Electric Colour Company’s sign for Time Out’s Gray’s Inn Road offices, 1970

//ECC’s sign on the facade of the Time Out offices at 374 Gray’s Inn Road, King’s Cross, London, autumn 1970. Photos courtesy Electric Colour Company/Andrew Greaves//

Recent encounters with Time Out founder Tony Elliott have brought to mind the audacious sign created by design collective Electric Colour Company to mark the magazine’s move into premises at 374 Gray’s Inn Road.

Continue reading Electric Colour Company’s sign for Time Out’s Gray’s Inn Road offices, 1970

Exclusive: Inside Paradise Garage at 430 King’s Road with Electric Colour Company, 1971

//Interior, 430 King's Road, Chelsea, May 1971. Note coconut matting, shack-style dressing room doors, trompe de l'oeil gate painted on stockroom door... and fake tiger. Photography: David Parkinson.//

I first wrote about Electric Colour Company – the design studio formed in the East End by four fine art students in the late 60s – in The Look and then in more detail here.

//Amid the singlets, printed sweatshirts and appliqued denim, a bamboo cage housed birds of paradise, suspended from the matting covered ceiling.//

In my view, ECC deserves much greater recognition for executing some very clever work in the field of retail design and interiors in the period 1969-1973.

Continue reading Exclusive: Inside Paradise Garage at 430 King’s Road with Electric Colour Company, 1971

‘Because of the economic crisis, people are trying to consume as fast as possible. Ideas are dead; there aren’t any to express the mood. Fashion is irrelevant’: Malcolm McLaren + SEX, November 1975

//Sex assistant Jordan, Gallery International, Vol 1, no 4.//

It’s unlikely that cities will shake or nations start to rock under the impact of Malcolm McLaren’s sexual revolution. A few people might die though.

Malcolm McLaren, at 30, is a mixture of entrepreneurial cultist, sexual evangelist, businessman, artist, fetishist and political philosopher; a psychotic visionary in the ephemeral subculture of the fashion world.

David May, Gallery International Vol 1 no 4.

In November 1975 – by which time his charges the Sex Pistols had just embarked on live performances – Malcolm McLaren was interviewed by journalist David May at 430 King’s Road, then in full bloom as radical retail venture SEX.

Continue reading ‘Because of the economic crisis, people are trying to consume as fast as possible. Ideas are dead; there aren’t any to express the mood. Fashion is irrelevant’: Malcolm McLaren + SEX, November 1975