Remembering Mary Revis

The buying diva of the corporate world


Mary Revis, nee Paidousis, passed away on Tuesday 19 November at Cabrini Hospital. A prominent member and significant personality in the Greek community, Mary also pioneered the fashion stakes of Melbourne. She was instrumental in the development of unisex fashions in Myer but also the beginnings of the brand Portmans.
Born in Alexandria Egypt, on November 17 1934, Mary was a charismatic child who had the fair complexion and medium build of her mother Nina but the blue eyes and ambitious spirit of her father Ioannis. Her father sadly suffered a heart attack and died two weeks before Mary married in 1956 to Niko Paidousis. Shortly after their marriage, the newlyweds, along with Mary’s mother Nina, migrated to Australia. When they finally disembarked in Melbourne, the city was amidst Olympic Games fever. At Station Pier, they were received by Niko’s sister and her husband and lived with them in Parkville.
“I came to Australia in 1956 during the Melbourne Olympic Games. The environment appeared to me alien, to say the least; I also felt very strange and rather confused, as I had recently graduated from the High School in Alexandria and I was newly married. Nikos being a proud man he did not want to arrive as an immigrant; he wanted to settle as an invitee in this country,” this is what Mary recalled of the emotional time when she arrived in Melbourne.
In her early twenties, Mary was keen to work and met a Greek woman working at Myer who introduced Mary to her supervisor. It was a time when many migrants were settling in Australia and department stores were desperate for sale assistants who spoke other languages. Mary had five languages under her belt – Italian, French, English, Arabic and Greek and was hired. This is what she had said about her time there:
“They appointed me at the youth centre of Myer, a section on the fifth floor catering for youth fashion; it is a common practice in large retailing shops to assess the commercial importance of a particular section on the actual revenue that it was generating and its popularity; hence the youth section was not within the first popular sections from a monetary or customers’ perspective. The practice was then that the cloth wear for both male and female youth was commonly displayed in one section. I was an ambitious young girl; I wanted to be innovative; to present a ground-breaking change which would enable me to introduce my own model in sales. It took me two years of hard work of attending the problems in the youth section of Myer; I was lining the customers up trying to serve each and every one of them; I was not passing or diverting them to other attendants. Myer had then introduced a system of bonus incentives; I was earning more from the bonus percentages than from my salary.”
In 1958, Mary met with Ken Myer, the son of the proprietor; he was a nice and receptive man, a member of the board of directors. Ken Myer soon suggested that she should travel to Paris and London assessing the youth fashion and introducing a modern approach in the sale of youth clothing. The key issue in this venture was the special and almost exclusive dealing with adolescent fashion between the ages 12-17; in this process she had also to deal with their parents because they were the ones who would ultimately decide and pay for that fashion. Mary was the product of a cosmopolitan city, where unity was obtained via diversity; where the various cultures produced a universal layer. Most young Australian individuals were by now becoming customers of world fashion, as television brought gigantic changes in fashion alertness.
The general manager of the Myer Emporium chain of stores then was an ultra conservative individual; a very competent manager, a dynamic leader and a very reserved negotiator who was also chairing the board. His name was Ken Steele. Consequently, it was natural that Mary’s innovative plans were received initially with hesitation. She could not forget when she was called to attend his office. He received her sceptical and dubious: “I wish to remind you that the term ‘unisex’ remains a provocative nomenclature in this establishment; The word ‘sex’ in any form or meaning is barred from this enterprise; we have a long tradition of ethics and values here,” he explained as he was flipping the papers on his desk. “Give me a chance to advance my plan; please give me access to the main windows of the firm, Mr Steele,” Mary had uttered cautiously. It was the most decisive battle that she won in her early years of settlement prior to reaching the years of maturity.
Mary felt confident and triumphant as she was entering her commercial youth section as a sales assistant manager, that day. At the age of twenty four, she already felt mature enough to survive intra-family disaster, one revolution and the destiny of the refugees. “We pioneered the introduction of unisex jeans; other companies later on tried to imitate our initiative; the company ‘Just Jeans’ and other just followed our example.”
In the meantime, Nina remained on guard of the household, as Mary was fully preoccupied with her business and travelling in the European capitals trying to tempt the fashion aspirations of Australia’s youth.
In early 1981 Mary, having divorced Niko, met and married another compatriot Tassos Revis, who was born in Alexandria. Mary and Tassos Revis married on 16 February 1982 in Fitzroy Gardens. Their best man was Solomon Lew, the chief shareholder of Myer. Mary and Tassos had met on a number of occasions during the socials at the club of the Greeks from Egypt and Middle East in South Melbourne. Mary was working then as buyer manager with the Myers Department store; an astute administrator and capable high-profile executive, executing and supervising buying transactions mainly from Europe. Following their marriage, Mary’s son Michael and her mother Nina moved into their house in Bulleen with Tassos. From then onward, Mary continued her charismatic career at Myers and later on at Portmans. Over the years she devoted her time and resources to serve with dignity and was distinguished as one of the most talented corporate buyers in the commercial world of the superstores in Australia.
But it wasn’t only her fashionable work she was renowned for; Mary was also heavily involved in the Greek community. In the ’90s, she joined the management committee of the national Centre for Hellenic Studies and Research (EKEME) and served for ten years as a board member. She was also invited by Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University Professor Michael Osborne in 2002 to join the University Council until her resignation in 2009; this had been the first Greek woman appointed to serve in the University Council. In 2001 she was one of the main stakeholders of the Society for Hellenic Studies and Research, which was established and incorporated in Victoria to acquire the building premises of the NCHSR (EKEME). Her charisma, talent and perseverance on duty will be missed.