Paula Stafford is synonymous with the bikini. For three decades from the 1950s, she was Australia’s best known bikini designer, her garments renowned for their stylish cut, reversibility and quality. Her designs showed that ‘less is more’ and put Queensland's Gold Coast fashion on the map.

Pauline Broughton (Paula) Stafford was born in 1920 in Victoria, the daughter of Leonard Alan Robertson, a naval officer, and his wife Ruth, nee Hogg. During the late 1930s Paula studied dress design at the Melbourne Technical College and the Emily Macpherson School of Domestic Science. She was serving with the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service in Toowoomba at the time of her marriage in 1943 to Beverley Stafford, a soldier from Southport. Later moving to Surfers Paradise, the couple established a business hiring beach umbrellas, chairs and windbreaks to visitors.

Paula Stafford made her first bikini soon after the two-piece swimsuit hit the world in 1946. (The term “bikini” was coined by the French designer Louis Reard after that year’s nuclear explosion on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.) Originally Paula made bikinis for friends, before she began supplying visitors to Surfers Paradise. By 1952 business was so brisk that she established a workshop in her Cavill Avenue apartment. Her reputation soared that year when a model, sporting her latest bikini design, was warned by a local beach inspector that the garment was too brief. Four years later Paula organised Australia’s first bikini parade, held in the Sydney Town Hall to promote Queensland’s Gold Coast.

As well as her boutique in Cavill Avenue, Surfers Paradise, Paula Stafford supplied outlets throughout Australia and overseas.

In 1990 Paula gave a collection of her beach wear to the Queensland Museum. Her papers and photographs are held by the John Oxley Library.