//George Hardie’s design for card announcing the opening of Universal Witness at 167 Fulham Road on November 17 1970//
Here’s another treasure from the trove of Design magazines given to me by the designer Paul Walters; the invitation for the opening of Paul Reeves’ west London boutique Universal Witness in November 1970.
//Interior of the first Fiorucci boutique, Galleria Passerella, Milan, 1972//
I am extremely grateful to artist and designer Paul Walters for his gift of dozens of issues of Design magazine dating to the dawn of the 1970s.
These are being catalogued and added to the collection I already have of the title; some were donated by Paul’s fellow artist and designer Steve Thomas a few years ago.
Design was founded in the mid-60s by the Design Council precursor the Council of Industrial Design, and back issues are a goldmine of visuals and text about most aspects of the design world, from interiors, posters and packaging to product innovation, architecture and popular culture.
//The report on the store opening in Design, December 1972//
I’m going to post a selection of stories that have caught my eye over the coming months, starting with the image at the top of the post: a rarely seen view inside Elio Fiorucci’s first boutique, which he opened in Milan’s Galleria Passerella in late 1972.
Fiorucci was much inspired, to put it politely, by Trevor Myles and Tommy Roberts’ pop-art fashion outlet Mr Freedom – which had gone out of business in the spring of 1972 – and commissioned artist Stan Peskett, who had produced murals for Roberts, to create a space which engaged customers with a similar energy: the yellow and red colour scheme was extended to the exposed piping and venting with insignia of sunrays emanating from fluffy clouds hovering over the clothing racks. Stan, who I interviewed a couple of years ago for my Malcolm McLaren biography, has described his interior for Fiorucci as ‘an installation’.
//Advert in Design, December 1972//
//Spread from fashion shoot featuring Mr Freedom designs, Nova October 1971//
Coincidentally, an ad in the same issue of Design featured an image of a model in Mr Freedom clothes which had appeared in Nova magazine the previous year. The advert was for the architecture and interiors publication Abitare, which continues to this day – see here.
I’m really jazzed about getting my hands on the first finished copy of Totally Wired, my history of the music press which is published by Thames & Hudson this autumn.
Designer Daniel Streat has done wonders with the day-the-world-turned-dayglo jacket concept and my choice of cover star Poly Styrene.
There are 60 or so illustrations, all magazines from my archive. The diversity reflects the content of the book, which covers the usual suspects – NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone – but will hopefully turn readers onto the unexpected and surprising, from Black Music and Collusion to WET, Ben Is Dead and Girlfrenzy.
Totally Wired is published in the UK and elsewhere on September 22 and in North America on November 29. It is available to order now from all good booksellers as well as my Bookshop page at uk.bookshop.org/shop/paulgorman or by clicking on this panel:
++ McLaren outside the empty Centre Point, spring 1979. Photo: Barry Plummer ++
Rare and exclusive images will be on display during the forthcoming event about the late Malcolm McLaren’s London life at Fora Soho on June 9.
//Subscribe exhibition ident//
//Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (right) featured in The Uniform Backlash, The i-D Bible Part 2, 1989. Photography Daniel Kohlbacher, styling Simon Foxton. Paul Gorman Archive//
Beginning in the early 1970s—as under-represented groups were demanding new forms of visibility following the emergence of political movements such as Black Power and the Stonewall Rebellion—a handful of British and American photo-driven alternative magazines came on the scene.
The Face, i-D, Rags, Out/Look, and other new publications amplified marginalized voices, especially those of queer makers and makers of colour, and made room for those makers to question who and what was accepted as mainstream. These publications introduced a hybrid model within the magazine industry: combining the high production standards and engagement with fashion of “powerhouse” publications such as Vogue and Life with the use of collage in zines and the text/image provocations of underground newspapers. In the end, these alternative magazines transformed their industry.
From the introduction to Subscribe.
Two years ago, just as the enormity of the pandemic was emerging, I met American curators Solveig Nelson and Michal Raz-Russo in London to discuss making a contribution to an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago about the significance of alternative magazines to Western culture.
Working on my forthcoming book The Rise & Fall Of The Music Press has brought home to me the brilliance of publications and journalists who have been marginalised in the story of the media sector inaugurated by the launch of The Melody Maker (as it was then known) in 1926.
//Malcolm McLaren between Patti Smith and David Johansen with Cyrinda Foxe and Lenny Kaye, Sheep Meadow, Central Park, May 11, 1975. Photo: Danny Fields//
//Close up: Malcolm McLaren refreshes himself behind Smith and Johansen//
46 years after music manager Danny Fields took the photograph of a group of New York’s 70s demi-monde at the top of this post I’ve spotted the previously unidentified person behind them: the subject of my latest book, Malcolm McLaren (who appears to be chugging a half-bottle of Smirnoff).
//Left: ‘Waitress dress’ designed by Diana Crawshaw for Mr Freedom 1971. Right: Karen Elson models Moschino dress in the Italian luxury brand’s campaign for its SS22 resort collection//
Even by the cynical standards of today’s fashion industry, the lifting – down to the closest detail – of a particular early 1970s design for British pop art store Mr Freedom by Italian luxury brand Moschino is breathtaking.
‘UNBELIEVABLE’ was the take of a leading fashion journalist while an internationally renowned fashion designer told me they thought it was ‘Outrageous!’
‘I’m sickened,’ says Diana Crawshaw, who came up with the original of this and many other designs for Mr Freedom’s owners Trevor Myles and Tommy Roberts between 1970 and 1972. ‘It’s terrible that they’ve simply been able to take things I spent a lot of time and effort on realising.’
The new version of Crawshaw’s waitress dress is the centrepiece of the Moschino collection, which is the brainchild of creative director Jeremy Scott. As well as direct quotes of these individual pieces, Moschino’s campaign appears as a tribute to a particular phase of Mr Freedom’s brief life, when its second set of premises at 20 Kensington Church Street included the cartoonish restaurant Mr Feed’Em.
//Mr Feed’Em waitress in hamburger repeat print dress in the restaurant 1971. Photography: Tim Street Porter/Elizabeth Whiting & Associates//
//Left: Mr Freedom designer Jim O’Connor. Photography: Tim Street Porter/Elizabeth Whiting & Associates//
//Mr Feed’Em interior. Photography: Tim Street Porter/Elizabeth Whiting & Associates//
And so the new Moschino campaign is replete with repeat prints and references to fried eggs, dripping hamburgers, hot dogs and ice-cream, all Mr Freedom and Mr Feed’Em motifs, as you can see in the film Scott has released to coincide with the collection drop:
And Crawshaw isn’t alone. The use of colour contrasts in the Moschino garments and on accessories such as bags imitates those used by another Mr Freedom designer, Jim O’Connor, as you can see here from this jumpsuit design in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection:
//Jim O’Connor for Mr Freedom jumpsuit collar and lapel detail. Photo: Paul Gorman Collection//
//Biker jacket handbag Moschino SS22//
That there is a paucity of new ideas in mainstream fashion is not news though I can’t help wondering about the role of those operators of vintage collections who are regularly raided by fashion designers in return for payments and thus encourage this behaviour.
Diana Crawshaw started her career at the King’s Road branch of I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet before moving on to make important contributions not just to Mr Freedom but also the legendary outlet Paradise Garage at 430 King’s Road.
//Frederiques Cifuentes photographs Diana Crawshaw outside 430 King’s Road for the King’s Road Fashion & Music Trail, 2012.//
A charming and constantly creative person, Diana was a Royal College a graduate and is now in her 70s. I interviewed her for the King’s Road music and fashion trail I created for Kensington & Chelsea Council in 2012 and when last I bumped into her (inevitably in Worlds End Books) she snapped a photograph of me and sent a flattering portrait she drew from it.
Diana continues as an inveterate Chelsea-ite as a palmist for the enduring outlet Wilde Ones (though at the moment is giving phone consultations). You can book a reading with her through the Wilde Ones website.
//The two maps are housed in handsome folders//
//The guide was designed by Ricardo Santos and includes photography of the band, quotes and a card for my Malcolm McLaren biography//
My new guide out with Herb Lester Associates is out now.
A celebration of the London lives of the Sex Pistols and their charismatic – some might say notorious – manager Malcolm McLaren, it comprises two fold-out maps with 100-plus addresses from birthplaces, schools, colleges, art schools, pubs, clubs, venues and boutiques to such diverse places as Buckingham Palace (where the Pistols signed to A&M Records), the Soho gay club Il Duce (frequented by McLaren after leaving art school in the early 70s) and the Shepherds Bush remand home where the teenage Steve Jones resided before being pulled up before various beaks on assorted burglary charges.
//There are nearly 60 entries charting the lives of the Pistols in London//
//The Pistols map shows how Punk Rock was at its dark heart a London thing//
The Pistols maps covers the group’s 29-month existence and the lives of the five members as they relate to the British capital, while McLaren’s shows how this fourth generation Scottish/Jewish provocateur used the city as a weapon of sex, style and subversion.
//Born in Stoke Newington, McLaren roamed the capital, from Lewisham and Clapham to Chelsea and Notting Hill to Fitzrovia and Oxford Street to Whitechapel and Rotherhithe//
//No coincidence that some of the major projects of McLaren’s life – a psychogeography of Oxford Street, the shop at 430 King’s Road and his campaign to become Mayor of London – were firmly rooted in the city//
SITUATION VACANT: Sex Pistols and Malcolm McLaren in London is available from Herb Lester Associates here.
//Outside my local “The Roebuck” in London SE1 yesterday//
//Barney Bubbles’ 1966 designs for Woodpecker and Strongbow ciders feature on the bus being used in filming//
This is freaky. Our local has been transformed into the King’s Road pub The Roebuck for the filming of Danny Boyle’s forthcoming FX series Pistol, based on guitarist Steve Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy.
The thing is I knew the Roebuck very well; it is in fact the place where I first met Malcolm McLaren, at the age of 15 in 1975. By happenstance I was drinking in the pub with an older brother the night McLaren recruited John Lydon to the Sex Pistols.
//The Roebuck in the late 70s. Photo by Barry Beattie/ANL/Shutterstock (5823647a)//
At The Roebuck I came across such individuals as the gangster John Bindon and his well-born paramour Vicki Hodge and the male model David “Piggy” Worth. One night we spotted the infamous art dealer Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser with some ne’er-do-wells. It was that sort of place.
//The Roebuck was a couple of minutes’ walk east of 430 King’s Road where the Mini driven by Vivienne Westwood, Steve Jones and others could often be seen. This recreation even includes balls of mohair wall in the back//
I returned there over the following years, particularly after I moved to neighbouring Kensington in 1977 – it was a 15-minute walk away. By that time Punk was shifting overground and the upstairs snooker room was the scene of much nefarious activity.
A wild twist is that pioneering 60s designs by the late graphic genius Barney Bubbles have been recreated as period adverts on a bus which is being used for filming.
The conjunction of two of the subjects of my books with a fondly remembered venue 20 yards from where I live is kind of wild.
| Paul Gorman is a writer. This is his blog: art, books, conversation, cults, dancing, design, encounters, environments, events, film, galleries, groups, individuals, invitations, magazines, music, opinions, performance, photography, places, press, privacy, spaces, style, thoughts + views. |
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