A style full of Grace

FOR next month's Grace Kelly: Style Icon exhibition, Bendigo Art Gallery director Karen Quinlan wanted most to conjure the woman ''to get a clear view of this ordinary person''. Quinlan knew the refined, chaste elegance of Kelly's dresses and suits, sunglasses, shoes, handbags and gloves on the way to the gallery from London's Victoria and Albert Museum would convey volumes about her public persona but Quinlan wanted even more intimacy for her visitors. She wanted more ''food for thought about this amazing woman who pre-dates all we know about celebrity today''.

Quinlan saw Kelly's absence (Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco died in a car crash in 1982 at the age of 52) like a pressing item on her ''to do'' list, a vacuum that had to be filled.

Bendigo's tribute to Kelly consequently has more photos and filmed fragments from her public persona and private life, more evidence of her real body language and the way she looked when she thought no one was looking. There are more triggers, in other words, to nut out just how the language of Kelly's wardrobe worked for her and in its wider social, historic and cultural contexts.

''It's usually the hardest thing about displaying fashion: that absence,'' Quinlan says. ''And remember here, we're dealing with the absence of a very special, real person.''

Most of the mannequins to be dressed in about 40 of Kelly's gowns and outfits - which date from 1954 to the year before her death - for the Bendigo exhibition are headless to minimise distraction, to enable a kind of Brechtian ''suspension of disbelief''. We can mentally conjure Kelly in that suit or this gown on that day without a replica of her head adding to our sensory confusion. Or, so the theory goes.

''You'll be looking at those garments and you'll be imagining her there,'' Quinlan says.

Beyond the whimsical spectre of Kelly herself, there is also a doctorate's worth of data to deduce from her clothes. The exhibition traces her sartorial timeline from lean teen collegiate to elegant royal matron in garments from American and Parisian high-fashion collections including some by Madame Gres, Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Chanel, Hermes and Oleg Cassini.