Paul Gorman is…

Inside Fiorucci’s first store in Milan in the early 70s

Aug 5th, 2022

//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.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

First copy of Totally Wired is in!

Aug 5th, 2022

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:

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Post-Pistol – a timely look at Malcolm McLaren’s London at Fora Soho tonight

Jun 9th, 2022

What with Pistol and all, it seems timely to discuss Malcolm McLaren’s place in the scheme of things so tonight journalist Helen Barrett and I will be in conversation at a London Society event about the late cultural iconoclast’s relationship with the city of his birth. Here is a selection of visuals from this evening’s presentation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

‘He used the city as a playground for artistic expression’: Mapping Malcolm McLaren’s London life on June 9

May 25th, 2022

++ 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Malcolm McLaren’s London Life with Helen Barrett at the London Society on June 9

Apr 26th, 2022

In the evening June 9 I’ll be in Soho for a London Society event about the London life of the late cultural provocateur Malcolm McLaren.

At workplace venue Fora in Broadwick Street writer Helen Barrett and I will be discussing the ways in which the man born in Stoke Newington and buried in Highgate Cemetery used the city as the springboard for his dizzying range of creative and subversive activities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , ,

Barney Bubbles website launched

Mar 30th, 2022

//barneybubbles.com//

The all-new Barney Bubbles website has been launched as part of the celebration to mark what would have been the graphic genius’s 80th birthday this year.

Read the rest of this entry »

TAGS: None

Enough Get Backery! Let’s celebrate Yoko Ono’s 70 years at the vanguard

Feb 9th, 2022

//Painting To Be Stepped On, Yoko Ono, 1961. Photograph: George Maciunas//

“People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles, but I think the Beatles ruined her in many ways”

Anne Bean, artist, to The Guardian, 2021.

Saturated as mass culture has recently been by Get Backery, I note the lack of celebration for another significant anniversary: 70 years since Yoko Ono became the first female student to be accepted onto the philosophy course at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University in 1952.

As noted in Inventing Downtown, Melissa Rachleff’s incisive history of New York’s artist-run galleries from the early 50s to the mid-60s, Ono left Gakushuin after two terms to join her parents in Manhattan, where she promptly enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College to study poetry and composition.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Talking Barney Bubbles in the Los Angeles Review of Books

Jan 25th, 2022

I’m featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books in conversation with the journalist and musician Elizabeth Nelson about the life and times of the late graphic designer Barney Bubbles.

Read the LARB piece here.

Nelson has also recorded a tribute to the late graphic artist with her band The Paranoid Style. The track was released yesterday and is available to stream/download via Bandcamp.

Here’s the song lyric video complete with customised Bubbles artworks:

The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, the third edition of my monograph, is published by Thames & Hudson this summer accompanied by specialist imprint Volume’s limited edition A Box of Bubbles. Order your’s here.

Tags: , , , , ,

A selection from my archive in Subscribe, the exhibition about artists and alternative magazines at the Art Institute of Chicago

Jan 21st, 2022

//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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Creative Review celebrates A Box Of Bubbles

Jan 20th, 2022

British design media outlet Creative Review has reported on the publication of A Box Of Bubbles, the forthcoming limited edition boxed and enhanced edition of the new monograph The Wild World Of Barney Bubbles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , ,