She designed jumpers worn by Princess Diana and Olivia Newton-John, then lost everything

P : Fashion Liz Newman's career took off in the 80s, after she started a knitwear label that became globally renowned.  (Supplied: Tricia Watkinson) Liz Newman at her surprise Knitwear: Back to the Future exhibition at the 2026 South Australian Living Artists Festival. (Supplied: Tricia Watkinson) At just 20, Liz Newman started a knitwear label that became globally renowned. She said it really took off in the mid-80s when Hey Hey It's Saturday star Jacki MacDonald started wearing her jumpers. "Every time Jacki wore one of the designs on Hey Hey, the Channel Nine switchboard would jam with people wanting to know where they could get the knitwear," Ms Newman said. Liz Newman was a national and global success. (Supplied: Tricia Watkinson) From a boutique in Twin Street in the Adelaide CBD, she was selling jumpers to stars like ice-skating duo Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, Olivia Newton-John, and even Princess Diana. She was employing more than 500 hand knitters, many based in country locations around Australia, to make the jumpers using intarsia, a style of knitting complex patterns using multiple colours. "It was a huge part of my life and an amazing time of my life, and then it all ended very quickly," Ms Newman said. Hard times ahead A culmination of unfortunate events, including the collapse of the SA Bank, led to the label's demise in the mid-1990s. "The state bank was going under, and they took me with them," Ms Newman said. Jayne Torvill, Christopher Dean, Olivia Newton-John, and Princess Diana are some celebrities who have worn Liz Newman's designs. (Supplied: Tricia Watkinson) "It was probably one of the worst periods of my life because I had worked so hard." But there were more hard times to come. In 2011 she was diagnosed with a brain tumour that she said was the size of an orange . It was not an easy journey. At rock bottom, she was living in housing trust accommodation and surviving on the disability pension. "It's been really hard. I don't have any superannuation, I don't have anything to fall back on, and surviving on a pension is really hard," she said. Meanwhile, her now vintage jumpers were selling for huge sums of money, but Ms Newman had kept only six of them, and lamented the loss of the patterns, which had been sold off with the business while she was unwell. "My cousin rang me, he works in South Korea, and he said there was a shop with one of my jumpers in the window and it was $1,000," she said.