was such an amazing read – raw and extraordinarily honest and a reminder that to move forward in life you have to forgive the past.
May 20, 2018
It is wrong to judge an autobiography on the character of its subject. It's apparent from Australian fashion designer Alannah Hill's memoir, Butterfly on a Pin, that she is melodramatic, rude, narcissistic, deliberately ignorant and Difficult to Get On With. Hill says that she was molested no fewer than 4 times her in her youth. She does not mention eating anything other than junk food and lollies. In her younger days she lied, forged and stole ("the next day I shoplifted a hammer"). She is obsessed with her son* and her dead mother (whom she spends much of her book demeaning). She had an undoubtedly rotten childhood, has pulled-herself-up by her pretty bootstraps and feels very, very sorry for herself. (When she calls herself "unjoined", read "unhinged").
So, not someone you would (as P says) "want to go on a houseboat holiday with"**, but you would want to read her book. You DO*** want to read this funny, zippy book, if you have ever worn one of the Alannah Hill girly garments with a silly name like "The I-Have-No-Interest-in-Telling-the-Truth,-the-Whole-Truth-and-Nothing-But-the-Truth Cardigan".
The story of the naming of the pieces in the Alannah Hill range is wry and typical of the exchanges between Hill and her mother Aileen:
"The naming of a new collection went like this : 'Mum! It's me, Lan. What are you doing right at this very moment, Mum?'
'Is that YOU, Lannaaah? Are you calling me on that little silly phone you've got? That's not a phone, Lan, it's a toy. I'm just sitting here, dear, I might get my hair set, but I'm still in my dressing gown, dear. Have you been sacked yet, dear? Did you ask what I'm eating, Lan? How do you know I'm eating? I'm just eating a little SAO BISCUIT!'
And that's how it went, from Mum's mouth, straight into my collections:
-I'm just having a little Sao frock
-You can't sew, dear, frock
-He's going to jail cardigan
-Love me in the cemetery frock
-She's a little bitch coat
-Who the HELL do you think you are? frock
-Ask your father, dear, cardigan
-You'll burn in hell, Alannah, camisole
-He doesn't LOVE you, dear, skirt
-You're a disgrace frock
-Where's my pony skirt
-Read your Bible, Alannah, frock
-He's NEVER going to marry you, Lannah, cardigan.'"
Hill's parents were the stuff of cliché - a drunken, disappointed, lapsed-Catholic father and a miserable mother calling upon all the Catholic saints to witness her martyrdom. The family (5 children of course) move from a failing orchard to "the graceless hellhole, the hellhole of THE MILK BAR" in the perfectly named Tasmanian town of Penguin. [A town that sits on the edge of tempestuous Bass Strait, features a 10 foot high statue of a penguin and has a famous local football team called 'Penguin' - Ed.]
The Hill family was poor, isolated and insanely bleak. "There would be no unnecessary talking, no laughing, no family holidays, no counter lunches, no counter teas, no Sunday drives and no games. Of any sort. We had no pencils, no pens, no music, no radio, no books, no toys, no friends and no hobbies. In Geeveston, by 5.30 pm we were in our narrow beds, lined up against one wall in the small porch." The child Alannah ran away to join the carnival, fought with her sister over a rag doll found in a puddle, was rejected by the Girl Guides, pushed her injured brother around in a pram, was thrown out of trade school and was "beside herself" when the neighbour's mother was found unresponsive in the bath draped over a rusty mower.
Hill's reconstructions of her mother's lifelong, unsparingly negative and off-point diatribes are the funniest passages in the memoir, awful as they must have been and exaggerated as their rendition here may be. When Hill suggests that she might move to Melbourne:-
"OH GO ON with you, Lannah! Take your BED over there then! Take your BED to Melbourne and lie in it on your OWN and see JUST how quickly you run back here to Ulverstone! Go ON! Nobody EVER rings for you. Why's THAT, Lan? Why doesn't anyone ring for you? Maybe it's your get-up and the way you STICKYBEAK into other people's business. You're such a stickybeak, Lan, and people DON'T LIKE a stickybeak."
Hill is molested at 12 years of age and, she says, "...from that day on I was a sitting duck...I didn't know if it was night or day, morning or afternoon.'" That trauma (and subsequent incidents, some of which she suggests she unwontedly invited, one of which was a truly terrible crime) hit her hard. The book is mainly concerned with Hill's view of herself as "smashed-up" by her childhood and abuse and its effects. However, it is not entirely clear how this brokenness manifests itself. Hill refers to her "free-floating anxiety", her "inner mongrel basdard" , to often feeling "imperfect and unreal" and "Buried-Alive Alannah". But we don't really understand what this means to her in day-to-day terms. How is she different from the rest of us with 'normal' childhoods? Certainly she feels inadequate at times - but that is to be human. Her behaviour is no doubt eccentric and temperamental but again....
We see a driven, fabulously successful millionaire who has worked at what she loves. There is a conflict between her claims of being 'unjoined' and obviously strong sense of self and confidence.
Hill says that she told a potential lover:-
"'Men see a vision, a creation of me that they've drawn inside their own mad, love-driven heads. You believe I'm a perfect vision of loveliness and glory, you'll idolise me, adore me and then you'll have to live with the crushing disappointment. I'm a bathtub without a plug. A broken window, a cracked skeleton. I fall from elegance with dull thuds onto floors. I can fly you to the moon and back in one day, and the very next I'll fly you straight to hell, where you'll stay until I feel loved again. I'm really a very plain, ordinary girl pretending to be a smashing girl..."
We just don't know what that means other than "I am vain, imperfect, want to be loved and I act badly at times."
The young Hill flees to Hobart, then Melbourne. Before she left home, Hill began to develop her trademark look -
"I announced to Mum that I'd now be wearing make-up for the rest of my life. She told me I looked ridiculous and to take some 'layers' of her foundation off. I told her I'd be wearing more layers of eye shadow, more layers of lipstick, more layers of everything, and that nobody would ever see me without make-up, a costume or a hairdo ever again. Mum agreed that it was probably a good idea." "I felt like a different person. I was transformed. No longer an abused little mongrel bastard, I understood the power of make-up and clothing. I was becoming the girl I'd always imagined I could be...My reinvention became my weapon to deal with the world." Hill takes this to such extremes that, decades later, when admitted to hospital for her son's caesarean birth, she wears "what can only be described as a meringue-pink ball gown with kitten heels". She puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign, which she had "borrowed" from the Sydney Westin hotel, on her hospital door, totally stage-dresses the room, and wears complete makeup in the operating theatre.
In her early days Hill wandered about, trying to create a place for herself. She pretended she was a librarian, got sacked from KFC, got sacked from a jewellery store and lived dangerously. She knocked on the doors of mansions looking for a room to rent. She walked into exclusive shops, "leaving my name and a reference I'd written myself, stating ten skills I did not have, one of them being stenography".
The laughs in the book are not all intentional - Like Joan Collins (!) Hill calls herself shy - "I was shy but I always had to appear larger than life; I knew I wouldn't be seen if I didn't make a scene..." - obviously thinking 'shy' is a synonym for screaming attention-seeking show pony. The "naturally rather shy" Hill would flirt, she admits, with a lamp. This shy young woman hitchhikes alone to "uber-cool" New Wave Melbourne nightclubs dressed like a "kindergarten kabuki girl". She fires personal questions at people with machine gun subtlety. When she meets David Heeney, future CEO of Factory X, she shouts over the music, 'I have heard some preeeeetttteeeee wild tales about you, Cowboy Man. Are you a hairdresser? Do you own a cemetery? Have you shrunk yourself in the wash? You're rather short, dear? Do you own an op shop in Fitzroy Street? Do you have a girlfriend? Are you married? Do you think you will ever have children? What are you looking for in life? Love, money or happiness? Which one?' And...spoken in a posh English accent: 'And where did you schoooooooooooool?'"
When the shrinking violet introduces herself to Robert Pearce, he tells her that he had seen her a year earlier, making a "'tremendous public spectacle'" of herself, dancing and busking outside the Prahran Town Hall on Chapel Street, probably wearing a "pink plastic nineteen-sixties frock." She asked for details, because she wanted to know how to do it again.
When this wallflower wants to be in the film Dogs in Space, she dresses-up and, at the production offices, "showed myself off again and again" to Richard Lowenstein and Michael Hutchence, and nabs a featured extra role.
This is not a "tell-all memoir". There are gaps, hints and unanswered questions in Hill's story. Her self-deprecation is carefully crafted to fit the fragile image, but the rock below and the ruthlessness are evident too.
But Hill is candid in her best chapter, "Coming Apart at the Seams", dealing with the David Jones' incident****. The depiction of her dawning horror, her desperate attempts to minimise the damage in her own mind and her utter wretchedness when the inescapable reality hits is visceral. Refreshingly, she does not pretend any PC views, or fake outrage at her own insensitivity - it was, she says, a flippant remark, (although we rather suspect a rejection rankles here). Admirably too, she does not even mention the substantial amount which she subsequently helped raise for charity in atonement.
Hill is also straight-up about having bought a house which she could not afford (with a mortgage of $23,000 a month). She does not pretend that she simply changed her mind, or wanted to move on. " From the first day I stepped inside my blue-chip castle, I wasn't just paying the colossal price of a south Yarra mortgage, I was also paying the price of a colossal illusion, an illusion that would dissolve into a future where, in less than three years, I'd be forced to sell my South Yarra mansion, the one I could never stop talking about." This honesty is all the more impressive in the face of her her spinning-eyed acquisitiveness, her unappealing desire to trade up and up and up, real estate-wise.
It's no surprise to the reader that Hill has had an unhappy series of relationships - at least two with men substantially younger than herself. She is wary of intimacy, "because becoming dependent on a man meant diminishing myself." She told herself early on that she "couldn't rely on anyone else". At 39 Hill decides to have a baby with her partner Karl, despite his expressed lack of interest and the warning of her assistant Hanh, "'..He no good! He no take care of you and the baby. He will leave you for sure. I feel sad for you, Lan, you spend years of your life giving him a good life and he treat you this way. It not fair, Lan, it not fair. What you going to do, you too old to have a baby with someone else. All your eggs dead anyway.'" Although we have the benefit of Hill's 20/20 hindsight, we are surprised that she is surprised with Karl leaves a week after the birth of their son.
At the time of writing Hill was in a relationship with Hugo Race (formerly of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, some of whom appear earlier, throwing beer-soaked toilet paper at Hill's head ). Race "..had a reputation for being difficult, prickly, an Ernest-Hemingway-esque romantic, dramatic musician, often on tour in Europe. Could I have found myself anybody more perfect? Mercurial, aloof, distant, moody but intoxicatingly attractive to me. Perfect!"
There is an odd incident concerning an early lover of nine years, "posh boy-person" Steven Jones Hyphenated Evans, who disappears absolutely at page 183 in about 1987, only to reappear at page 289 in about 2013, when Hill tells us that he is "the man who had influenced almost every decision I had made for the last thirty-five years..." Hill then seems to take credit for his remarkable recovery from apparently terminal bladder cancer - Her feat? She introduced him to an oncologist.
Hill's uber-confidence and self-absorption are monumental. Again, we don't have to like the subject of a memoir, and their lack of insight may be of interest, but it is not clear when Hill is boasting about her rebelliousness and when she is serving-herself-up for our dissection.
In India she contracts typhoid as a result of neglecting to have the recommended immunisations - "I'd read the fine print but was sure it didn't apply to me."
Many years earlier, when attending a sophisticated and arty "dinner-party-as-an-idea", Hill shuns the "inedible food" and brings her own picnic pack - red cordial, Smarties, salt-and-vinegar chips, Cheezels, hors d'oeuvres on Salada biscuits and chocolates. When it is the turn of Hill and her partner to host a dinner-party-as-an-idea, she breaks into the empty apartment next door and serves lemonade, jelly, confectionery, pizza subs, saveloys, fish fingers and cold party pies on the floor, lit by borrowed torches. Backed by ABBA.
Does Hill really live on children's treats? Was she truly diagnosed as suffering from diabetes, scurvy and malnutrition when pregnant?
Hill's fashion career started when she was offered a job at hippie Chapel Street boutique "Indigo"; her idiosyncratic personal style having been recognised. Clearly a sensational saleswoman, Hill sold masses of clothes she loathed, and ultimately helped re-brand the outlet with a more modern look, launching her own label. True to fashion, when she is asked to leave, she is told, "'If there's ever any trouble, you're in the middle of it....Lan, you've just got bigger dreams than the rest of us. You've become impossible.'"
After the appropriate period of spectacular mourning, Hill starts work at Dialogue, (main label Target). Here she worked incredibly hard, hands on, based in a room under the stairs, hidden from the financial controller. Shortly after she sold a sizeable amount of her collection (including to David Jones), Dialogue went into administration. Hill then went to work at Factory X, ultimately opening the Alannah Hill bow teeks under their umbrella.
Unusually, Hill's parents agreed to attend the opening night of the first bow teek, in chic Chapel Street. "I don't believe my parents had any idea what they were really attending. Something about having to travel all the way to Melbourne to attend some kind of an opening with my name on a window." Hill's mother sat in the front window smoking, greeting guests, "'Oh dear, Lan, who was HEEEE? What a crushing, drunken bore...You can't sew a thing, dear, you can't even darn a sock, Now you listen to me, Lan, you LISTEN to me. This does NOT feel RIGHT, I smell a rat and I just don't like it! Now tell me again, why IS your name on all of the clothing? WHY?'''
Although she misses the main point, Aileen Hill does raise an important question. We never read about her daughter working on a sewing machine or picking up a sewing needle. When asked how she had built a successful fashion brand, having not done a design course, she answers, "I suspect the truth, dear reader, lies in my favourite line from that great Australian comedy The Castle. 'It's just the vibe of the thing, and....no, that's it, it's the vibe."" Hill says that she worked up to a hundred hours a week, forgoing a social life; she had "instinct, determination and tenacity with a desire to never, ever, ever give up." Her success was due to the fact that she was her " own best advertisement", living, breathing, dreaming it, without distraction, a real person behind the brand, in her fantasy world.
Yes, but these are motherhood statements. We do not know if Hill can sew, if she holds pins in her mouth, how she learnt to design, or how she actually physically expressed that instinct, determination and tenacity (other than when she talks about meetings and publicity). We do not know how she spends a day in her studio. We really have no hint, in a practical sense, of how Hill made it from shop-girl at Indigo to a fleet of Alannah Hill bow teeks. It's like the South Park Underpants Gnomes' business plan - "Phase 1: Collect underpants, Phase 2: ?, Phase 3: Profit". Therein lies the one real fault of this book. We are told very little indeed about Hill's inspiration, her theories, her designing and nothing about how she collates a collection. Although this is a memoir about healing and dealing with trauma, Hill is famous for fashion. The typical reader of this book will want to know something about being a fashion designer and - also - would be fascinated to learn how Hill compiles her own, famous daily look.
The Alannah Hill brand was sold to stores in London, New York and Singapore. But that didn't impress Aileen. When Hill phones her mother to tell her that she is standing on Fifth Avenue outside Henri Bendel's which is featuring Alannah Hill designs in the front window, Aileen says "'New YORK??? Oh, you are NOT, Lannaaaah! How can you be talking to me in Ulverstone on that tiny little beeping phone of yours? From New York? WHAT clothing, dear? WHAT window? FIFTH Avenue? Didn't they want you on FIRST Avenue, Lan? You only came fifth?"'
Factory X begins to take decisions about the Alannah Hill brand without her knowledge. She makes a tactical error, and is pushed out. She says that she reinvents herself and launches the short-lived Louise Love brand, (but this brand looks the same as the 'old' Alannah Hill, and so does she.) She does, however, tell the story of her trauma and that may be cathartic both for herself and others.
When Aileen dies, Hill says, "Nothing can ever prepare you for the news of your mother's death. It penetrates the heart with a burning arrow of sorrow and sometimes scorching regret. My world went black. I went black. It was the blackest day I'd lived." Hill falls into a seemingly bottomless slough of overblown grief, which is somewhat difficult to swallow, given the preceding chapters.
Even when her therapist has told Hill, "you have to stop living in your head with your mother - it's time to let her voice go."' and she says, "in my better moments on this earth, I understand that we are all responsible for our own lives", Hill will not stop living in that shadow. Is it because this is the (invisible) disability which makes her special and absolves her from normal behaviour?
Despite Hill's (self-confessed) poor education, naivete and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity, she has a sharp eye for the mysteries and ironies of existence. She writes very well indeed, and has an amusing, individualistic turn of phrase:
"My shoes slipped off my feet in excitement".
"A gang of Alannah Hill girls walking toward you could knock a Tim Tam biscuit right out of your hands."
"A scared tip-rat, I cried at the drop of a scream."
(When worrying that she is a bad mother), ""I catastrophised a little bit more about whether my delivering him a Scotch Finger biscuit with a Kit Kat on a side tray would come back to haunt me in E's teen years."
Hill is flashy, inconsistent and self-obsessed; essentially a loner, but that is how creative, eccentric butterflies should be.
***********
PLEASE SEE thevarnishedculture.com FOR FOOTNOTES.
So, not someone you would (as P says) "want to go on a houseboat holiday with"**, but you would want to read her book. You DO*** want to read this funny, zippy book, if you have ever worn one of the Alannah Hill girly garments with a silly name like "The I-Have-No-Interest-in-Telling-the-Truth,-the-Whole-Truth-and-Nothing-But-the-Truth Cardigan".
The story of the naming of the pieces in the Alannah Hill range is wry and typical of the exchanges between Hill and her mother Aileen:
"The naming of a new collection went like this : 'Mum! It's me, Lan. What are you doing right at this very moment, Mum?'
'Is that YOU, Lannaaah? Are you calling me on that little silly phone you've got? That's not a phone, Lan, it's a toy. I'm just sitting here, dear, I might get my hair set, but I'm still in my dressing gown, dear. Have you been sacked yet, dear? Did you ask what I'm eating, Lan? How do you know I'm eating? I'm just eating a little SAO BISCUIT!'
And that's how it went, from Mum's mouth, straight into my collections:
-I'm just having a little Sao frock
-You can't sew, dear, frock
-He's going to jail cardigan
-Love me in the cemetery frock
-She's a little bitch coat
-Who the HELL do you think you are? frock
-Ask your father, dear, cardigan
-You'll burn in hell, Alannah, camisole
-He doesn't LOVE you, dear, skirt
-You're a disgrace frock
-Where's my pony skirt
-Read your Bible, Alannah, frock
-He's NEVER going to marry you, Lannah, cardigan.'"
Hill's parents were the stuff of cliché - a drunken, disappointed, lapsed-Catholic father and a miserable mother calling upon all the Catholic saints to witness her martyrdom. The family (5 children of course) move from a failing orchard to "the graceless hellhole, the hellhole of THE MILK BAR" in the perfectly named Tasmanian town of Penguin. [A town that sits on the edge of tempestuous Bass Strait, features a 10 foot high statue of a penguin and has a famous local football team called 'Penguin' - Ed.]
The Hill family was poor, isolated and insanely bleak. "There would be no unnecessary talking, no laughing, no family holidays, no counter lunches, no counter teas, no Sunday drives and no games. Of any sort. We had no pencils, no pens, no music, no radio, no books, no toys, no friends and no hobbies. In Geeveston, by 5.30 pm we were in our narrow beds, lined up against one wall in the small porch." The child Alannah ran away to join the carnival, fought with her sister over a rag doll found in a puddle, was rejected by the Girl Guides, pushed her injured brother around in a pram, was thrown out of trade school and was "beside herself" when the neighbour's mother was found unresponsive in the bath draped over a rusty mower.
Hill's reconstructions of her mother's lifelong, unsparingly negative and off-point diatribes are the funniest passages in the memoir, awful as they must have been and exaggerated as their rendition here may be. When Hill suggests that she might move to Melbourne:-
"OH GO ON with you, Lannah! Take your BED over there then! Take your BED to Melbourne and lie in it on your OWN and see JUST how quickly you run back here to Ulverstone! Go ON! Nobody EVER rings for you. Why's THAT, Lan? Why doesn't anyone ring for you? Maybe it's your get-up and the way you STICKYBEAK into other people's business. You're such a stickybeak, Lan, and people DON'T LIKE a stickybeak."
Hill is molested at 12 years of age and, she says, "...from that day on I was a sitting duck...I didn't know if it was night or day, morning or afternoon.'" That trauma (and subsequent incidents, some of which she suggests she unwontedly invited, one of which was a truly terrible crime) hit her hard. The book is mainly concerned with Hill's view of herself as "smashed-up" by her childhood and abuse and its effects. However, it is not entirely clear how this brokenness manifests itself. Hill refers to her "free-floating anxiety", her "inner mongrel basdard" , to often feeling "imperfect and unreal" and "Buried-Alive Alannah". But we don't really understand what this means to her in day-to-day terms. How is she different from the rest of us with 'normal' childhoods? Certainly she feels inadequate at times - but that is to be human. Her behaviour is no doubt eccentric and temperamental but again....
We see a driven, fabulously successful millionaire who has worked at what she loves. There is a conflict between her claims of being 'unjoined' and obviously strong sense of self and confidence.
Hill says that she told a potential lover:-
"'Men see a vision, a creation of me that they've drawn inside their own mad, love-driven heads. You believe I'm a perfect vision of loveliness and glory, you'll idolise me, adore me and then you'll have to live with the crushing disappointment. I'm a bathtub without a plug. A broken window, a cracked skeleton. I fall from elegance with dull thuds onto floors. I can fly you to the moon and back in one day, and the very next I'll fly you straight to hell, where you'll stay until I feel loved again. I'm really a very plain, ordinary girl pretending to be a smashing girl..."
We just don't know what that means other than "I am vain, imperfect, want to be loved and I act badly at times."
The young Hill flees to Hobart, then Melbourne. Before she left home, Hill began to develop her trademark look -
"I announced to Mum that I'd now be wearing make-up for the rest of my life. She told me I looked ridiculous and to take some 'layers' of her foundation off. I told her I'd be wearing more layers of eye shadow, more layers of lipstick, more layers of everything, and that nobody would ever see me without make-up, a costume or a hairdo ever again. Mum agreed that it was probably a good idea." "I felt like a different person. I was transformed. No longer an abused little mongrel bastard, I understood the power of make-up and clothing. I was becoming the girl I'd always imagined I could be...My reinvention became my weapon to deal with the world." Hill takes this to such extremes that, decades later, when admitted to hospital for her son's caesarean birth, she wears "what can only be described as a meringue-pink ball gown with kitten heels". She puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign, which she had "borrowed" from the Sydney Westin hotel, on her hospital door, totally stage-dresses the room, and wears complete makeup in the operating theatre.
In her early days Hill wandered about, trying to create a place for herself. She pretended she was a librarian, got sacked from KFC, got sacked from a jewellery store and lived dangerously. She knocked on the doors of mansions looking for a room to rent. She walked into exclusive shops, "leaving my name and a reference I'd written myself, stating ten skills I did not have, one of them being stenography".
The laughs in the book are not all intentional - Like Joan Collins (!) Hill calls herself shy - "I was shy but I always had to appear larger than life; I knew I wouldn't be seen if I didn't make a scene..." - obviously thinking 'shy' is a synonym for screaming attention-seeking show pony. The "naturally rather shy" Hill would flirt, she admits, with a lamp. This shy young woman hitchhikes alone to "uber-cool" New Wave Melbourne nightclubs dressed like a "kindergarten kabuki girl". She fires personal questions at people with machine gun subtlety. When she meets David Heeney, future CEO of Factory X, she shouts over the music, 'I have heard some preeeeetttteeeee wild tales about you, Cowboy Man. Are you a hairdresser? Do you own a cemetery? Have you shrunk yourself in the wash? You're rather short, dear? Do you own an op shop in Fitzroy Street? Do you have a girlfriend? Are you married? Do you think you will ever have children? What are you looking for in life? Love, money or happiness? Which one?' And...spoken in a posh English accent: 'And where did you schoooooooooooool?'"
When the shrinking violet introduces herself to Robert Pearce, he tells her that he had seen her a year earlier, making a "'tremendous public spectacle'" of herself, dancing and busking outside the Prahran Town Hall on Chapel Street, probably wearing a "pink plastic nineteen-sixties frock." She asked for details, because she wanted to know how to do it again.
When this wallflower wants to be in the film Dogs in Space, she dresses-up and, at the production offices, "showed myself off again and again" to Richard Lowenstein and Michael Hutchence, and nabs a featured extra role.
This is not a "tell-all memoir". There are gaps, hints and unanswered questions in Hill's story. Her self-deprecation is carefully crafted to fit the fragile image, but the rock below and the ruthlessness are evident too.
But Hill is candid in her best chapter, "Coming Apart at the Seams", dealing with the David Jones' incident****. The depiction of her dawning horror, her desperate attempts to minimise the damage in her own mind and her utter wretchedness when the inescapable reality hits is visceral. Refreshingly, she does not pretend any PC views, or fake outrage at her own insensitivity - it was, she says, a flippant remark, (although we rather suspect a rejection rankles here). Admirably too, she does not even mention the substantial amount which she subsequently helped raise for charity in atonement.
Hill is also straight-up about having bought a house which she could not afford (with a mortgage of $23,000 a month). She does not pretend that she simply changed her mind, or wanted to move on. " From the first day I stepped inside my blue-chip castle, I wasn't just paying the colossal price of a south Yarra mortgage, I was also paying the price of a colossal illusion, an illusion that would dissolve into a future where, in less than three years, I'd be forced to sell my South Yarra mansion, the one I could never stop talking about." This honesty is all the more impressive in the face of her her spinning-eyed acquisitiveness, her unappealing desire to trade up and up and up, real estate-wise.
It's no surprise to the reader that Hill has had an unhappy series of relationships - at least two with men substantially younger than herself. She is wary of intimacy, "because becoming dependent on a man meant diminishing myself." She told herself early on that she "couldn't rely on anyone else". At 39 Hill decides to have a baby with her partner Karl, despite his expressed lack of interest and the warning of her assistant Hanh, "'..He no good! He no take care of you and the baby. He will leave you for sure. I feel sad for you, Lan, you spend years of your life giving him a good life and he treat you this way. It not fair, Lan, it not fair. What you going to do, you too old to have a baby with someone else. All your eggs dead anyway.'" Although we have the benefit of Hill's 20/20 hindsight, we are surprised that she is surprised with Karl leaves a week after the birth of their son.
At the time of writing Hill was in a relationship with Hugo Race (formerly of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, some of whom appear earlier, throwing beer-soaked toilet paper at Hill's head ). Race "..had a reputation for being difficult, prickly, an Ernest-Hemingway-esque romantic, dramatic musician, often on tour in Europe. Could I have found myself anybody more perfect? Mercurial, aloof, distant, moody but intoxicatingly attractive to me. Perfect!"
There is an odd incident concerning an early lover of nine years, "posh boy-person" Steven Jones Hyphenated Evans, who disappears absolutely at page 183 in about 1987, only to reappear at page 289 in about 2013, when Hill tells us that he is "the man who had influenced almost every decision I had made for the last thirty-five years..." Hill then seems to take credit for his remarkable recovery from apparently terminal bladder cancer - Her feat? She introduced him to an oncologist.
Hill's uber-confidence and self-absorption are monumental. Again, we don't have to like the subject of a memoir, and their lack of insight may be of interest, but it is not clear when Hill is boasting about her rebelliousness and when she is serving-herself-up for our dissection.
In India she contracts typhoid as a result of neglecting to have the recommended immunisations - "I'd read the fine print but was sure it didn't apply to me."
Many years earlier, when attending a sophisticated and arty "dinner-party-as-an-idea", Hill shuns the "inedible food" and brings her own picnic pack - red cordial, Smarties, salt-and-vinegar chips, Cheezels, hors d'oeuvres on Salada biscuits and chocolates. When it is the turn of Hill and her partner to host a dinner-party-as-an-idea, she breaks into the empty apartment next door and serves lemonade, jelly, confectionery, pizza subs, saveloys, fish fingers and cold party pies on the floor, lit by borrowed torches. Backed by ABBA.
Does Hill really live on children's treats? Was she truly diagnosed as suffering from diabetes, scurvy and malnutrition when pregnant?
Hill's fashion career started when she was offered a job at hippie Chapel Street boutique "Indigo"; her idiosyncratic personal style having been recognised. Clearly a sensational saleswoman, Hill sold masses of clothes she loathed, and ultimately helped re-brand the outlet with a more modern look, launching her own label. True to fashion, when she is asked to leave, she is told, "'If there's ever any trouble, you're in the middle of it....Lan, you've just got bigger dreams than the rest of us. You've become impossible.'"
After the appropriate period of spectacular mourning, Hill starts work at Dialogue, (main label Target). Here she worked incredibly hard, hands on, based in a room under the stairs, hidden from the financial controller. Shortly after she sold a sizeable amount of her collection (including to David Jones), Dialogue went into administration. Hill then went to work at Factory X, ultimately opening the Alannah Hill bow teeks under their umbrella.
Unusually, Hill's parents agreed to attend the opening night of the first bow teek, in chic Chapel Street. "I don't believe my parents had any idea what they were really attending. Something about having to travel all the way to Melbourne to attend some kind of an opening with my name on a window." Hill's mother sat in the front window smoking, greeting guests, "'Oh dear, Lan, who was HEEEE? What a crushing, drunken bore...You can't sew a thing, dear, you can't even darn a sock, Now you listen to me, Lan, you LISTEN to me. This does NOT feel RIGHT, I smell a rat and I just don't like it! Now tell me again, why IS your name on all of the clothing? WHY?'''
Although she misses the main point, Aileen Hill does raise an important question. We never read about her daughter working on a sewing machine or picking up a sewing needle. When asked how she had built a successful fashion brand, having not done a design course, she answers, "I suspect the truth, dear reader, lies in my favourite line from that great Australian comedy The Castle. 'It's just the vibe of the thing, and....no, that's it, it's the vibe."" Hill says that she worked up to a hundred hours a week, forgoing a social life; she had "instinct, determination and tenacity with a desire to never, ever, ever give up." Her success was due to the fact that she was her " own best advertisement", living, breathing, dreaming it, without distraction, a real person behind the brand, in her fantasy world.
Yes, but these are motherhood statements. We do not know if Hill can sew, if she holds pins in her mouth, how she learnt to design, or how she actually physically expressed that instinct, determination and tenacity (other than when she talks about meetings and publicity). We do not know how she spends a day in her studio. We really have no hint, in a practical sense, of how Hill made it from shop-girl at Indigo to a fleet of Alannah Hill bow teeks. It's like the South Park Underpants Gnomes' business plan - "Phase 1: Collect underpants, Phase 2: ?, Phase 3: Profit". Therein lies the one real fault of this book. We are told very little indeed about Hill's inspiration, her theories, her designing and nothing about how she collates a collection. Although this is a memoir about healing and dealing with trauma, Hill is famous for fashion. The typical reader of this book will want to know something about being a fashion designer and - also - would be fascinated to learn how Hill compiles her own, famous daily look.
The Alannah Hill brand was sold to stores in London, New York and Singapore. But that didn't impress Aileen. When Hill phones her mother to tell her that she is standing on Fifth Avenue outside Henri Bendel's which is featuring Alannah Hill designs in the front window, Aileen says "'New YORK??? Oh, you are NOT, Lannaaaah! How can you be talking to me in Ulverstone on that tiny little beeping phone of yours? From New York? WHAT clothing, dear? WHAT window? FIFTH Avenue? Didn't they want you on FIRST Avenue, Lan? You only came fifth?"'
Factory X begins to take decisions about the Alannah Hill brand without her knowledge. She makes a tactical error, and is pushed out. She says that she reinvents herself and launches the short-lived Louise Love brand, (but this brand looks the same as the 'old' Alannah Hill, and so does she.) She does, however, tell the story of her trauma and that may be cathartic both for herself and others.
When Aileen dies, Hill says, "Nothing can ever prepare you for the news of your mother's death. It penetrates the heart with a burning arrow of sorrow and sometimes scorching regret. My world went black. I went black. It was the blackest day I'd lived." Hill falls into a seemingly bottomless slough of overblown grief, which is somewhat difficult to swallow, given the preceding chapters.
Even when her therapist has told Hill, "you have to stop living in your head with your mother - it's time to let her voice go."' and she says, "in my better moments on this earth, I understand that we are all responsible for our own lives", Hill will not stop living in that shadow. Is it because this is the (invisible) disability which makes her special and absolves her from normal behaviour?
Despite Hill's (self-confessed) poor education, naivete and apparent lack of intellectual curiosity, she has a sharp eye for the mysteries and ironies of existence. She writes very well indeed, and has an amusing, individualistic turn of phrase:
"My shoes slipped off my feet in excitement".
"A gang of Alannah Hill girls walking toward you could knock a Tim Tam biscuit right out of your hands."
"A scared tip-rat, I cried at the drop of a scream."
(When worrying that she is a bad mother), ""I catastrophised a little bit more about whether my delivering him a Scotch Finger biscuit with a Kit Kat on a side tray would come back to haunt me in E's teen years."
Hill is flashy, inconsistent and self-obsessed; essentially a loner, but that is how creative, eccentric butterflies should be.
***********
PLEASE SEE thevarnishedculture.com FOR FOOTNOTES.
June 28, 2018
It was not a joyous book to read, it was uncomfortable, engaging and interesting. Hill's story is complex and all about one woman trying to connect, attempting to be someone who is worthwhile, worthy of love. Why? Because she did not get love in her childhood. She is always a child. Her development stunted and mis-formed, in so many ways, but she is worthy of love, even if she does not yet see it herself.
She is not self made, at every point she was supported by someone, these relationships I would have liked to hear more about. I get the sense that she is hiding these things, why? Is it because she is so self orientated and egotistical? Is it because she does not value them? At some point was she rejected by people and now she needs to bury them? I wanted to know more about these relationships as they lasted decades, but were sized up in a sentence or two as were her partner relationships, we never got to the heart or soul of anyone around her. Or her. Her sister who has visited her daily for 13 years is never more than a mention- we do not get to understand anyone. Not even her son- the most important relationship to her.
Hill flutters around, not sure how to engage and it is heart wrenching to watch. She is an incredible woman who is a hero of fluid adaptability. She reinvents herself constantly to survive. She wears a costume to exist. She surrounds herself with opulence to give herself value. She has found these things to help her get through her hostile world. She is amazing. She is sad.
On further reflection I feel manipulated by this book.
The way that Hill portrays herself is eating at me. There are things that don't ring true. Like the idea that a psychologist says that she cannot be fixed. I cannot imagine a psychologist ever saying that, their job is to get you mentally healthy and give you skills to re-engage in your life and relationships. If that is true, get another psychologist. The other is the way she talks about starting up her final business venture, that she backed herself, even putting herself in a financially precarious situation to do so (trying to manipulate me by feeling sorry for her). That is the way most businesses are started.
Why did she write this book? If it was to tell about her journey from rag to riches she has left out massive chunks. Is this book itself a reinvention?
She is not self made, at every point she was supported by someone, these relationships I would have liked to hear more about. I get the sense that she is hiding these things, why? Is it because she is so self orientated and egotistical? Is it because she does not value them? At some point was she rejected by people and now she needs to bury them? I wanted to know more about these relationships as they lasted decades, but were sized up in a sentence or two as were her partner relationships, we never got to the heart or soul of anyone around her. Or her. Her sister who has visited her daily for 13 years is never more than a mention- we do not get to understand anyone. Not even her son- the most important relationship to her.
Hill flutters around, not sure how to engage and it is heart wrenching to watch. She is an incredible woman who is a hero of fluid adaptability. She reinvents herself constantly to survive. She wears a costume to exist. She surrounds herself with opulence to give herself value. She has found these things to help her get through her hostile world. She is amazing. She is sad.
On further reflection I feel manipulated by this book.
The way that Hill portrays herself is eating at me. There are things that don't ring true. Like the idea that a psychologist says that she cannot be fixed. I cannot imagine a psychologist ever saying that, their job is to get you mentally healthy and give you skills to re-engage in your life and relationships. If that is true, get another psychologist. The other is the way she talks about starting up her final business venture, that she backed herself, even putting herself in a financially precarious situation to do so (trying to manipulate me by feeling sorry for her). That is the way most businesses are started.
Why did she write this book? If it was to tell about her journey from rag to riches she has left out massive chunks. Is this book itself a reinvention?
November 9, 2018
This book was a lesson to me about judgement. I don't care about fashion in general but I HATED Alannah Hill's designs - so twee and sickeningly girly. Of course I was also judging the woman behind the fashion without knowing a thing about her. I am humbled by this book. I dismissed Monet in the same way until I took a guided tour and had his work contextualised. After reading Alannah's memoir her designs make sense and suddenly become very beautiful. Context is everything. Forgive me, Alannah, and I will apply this lesson moving forward.
August 31, 2025
Growing up poor white trash myself and struggling to find a way up and out and make something of my life i have a natural affinity with other people who've had similar experiences.
Alannah Hill grew up in miserable Tasmanian poverty with useless and abusive parents but has somehow still managed to reinvent herself and make something remarkable out of her life.
This was an engaging, humble and riveting memoir. I would highly recommend.
Alannah Hill grew up in miserable Tasmanian poverty with useless and abusive parents but has somehow still managed to reinvent herself and make something remarkable out of her life.
This was an engaging, humble and riveting memoir. I would highly recommend.
April 30, 2024
I’m going to start with three points:
I can’t stand misery memoirs that read like trauma porn/blame your parents for your garbage life diatribes – this is nothing like that.
This is the best memoir I have ever read, and I’m extremely choosy with memoirs (for why see above point).
This is a memoir that comes to life as an audio, read by Alannah Hill herself, in all her enthusiastic glory. It’s so entertaining, like nothing I’ve ever listened to before. You won’t get the full Aileen Hill (Alannah’s mother) effect by reading it. For that, and believe me, you need that, you’ll have to listen to Alannah reading as her mother. It’s both hilarious and tragic, the things Aileen would say and the way she would say them.
From a childhood trauma that combined neglect, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, to the eccentric Queen of the Australian fashion industry, this is a story of so much about a woman who is quite literally a self-made wonder. Cancelled from her own label before cancel culture was even a thing, a rapid and successful come-back, only to step away from it all in favour of taking stock, battling cancer, and being the best mother she could be. Alannah Hill, I salute you. Self-depreciating, unflinchingly honest, sad and funny, Butterfly on a Pin is not just a memoir, it’s a love letter to a mother that couldn’t mother, a thank you to those who loved Alannah Hill fashion and still do, a beacon of hope for survivors of child abuse, and a testimony to hard work, long hours, and soldiering on. Brilliant. Absolutely marvellous.
I can’t stand misery memoirs that read like trauma porn/blame your parents for your garbage life diatribes – this is nothing like that.
This is the best memoir I have ever read, and I’m extremely choosy with memoirs (for why see above point).
This is a memoir that comes to life as an audio, read by Alannah Hill herself, in all her enthusiastic glory. It’s so entertaining, like nothing I’ve ever listened to before. You won’t get the full Aileen Hill (Alannah’s mother) effect by reading it. For that, and believe me, you need that, you’ll have to listen to Alannah reading as her mother. It’s both hilarious and tragic, the things Aileen would say and the way she would say them.
From a childhood trauma that combined neglect, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, to the eccentric Queen of the Australian fashion industry, this is a story of so much about a woman who is quite literally a self-made wonder. Cancelled from her own label before cancel culture was even a thing, a rapid and successful come-back, only to step away from it all in favour of taking stock, battling cancer, and being the best mother she could be. Alannah Hill, I salute you. Self-depreciating, unflinchingly honest, sad and funny, Butterfly on a Pin is not just a memoir, it’s a love letter to a mother that couldn’t mother, a thank you to those who loved Alannah Hill fashion and still do, a beacon of hope for survivors of child abuse, and a testimony to hard work, long hours, and soldiering on. Brilliant. Absolutely marvellous.
June 7, 2018
Butterfly on a Pin........ "a precious insect stuck with a pin in it's heart held inside a showcase"
Just like the world of Miss Alannah Louise Hill.
This book should come with the following warning................
"Upon opening the cover prepare yourself for a marathon read. Make sure you have an ample supply of beverages and bowls full of munchies, a comfy place to snuggle into and a large box of tissues.
You are going to be there for a while."
You will be utterly transfixed on this journey. Your emotions will run wild, you will laugh until your stomach hurts, cry all the tears from your eyes and then some.
Extremely raw and very courageous.
"This Butterfly does indeed fly if only for a little while, it returns to it's showcase to reinvent itself once again."
I finished this book with my emotions running wild.
I was linking parts of Miss Hill's history with mine, we are around the same age and unfortunately at times our past was sadly similar. Not uncommon for some of us born in the mid sixties.
Miss Hill has an amazing natural gift as a writer and is a fabulous story teller.
This combined with her wit and humour are what make this memoir a compelling read.
Just like the world of Miss Alannah Louise Hill.
This book should come with the following warning................
"Upon opening the cover prepare yourself for a marathon read. Make sure you have an ample supply of beverages and bowls full of munchies, a comfy place to snuggle into and a large box of tissues.
You are going to be there for a while."
You will be utterly transfixed on this journey. Your emotions will run wild, you will laugh until your stomach hurts, cry all the tears from your eyes and then some.
Extremely raw and very courageous.
"This Butterfly does indeed fly if only for a little while, it returns to it's showcase to reinvent itself once again."
I finished this book with my emotions running wild.
I was linking parts of Miss Hill's history with mine, we are around the same age and unfortunately at times our past was sadly similar. Not uncommon for some of us born in the mid sixties.
Miss Hill has an amazing natural gift as a writer and is a fabulous story teller.
This combined with her wit and humour are what make this memoir a compelling read.
June 5, 2018
This book was incredible. Although I have always been an Alannah Hill fan and spent lots of money on her amazing clothing, I never knew the true story behind her. It is extremely well written and draws the reader into her world. Even if your not a fan do yourself a favour and read it.
November 11, 2018
I always loved Alannah Hill’s clothes. Gorgeous velvets, silks and lace, embroidered and embellished with flowers, put together with humour and whimsy and bravado. As a young journalist and writer, I could rarely afford these alluring, fantastical creations, but I used to rummage in the sales bins or buy second-hand, and throw them together with other op-shop finds and a pair of red dancing shoes.
I have a fine collection of vintage Alannah now, most of which I can’t fit into anymore. I’m hoping my daughter will inherit them and create her own unique look (probably with jeans and sneakers). I still like to hunt through the Alannah Hill sales rack for a pink silk cami, a red lace dress, or a flamboyant rose hairpin. A dash of Alannah can make any woman feel glamorous.
I met Alannah Hill a few times, when I worked in fashion magazines, and she was always funny, raucous, and dressed to the nines. She made every other woman look drab and dull. And then, about five years ago, Alannah walked away from the fashion industry, leaving her brand to be designed and managed by Factory X, the name behind such brands as Dangerfied, Gorman and Princess Highway. There were rumours of bitter infighting, but neither Alannah or Factory X has revealed what really went on behind the scenes.
When I saw Alannah had written a memoir and was a guest at the Sydney Writers Festival, I went along to hear her speak and then bought the book and asked her to sign it for me. Her story, Butterfly On A Pin: A Memoir of Love, Despair and Reinvention, tells the story of her poverty-stricken abusive childhood, her wild adolescence, her search for love and meaning, and the creation and loss of the iconic Alannah Hill brand. The writing is raw, honest, heartfelt, and poignant. I was deeply moved at times, discovering the hurt and heartbreak behind her manic energy and edgy flamboyance. It really is an astonishing story of survival and transformation, and makes my vintage fashion collection so much more meaningful to me now.
I have a fine collection of vintage Alannah now, most of which I can’t fit into anymore. I’m hoping my daughter will inherit them and create her own unique look (probably with jeans and sneakers). I still like to hunt through the Alannah Hill sales rack for a pink silk cami, a red lace dress, or a flamboyant rose hairpin. A dash of Alannah can make any woman feel glamorous.
I met Alannah Hill a few times, when I worked in fashion magazines, and she was always funny, raucous, and dressed to the nines. She made every other woman look drab and dull. And then, about five years ago, Alannah walked away from the fashion industry, leaving her brand to be designed and managed by Factory X, the name behind such brands as Dangerfied, Gorman and Princess Highway. There were rumours of bitter infighting, but neither Alannah or Factory X has revealed what really went on behind the scenes.
When I saw Alannah had written a memoir and was a guest at the Sydney Writers Festival, I went along to hear her speak and then bought the book and asked her to sign it for me. Her story, Butterfly On A Pin: A Memoir of Love, Despair and Reinvention, tells the story of her poverty-stricken abusive childhood, her wild adolescence, her search for love and meaning, and the creation and loss of the iconic Alannah Hill brand. The writing is raw, honest, heartfelt, and poignant. I was deeply moved at times, discovering the hurt and heartbreak behind her manic energy and edgy flamboyance. It really is an astonishing story of survival and transformation, and makes my vintage fashion collection so much more meaningful to me now.
December 12, 2018
After hearing Alannah talk on several podcasts, I was keen to read her book.
I found her story tragic, hopeful and eccentric. It's sad that she's been treated so badly by many people in her life - from her family to her business partners to her lovers. And she reinvents herself through fashion and dreams.
At times it was amusing - she's a funny woman. And her writing was eccentric - Bow Teek etc. She showed her naïveté - especially when she became a mother. Still, she fell on her feet, like many other occasions where things looked precarious.
I am thankful for her showing so much vulnerability and wish her happiness.
I found her story tragic, hopeful and eccentric. It's sad that she's been treated so badly by many people in her life - from her family to her business partners to her lovers. And she reinvents herself through fashion and dreams.
At times it was amusing - she's a funny woman. And her writing was eccentric - Bow Teek etc. She showed her naïveté - especially when she became a mother. Still, she fell on her feet, like many other occasions where things looked precarious.
I am thankful for her showing so much vulnerability and wish her happiness.
January 30, 2019
This was an uncomfortable read, but so totally worth it. Such a powerfully told story - thank goodness for Marieke Hardy and her letters program that brought this to light.
I can remember cooing over the Alannah Hill designs in store at The Strand so many years ago - to think the story behind her store was this intricate is pretty crazy.
The insight into lower class Tasmanian life of the 60s and 70s was also interesting and heartbreaking.
Humans do strange things to each other... but Alannahs reinvention and success is inspirational.
Her portrayal of her mum in this book is amazing and had me nodding the whole time.
I can remember cooing over the Alannah Hill designs in store at The Strand so many years ago - to think the story behind her store was this intricate is pretty crazy.
The insight into lower class Tasmanian life of the 60s and 70s was also interesting and heartbreaking.
Humans do strange things to each other... but Alannahs reinvention and success is inspirational.
Her portrayal of her mum in this book is amazing and had me nodding the whole time.
June 17, 2018
A beautifully written memoir. A harrowing read at times, but completely worth the journey - wow. I have always admired Alannah Hill's designs and business; it was wonderful to get an insight into the beginnings of her professional life through to the present day. Everyone has a story and hers is amazing, in my view. It is a hard book to put down once you start. Recommend this highly and wish NOTHING but the best to Alannah for the future - I shall be watching closely & ready to support her!
June 10, 2018
This is such a brave memoir penned to perfection by an amazing lady. The first few chapters are dark but she's an inspiration and a survivor. Enjoy your new path Alannah.
June 13, 2018
All memoirs are from a single perspective - this one is no exception. Funny, sad, outrageous, beautiful, quirky - just like the author. Revealing and honest and brave.
September 7, 2021
For more reviews, head to my blog Chantel Speaks
“…from that day on I was a sitting duck...I didn't know if it was night or day, morning or afternoon.”
Butterfly on a Pin is Alannah Hill’s memoir from her difficult upbringing to becoming one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers. This is a not a story of just Alannah Hill. It's a story of becoming Alannah Hill and evolving into who you are outside of a name, a brand and the places that you started from.
Hill’s writing is witty and eccentric. I listened to the audiobook and loved hearing her narrate the book. The voices she chose for particular people in her life and the way she describes them are great. These are all things that would bring me back for a re-listen one day, now that I understand her story better.
This is an engaging and interesting read, but it is also emotionally difficult and confronting. Some of the subject matter of Hill’s experiences are not easy to read or digest. As I was reading myself, I did periodically take steps away after reading particular troubling events.
“If I keep staring back into the past, my future would never glimmer”
Invention and reinvention are key themes in the memoir. First, there’s the young Alannah trying to find her way to fashion after her unstable and difficult childhood. There’s adult Alannah entering the world of fashion design and the world of business. As she enters the later phases of adulthood and becomes a mother, we see reflections of her life, and her upbringing in transformative ways. For me, this is where Butterfly on a Pin is most powerful in its storytelling.
Reading how Hill took those early experiences into adulthood and then later as a mother herself, were really quite intriguing to read. There can be traumatic events that happen in our lives, we can sometimes look on those that should love us with deep mistrust, how do we resolve that through our experiences? How do we go on through the decades and make sense of all those things?
“Reinvention became my weapon to deal with the world”
Butterfly on a Pin is a brilliantly engaging memoir. The relationships Hill builds on her journey through life, especially of that with her mother and how that evolves after becoming a mother herself, were particularly moving.
I highly recommend this memoir, even if you don’t know Alannah’s story or her fashion brands. It is a glimpse into 1980s and 1990s Australia, and a woman’s reinvention through childhood trauma and difficulty.
Content warning: this memoir does contain some detail relating to child abuse and sexual assault and may be triggering for some readers.
“…from that day on I was a sitting duck...I didn't know if it was night or day, morning or afternoon.”
Butterfly on a Pin is Alannah Hill’s memoir from her difficult upbringing to becoming one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers. This is a not a story of just Alannah Hill. It's a story of becoming Alannah Hill and evolving into who you are outside of a name, a brand and the places that you started from.
Hill’s writing is witty and eccentric. I listened to the audiobook and loved hearing her narrate the book. The voices she chose for particular people in her life and the way she describes them are great. These are all things that would bring me back for a re-listen one day, now that I understand her story better.
This is an engaging and interesting read, but it is also emotionally difficult and confronting. Some of the subject matter of Hill’s experiences are not easy to read or digest. As I was reading myself, I did periodically take steps away after reading particular troubling events.
“If I keep staring back into the past, my future would never glimmer”
Invention and reinvention are key themes in the memoir. First, there’s the young Alannah trying to find her way to fashion after her unstable and difficult childhood. There’s adult Alannah entering the world of fashion design and the world of business. As she enters the later phases of adulthood and becomes a mother, we see reflections of her life, and her upbringing in transformative ways. For me, this is where Butterfly on a Pin is most powerful in its storytelling.
Reading how Hill took those early experiences into adulthood and then later as a mother herself, were really quite intriguing to read. There can be traumatic events that happen in our lives, we can sometimes look on those that should love us with deep mistrust, how do we resolve that through our experiences? How do we go on through the decades and make sense of all those things?
“Reinvention became my weapon to deal with the world”
Butterfly on a Pin is a brilliantly engaging memoir. The relationships Hill builds on her journey through life, especially of that with her mother and how that evolves after becoming a mother herself, were particularly moving.
I highly recommend this memoir, even if you don’t know Alannah’s story or her fashion brands. It is a glimpse into 1980s and 1990s Australia, and a woman’s reinvention through childhood trauma and difficulty.
Content warning: this memoir does contain some detail relating to child abuse and sexual assault and may be triggering for some readers.
April 9, 2022
A love letter to Butterfly on a pin,
Last Saturday at the op shop, a book jumped out at me. The cover re-ignited some nostalgia inside as I remembered one of my favourite shopping experiences as a teenager dreaming over lace dresses, floral pencils skirts and embellished cardigans. Had Alanna Hill written a book? I didn't even know the story of her life that I was about to discover a tale of love and loss, pain and power, the rising and the falling, femininity and masculinity, life and death, poverty and riches, and so many more themes.
As the sun started to come out that Saturday afternoon after many days of rain, I devoured the pages. I delved deeper into her story with each turn—a tale of the actual battle of dealing with burning creativity within.
As Sunday night came to a close and the working week loomed, I switched from the physical book to the audiobook because I could not get enough. I loved Alannah's voice talking directly to her dear reader.
Alannah confirmed that life is an obstacle course and that our lessons (or sufferings) are our opportunities to learn. Sometimes we learn the lessons too late. Sometimes we need to understand it a few times over for them to sink in. She fearlessly exposed her shame and vulnerability. She reiterated the importance and freeing sensation of speaking your truth.
The way she used her expression to play the different characters in the book was incredibly entertaining. Especially the way she read her mother's voice, which was hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. She exposed the very bond between them, especially after she died, which became a representation of the lifelong bond between mother and child. We are inextricably linked with no manual that teaches us how to behave. Instead, we evolve together, expose ourselves to one another and despise each other even though our love is unconditional.
Thank you, Alannah, for sharing your story. For showing us creative types that the journey isn't always easy, but we should always let our light shine.
Love your dear reader.
p.s Alannah, your writing is terrific. I can't wait to read what your write next.
Last Saturday at the op shop, a book jumped out at me. The cover re-ignited some nostalgia inside as I remembered one of my favourite shopping experiences as a teenager dreaming over lace dresses, floral pencils skirts and embellished cardigans. Had Alanna Hill written a book? I didn't even know the story of her life that I was about to discover a tale of love and loss, pain and power, the rising and the falling, femininity and masculinity, life and death, poverty and riches, and so many more themes.
As the sun started to come out that Saturday afternoon after many days of rain, I devoured the pages. I delved deeper into her story with each turn—a tale of the actual battle of dealing with burning creativity within.
As Sunday night came to a close and the working week loomed, I switched from the physical book to the audiobook because I could not get enough. I loved Alannah's voice talking directly to her dear reader.
Alannah confirmed that life is an obstacle course and that our lessons (or sufferings) are our opportunities to learn. Sometimes we learn the lessons too late. Sometimes we need to understand it a few times over for them to sink in. She fearlessly exposed her shame and vulnerability. She reiterated the importance and freeing sensation of speaking your truth.
The way she used her expression to play the different characters in the book was incredibly entertaining. Especially the way she read her mother's voice, which was hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. She exposed the very bond between them, especially after she died, which became a representation of the lifelong bond between mother and child. We are inextricably linked with no manual that teaches us how to behave. Instead, we evolve together, expose ourselves to one another and despise each other even though our love is unconditional.
Thank you, Alannah, for sharing your story. For showing us creative types that the journey isn't always easy, but we should always let our light shine.
Love your dear reader.
p.s Alannah, your writing is terrific. I can't wait to read what your write next.
October 8, 2018
This for me, was one of those unexpected reads that changes something in you. I’d had this on my shelf for a while, as a lover of fashion and books I stumbled across a signed copy of Alannah Hill’s memoir and I “had to have it” and when I found I was verging on a readers rut not knowing what I felt like reading I picked it up...and could not put it down. Raw, real, it’s in your face straight up life. This is going down as one of my favourite reads ❤️
October 3, 2018
I found this a fascinating read. It was so sad in parts. Hill’s descriptions of her Tasmanian childhood painted a bleak picture. There were some very uncomfortable, shocking things Hill revealed in this book too. I understand her writing style. So much has happened in her life her “dip in and out” style of narration made sense and works well.
November 18, 2018
I’m not normally into memoirs as I generally find so many a bit self indulgent and really repetitive but wow this one was amazing. Firstly the writing was excellent. And wow what a story! Definitely one I would recommend reading.
July 12, 2020
This book was recommended to me and I have to admit, i wasn’t too familiar with who Alannah hill was (sorry!) - but I’m so glad I read this. What an incredibly honest and heartbreaking read this was - if you’re looking for an intriguing and raw memoir, this is for you.
August 12, 2018
MANIC. Fascinating. So very, very sad.
August 1, 2022
I listened to the author reading her lollipop drenched, nimble witted, darkly hilarious and utterly devastating story and seriously you MUST treat yourself. Her impersonations are brilliant and her authenticity shoves you in the back every chapter. Omg. Have always loved her designs and now I know why. She’s my favourite.
February 28, 2022
Actual Rating 3.5*
A book that was just so eye opening.
The story is often so unsafe and heart breaking.
It is not a comfortable book to read.
Alannah Hill is clearly a bit unhinged. She suffered a traumatic childhood and this book explores her journey to multimillionaire-hood (and her losses). The book is quirky, just like her … but I’m not sure it’s the ‘tell all’ it’s claimed to be. So much seems to be missing from the story.
I love fashion and so was interested to hear this story.
16+ with some big trigger warnings around rape, childhood abuse, truth and manipulation.
A book that was just so eye opening.
The story is often so unsafe and heart breaking.
It is not a comfortable book to read.
Alannah Hill is clearly a bit unhinged. She suffered a traumatic childhood and this book explores her journey to multimillionaire-hood (and her losses). The book is quirky, just like her … but I’m not sure it’s the ‘tell all’ it’s claimed to be. So much seems to be missing from the story.
I love fashion and so was interested to hear this story.
16+ with some big trigger warnings around rape, childhood abuse, truth and manipulation.
April 6, 2020
.. A raw and depressing memoir of a talented lady whom was lucky enough to be given a chance the cut-throat, pretentious clothing industry. Surrounded by much destruction and mental health issues, it was Amazing she found such success, a credit to her creating a clothing empire.
September 8, 2022
"I stole a glance at Mum and felt her trying to love me."
Darkly hilarious and totally outrageous, I loved this from the moment I saw that spectacular cover photograph. Set in Tasmania and Melbourne in times that I lived in these places, I related to much of the atmosphere and culture of the time and appreciated my sense of familiarity.
Hill survives a loveless, aimless childhood existence to slam herself into the centre of the world's fashion icons. Audaciousnessly she names up she names up the trauma of childhood, sexual abuse and violence. Her authentic irreverent life is refreshing, inspiring and kicks you in the gut.
I've marked Handbag of Happiness as 'to read'.
Darkly hilarious and totally outrageous, I loved this from the moment I saw that spectacular cover photograph. Set in Tasmania and Melbourne in times that I lived in these places, I related to much of the atmosphere and culture of the time and appreciated my sense of familiarity.
Hill survives a loveless, aimless childhood existence to slam herself into the centre of the world's fashion icons. Audaciousnessly she names up she names up the trauma of childhood, sexual abuse and violence. Her authentic irreverent life is refreshing, inspiring and kicks you in the gut.
I've marked Handbag of Happiness as 'to read'.
August 13, 2020
Raw, real, and inspiring. Alannah’s story is bubbling over with drama and doilies.
In the darkness she hides, in the light, she shines.
Sharing her painful past she encourages others to seek help. Showing how she broke the mould and found the strength to live (regardless of negativity from her mother), urging every young girl to reach for the stars.
In the end, her truth is found. Love exists. Cherish every day. Life is precious.
A remarkable read. Every chapter compelling you to read on. As the person behind the clothes (in an age of her own) transforms into a butterfly. And the brand her sense of style created, the key to her success. I will always adore Alannah Hill.
In the darkness she hides, in the light, she shines.
Sharing her painful past she encourages others to seek help. Showing how she broke the mould and found the strength to live (regardless of negativity from her mother), urging every young girl to reach for the stars.
In the end, her truth is found. Love exists. Cherish every day. Life is precious.
A remarkable read. Every chapter compelling you to read on. As the person behind the clothes (in an age of her own) transforms into a butterfly. And the brand her sense of style created, the key to her success. I will always adore Alannah Hill.
May 24, 2018
I enjoyed this book and hearing about the life of a woman I have admired for so long. The only reason I’m giving it four stars instead of five is because I got confused about the timeline and where it was in her life because it flitted backwards and forwards a lot, something that always annoys me in books. But otherwise it’s a story superbly told with wit, humour and a big bunch of drama.
June 16, 2018
Got a bit sick of the wah wah wah & the mother issue is long, drawn out & basically throughout the whole book.
Easy read, interesting read, very much what you hear about growing up in tassie in the 70s.
I wouldn’t rave about it & recommend it to others but I am glad I read it.
Easy read, interesting read, very much what you hear about growing up in tassie in the 70s.
I wouldn’t rave about it & recommend it to others but I am glad I read it.
July 30, 2020
4.5 stars
I’ve been fascinated by this Australian designer since I used to work quite close to the Factory X outlet many many years ago....and used to have a wardrobe full of Alannah Hill designs!
This book is a memoir that covers Alannah’s rather sad and unhappy childhood in Tasmania to her move to Melbourne where she built a name for herself with her clothing label and then walked away from it all many years later.
The book started off quite melodramatically (although Alannah isn’t exactly known as being a shrinking violet, so it wasn’t unexpected), but I wasn’t sure if I was going to really enjoy it. However perhaps I just got used to the writing style or maybe the book improved as it went along (or perhaps both!), but I grew to love it.
Despite the somewhat outlandish behavior there is something deeply relatable about the way Alannah Hill writes....she really captures the idea of feeling ‘less than’....of feeling that you don’t always know the right thing to say and that underneath all the flowers and sequins you’re still that no-good ‘mongrel’ (a word she uses to describe herself many times) from rural Tasmania.
She writes about herself and her relationships in a self-deprecating manner and puts herself and her faults right out there. She is aware of and can laugh at her own eccentricity and follies. And while there are many funny and witty moments in the book, it is really quite deeply sad.
To be honest, I thought this book was going to be some fun and fluff (and there was some of that!), so I was not expecting to feel so much emotion throughout reading it. The parts about giving birth to her son were beautiful and the challenging relationship with her parents - her mother in particular - were so heartfelt. The ending of the book made me cry and I was genuinely sorry to have reached the end 😞 Highly recommended to anyone who has an interest in Alannah Hill, or to anyone who has a difficult relationship with their parents ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5
I’ve been fascinated by this Australian designer since I used to work quite close to the Factory X outlet many many years ago....and used to have a wardrobe full of Alannah Hill designs!
This book is a memoir that covers Alannah’s rather sad and unhappy childhood in Tasmania to her move to Melbourne where she built a name for herself with her clothing label and then walked away from it all many years later.
The book started off quite melodramatically (although Alannah isn’t exactly known as being a shrinking violet, so it wasn’t unexpected), but I wasn’t sure if I was going to really enjoy it. However perhaps I just got used to the writing style or maybe the book improved as it went along (or perhaps both!), but I grew to love it.
Despite the somewhat outlandish behavior there is something deeply relatable about the way Alannah Hill writes....she really captures the idea of feeling ‘less than’....of feeling that you don’t always know the right thing to say and that underneath all the flowers and sequins you’re still that no-good ‘mongrel’ (a word she uses to describe herself many times) from rural Tasmania.
She writes about herself and her relationships in a self-deprecating manner and puts herself and her faults right out there. She is aware of and can laugh at her own eccentricity and follies. And while there are many funny and witty moments in the book, it is really quite deeply sad.
To be honest, I thought this book was going to be some fun and fluff (and there was some of that!), so I was not expecting to feel so much emotion throughout reading it. The parts about giving birth to her son were beautiful and the challenging relationship with her parents - her mother in particular - were so heartfelt. The ending of the book made me cry and I was genuinely sorry to have reached the end 😞 Highly recommended to anyone who has an interest in Alannah Hill, or to anyone who has a difficult relationship with their parents ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5
March 2, 2022
I have always loved the fashions that Alannah Hill created, so pretty, colourful, vivid, empowering designs unlike others. So when I saw this book, wrapped so beautifully in it's own pink and gold box, I knew it was coming home with me. Just like the skirt I bought from her store about 10 years ago. Oh how I loved her shop, so beautifully designed and her staff were gorgeous in their AH designs. 🥰🥰
Her memoir takes you on a different journey though. It's a history of what I consider neglect. Unloved, unseen and unheard. Yet her spirit knew there must be more and there was and still is. Wrapped in her own coat of anxiety and wild, exuberant and vivid imagination, Alannah has fought the odds of her upbringing, her abuse and her history to create one of Australia's most beautiful and loved fashion ranges. Her story is sad, raw, cruel, anxiety ridden, somewhat horrific yet also hopeful, funny and inspirational in it's telling. A somewhat innocent and naive girl/woman, who is funny, talented, creative, anxious, self deprecating, witty and totally and completely UNIQUE! She has built a life, created a beautiful clothing line, and a son who is simply her greatest love story. An extremely honest, sometimes uncomfortable to read memoir that is not what you expect behind her beautifully crafted designs. I read it over 2 days and didn't regret it at all. I am just even more in awe of Alannah and her designs. 😍😍
@louiselovebrand I love you, quirks and all.
Her memoir takes you on a different journey though. It's a history of what I consider neglect. Unloved, unseen and unheard. Yet her spirit knew there must be more and there was and still is. Wrapped in her own coat of anxiety and wild, exuberant and vivid imagination, Alannah has fought the odds of her upbringing, her abuse and her history to create one of Australia's most beautiful and loved fashion ranges. Her story is sad, raw, cruel, anxiety ridden, somewhat horrific yet also hopeful, funny and inspirational in it's telling. A somewhat innocent and naive girl/woman, who is funny, talented, creative, anxious, self deprecating, witty and totally and completely UNIQUE! She has built a life, created a beautiful clothing line, and a son who is simply her greatest love story. An extremely honest, sometimes uncomfortable to read memoir that is not what you expect behind her beautifully crafted designs. I read it over 2 days and didn't regret it at all. I am just even more in awe of Alannah and her designs. 😍😍
@louiselovebrand I love you, quirks and all.
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