//From the catalogue for Christie’s Pop Culture auction, June 20,2014//

Six years ago on The Look blog I posted images and memories supplied by Terry Slobodzian, who ran boutiques Explosion and Lacy Lady in the upstate New York town of North Tonawanda in the late 60s and early 70s.

Such shops as Slobodzian’s and The People’s Space (run by Tommy Hilfiger in the neighbouring Emira) were part of a regional US trend for wild and usually wildly-named clothing stores sparked by eccentric retail ventures such as Granny Takes A Trip in England.

As I discovered through contact with vintage dealer/expert Ben Cooney, these are the places who showed at the National Boutique Show in NYC and broadcast their wares from the back pages of Baron Wolman’s fashion/music mag Rags: A Long Time Comin’ in San Anselmo, The Bead Experience in Baltimore, The Great Linoleum Clothing Experiment in LA, Bouncing Bertha’s Banana Blanket and Jenny Waterbags in New York, Mom’s Apple Grave in San Francisco…you get the picture.

//From The Look blog, December 2008//

Granny’s occupied a totemic status for the people who operated these outlets; Slobodzian visited London on a buying spree in 1970 and naturally dropped in at 488 King’s Road. “What a trip it was,” he told me in 2008.“Every piece fit like a glove right off the rack. The craftmanship and choice of fabric was amazing.”

Now Slobodzian’s Granny’s suits as featured on The Look blog are in this Friday’s Pop Culture sale at Christie’s along with two shirts from Bouncing Bertha’s Banana Blanket.

Here’s Rod Stewart in the same paneled velvet suit design as Lot 55 in the sale:

Read The Look post here.

Find out more about the Pop Culture sale here.

Cassandra Tondro has uploaded pages from Rags Magazine here.

Tags: A Long Time Comin', Ben Cooney, Bouncing bertha's Banana Blanket, Cassandra Tondro, Christie's, Emira, Explosion, Jenny Waterbags, Lacy Lady, Mom's Apple Grave, North Tonawanda, Rags, Rod Stewart, Terry Slobodzian, The Bead Experience, The Great Linoleum Clothing Experiment, The People's Space, Tommy Hilfiger

//Scrubbing up well. Cygan with auction house assistant. Photo: Christie's//

M.Goldstein’s Nathaniel Lee Jones is on fire at the moment; on the heels of next week’s Reginald Alan Westaway exhibition in Prague, his awesome 9ft-high robot Cygan goes on sale at Christie’s Out Of The Ordinary auction on September 5.

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Tags: Christie's, M. Goldstein, Nathaniel Lee Jones, Prague, Reginald Alan Westaway

//From the catalogue for next week's auction//

The spirit of great British boutique culture is summoned by a couple of lots in next week’s Pop Culture sale at Christie’s.

One is a previously unpublished June 1967 photograph of Jim Hendrix not in Carnaby Street as captioned, but outside the tobacconist Finlay’s, which was in Foubert’s Place. It’s evident from the carrier bag in his famous left hand that the guitarist had just visited  I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, which was next door to Finlay’s and the place where he bought the Hussar’s jacket worn in this photograph and at Monterey Pop that same month.

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Tags: Christie's, I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet, Jane Wentworth, Jimi Hendrix, Jon Wealleans, Kleptomania, Rave, Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, The Wick, Tony Sanchez