Tomorrow I’ll be talking to interiors, homewares and textile designer Sue Timney about the fashion legacy of the King’s Road, the two-and-a-half mile thoroughfare in west London’s Chelsea where the late Mary Quant kicked off the boutique boom by opening her clothes shop Bazaar at 135a in 1955.
Continue reading Talking Fashion and the King’s Road with design legend Sue Timney
I’m looking forward to appearing at Pop Up, the subcultures festival being held in the Gloucestershire town of Stroud next month.
I’ll be comparing and contrasting the work of Barney Bubbles with that of his rivals Hipgnosis in the 70s and 80s with Mark Blake, author of the new book about the British music design studio and Pop Up organiser and writer Ben Wardle.
Continue reading Talking Barney Bubbles x Hipgnosis at Stroud’s Pop Up festival on March 26
Curator and writer Faye Dowling’s latest venture is the intriguing Goth Shop, which enters the physical realm tonight as a pop-up gallery and retail outlet in London’s Spitalfields.
Continue reading Goth Shop: The beautiful and the damned in Spitalfields for the next 10 days
The British sex magazine Curious was well-named: for the duration of its near-decade long run from the late 1960s it was indeed a curiosity.
Continue reading Bizarre semi-naked woodland Mr Freedom shoot, I was a TV, Edward Bell’s ‘The Queen Of Clapham’… Inside the infamous Curious magazine featuring David Bowie + Freddie Burretti on its cover
The jury is out on this autumn’s relaunch of the print edition of venerated British style magazine The Face; as I suggested here it’s going to take more than one splashy issue to assess whether the proposition has legs as we enter the 2020s (next May will mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of The Face by Nick Logan).
//Outtakes of the eight women featured in London Belles, published in the December 7 1973 issue of West One magazine. Photography © John Bishop. No reproduction without permission//
Although high fashion may be a thing of the past, what has replaced it is individuality and freedom to express. Women like these now make up their own minds about what they are and what they wear. Perhaps the rest of us should get the message and start being living fashion.
West One, December 7, 1973
I’m really honoured that veteran fashion photographer John Bishop has granted me this exclusive to show previously unpublished outtakes from the landmark London Belles feature he shot for the 1970s British magazine West One.
I’m indebted to Tate Liverpool curator Darren Pih for the connection between a photograph which appeared in ARK 33 – the edition of the Royal College Of Art magazine which was the subject of my last post – and a contemporaneous work by the artist Billy Apple.
Of the many talented photographers who provided The Face with its visual verve, Kate Simon was uniquely positioned to chronicle the cutting edge cultural developments in New York in the 1980s.
Simon had spent much of the previous decade in London, photographing musicians and performers from Bob Marley and David Bowie to the Sex Pistols and The Clash (whose debut album features her striking portrait of Strummer, Jones and Simonon). Crucially, Simon’s work also appeared in the New Musical Express during The Face founder Nick Logan’s editorship of the music paper.
I’m very much looking forward to Women Look At Women, the new exhibition which explores feminine identity through the work of 13 internationally renowned women artists opening at London’s Richard Saltoun tonight.
The striking and intimate portraits are of men Borel is either close friends with, or met randomly. Straight, gay, trans, from various professions and backgrounds, the sitters in Homme Libre have an edge of some sort, be it in their stance and attitude, an air of mystery and romance, their strength and vulnerability, or they have reminded Borel of someone she once knew or saw in a film. The series explores ideas of masculinity seen from a female perspective, examining themes of intimacy and identity.
From the notes for Homme Libre
I am among the subjects of photographer Carla Borel’s exhibition Homme Libre, which opens next month at London’s A22 Gallery.
Continue reading Homme Libre: Carla Borel’s exhibition explores strength + vulnerability