Press Enter to Search or ESC to Close
Great news that the British Library has digitised the archive of one of the most important magazines of modern times: Spare Rib. If you don’t know it or haven’t seen the publication, you are in for a treat. As the British Library’s politics and public life curator Polly Russell says, Spare Rib was “funny, irreverent, […]
//Malcolm McLaren, 1973. Photo: David Parkinson. Bryan Ferry, 1976. Photo Richard Wallis// A couple of years back I showed examples of photography by the late David Parkinson to car-nut graphic design maestro Jules Balme; I knew he would be interested in the incorporation of a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado in a 1973 Let It Rock fashion […]
“There were many kings of the King’s Road at different periods of time but there was only one Emperor” Lloyd Johnson Very sad to note the passing of Billy Murphy, a thoroughly lovely bloke whose contribution to street fashion – particularly in Britain and specifically in and around the King’s Road – is sorely underrated. […]
Ahead of the publication of my piece about the late photographer David Parkinson in GQ UK in a few weeks, here are a couple of masterful images which demonstrate his stylised, simultaneously gritty and glamorous approach. Both stem from issues of men’s magazine Club International; the 1974 cover shot model is wearing Parkinson’s decorated Lewis […]
I’ve been enjoying researching materials relating to the late photographer David Parkinson for a feature for GQ magazine, so thought I’d share some of the images I dug out of the Parkinson archive concerning the 70s King’s Road retro clothing store Acme Attractions. Parkinson’s position as fashion editor of Paul Raymond’s sophisticated soft-porn magazine Club […]
Glam! The Performance Of Style – the exhibition which locates early 70s glam rock in the context of fine art and the interplay between “high” and mass culture – is opening at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, Austria later this month. I was a consultant to Glam!’s curator Darren Pih of Tate Liverpool, where the […]
Growing up in London in the 60s and 70s with an interest in the counterculture, music and street politics meant that the shaggy-headed figure of Mick Farren loomed large on the landscape.
Fashion shoots were little known aspect of the practice of design studio Hipgnosis, whose co-founder Storm Thorgerson died on Thursday. In line with the approach Thorgerson and his partner Aubrey Powell took with their raft of album sleeve commissions, the series of fashion spreads Hipgnosis produced for Club International in the early 70s were visually […]
Tucked away at the back of an issue of British soft-porn magazine Club International was a fashion shoot featuring clothing elements which denoted the crystallisation of the new art-directed glam aesthetic inaugurated by the release of Roxy Music’s first album a couple of months previously. The photographer was Karl Stoecker, the New Yorker who had […]
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 […]