//Mr Freedom 1971 design in archive selection, Vogue UK, June 2012.//
Ahead of Tommy Roberts’ appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek and London Live 94.9’s Robert Elms Show tomorrow, there has been a flurry of media mentions of the mould-breaking boutiques with which he was involved.
//From The Sunday Times Magazine, November 28, 1971.//
The joy of writing about a subject as rich as Tommy Roberts is that research turns up an apparently limitless supply of fabulous material.
Even the tangential stuff – such as this from my archive, a spread from a 1971 Sunday Times Magazine – gets me going.
//Frederiques Cifuentes photographs Diana Crawshaw outside 430 King's Road.//
Filming continued yesterday for this summer’s King’s Road Fashion & Music Trail, which is is being launched to visitors to west London’s historic thoroughfare as part of Kensington & Chelsea’s InTransit festival in July.
We will be covering all the boutique manifestations at 430 King’s Road; for a start I plumped for its incarnation as Paradise Garage in 1971, operated by Trevor Myles with Chris Snow and Diana Crawshaw.
//Left: Living Legend: Modern English by Diane Solway, W magazine, May 2012. Right screen-grab of spread from Husk, Spring/Summer 2012.//
My new book MR FREEDOM – Tommy Roberts: British Design Genius is featured in the new editions of US fashion monthly W magazine and European quarterly Husk.
With a foreword by Paul Smith and contributions from the designers who created the work sold in Roberts’ shops as well as friends, family and design authorities, MR FREEDOM is published in June by Adelita and distributed in the US by DAP.
//Stetson, embroidered shirt and hand-tooled leather belt from The Emperor Of Wyoming. Photo: David Parkinson for Club International, February 1974.//
Billy Murphy’s boutique The Emperor Of Wyoming was an extremely important staging post not just in the story of British rock and roll fashion but also the development of the vintage scene in this country.
Opened by Murphy at 404 King’s Road in 1972, TEOW specialised in selected items of Westernwear and American clothing at a time when the pickings were slim for such garments in London.
This is the front of the jacket of my new book Mr Freedom – Tommy Roberts: British Design Hero.
British Design From 1948: Innovation In The Modern Age – the new book accompanying the forthcoming show at the V+A – is a bumper edition: 400 pages weighing in at 5lbs.
It’s cheering to see Barney Bubbles’ design Ian Dury With Love granted upfront prominence; the poster is in select company given special treatment by the book’s designer, Barnbrook’s Daniel Streat. The others are: Cecil Beaton’s 1953 coronation portrait of The Queen, a shot of Damien Hirst’s Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy and Brian Duffy’s Aladdin Sane portrait of David Bowie.
If you’re in Austin TX – and there’s a chance you might be since hundreds of thousands of people have descended on the city for the annual SXSW film/music/interactive conflab taking place there this week – try and nip along to the Ray Ban Legendary Visions house at 78 Rainey Street on the eastside for a gander at the room collages/installations I have engineered to reflect my take on the look of music.
//Front cover (No Pussyfooting), Fripp & Eno, EG/Island, 1973.//
The final piece in Tate Modern’s current Yayoi Kusama show – her dramatic Infinity Mirror Room – brought to my vinyl-fixated mind one of the greatest record sleeves of all time: the gatefold for (No Pussyfooting), the album released in 1973 by Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.
All of a piece with the music it packages – prismatic, playful, calm, cerebral, oblique – the four-part composition was photographed and designed at Eno’s behest by photographer/filmmaker Willie Christie.
| Paul Gorman is a writer. This is his blog: art, books, conversation, cults, dancing, design, encounters, environments, events, film, galleries, groups, individuals, invitations, magazines, music, opinions, performance, photography, places, press, privacy, spaces, style, thoughts + views. |
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