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“Fashion seemed to be the place where music and art came together. Creating my own clothes was like jumping into the musical end of painting. The shop became a natural extension of my studio.” Malcolm McLaren. The Look, 2001. Featuring a rare portrait of Malcolm McLaren displaying his wares inside the recently opened Let It […]
Perfect Binding, the recently published book by British experimental filmmaker/broadcaster/bookseller William English, is a psychogeographic portrait of a particular strain of cultural activity in a particular place at a particular time: the Midlands city of Leicester from the 1950s to the 70s.
“Those blue suede shoes had a magical association that seemed authentic. They represented an age of desperate romantic revolt to change your life.” Malcolm McLaren, notes on his life in fashion, 1997 I’m celebrating the 70th anniversary of the introduction of George Cox & Co’s first creeper at the Port Eliot Festival next week with […]
There has been a breakthrough in my challenge to Dame Vivienne Westwood, her co-author Ian Kelly and publisher Picador over their lifting of substantial amounts of material from my book The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion for the designer’s 2014 “authorised biography”. The paperback edition of Vivienne Westwood published last week contains a whopping […]
It is a little known fact that David Bowie was an occasional visitor to 430 King’s Road when it was operating as Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die. This manifestation of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s revolutionary boutique – which paid design tribute to the fetishistic studded leather attire of Britain’s early 60s […]
Electric Colour Company were intent on enlivening the visual landscape of grey London town by desecrating polite notions of decor and good taste My feature on the pioneering but sorely undervalued design studio Electric Colour Company appears in the current issue of UK GQ Style.
Jenni Murray: You’ve said ‘clothes were politics long before fashion’. What did you mean by that? Vivienne Westwood: I have no idea. Jenni Murray: Was it something you said to Ian (Kelly) and now you’ve forgotten? Vivienne Westwood: No…is that what it says in the book? Jenni Murray: Yes Vivienne Westwood: Well then, he might […]
The September 2012 issue of GQ features this David Parkinson photograph of the interior of Tommy Roberts and Trevor Myles’ Mr Freedom at 430 King’s Road. One of a number of previously-unpublished photographs in Mr Freedom – Tommy Roberts: British Design Hero, this shot captures the extraordinary fit-out Myles and Roberts’ commissioned from pioneering East […]
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.
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 […]