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.

In 1968, women made up about 30 per cent 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.

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