Had a look around the new little Carnaby Street exhibition (at 38, Carnaby Street….shockingly enough) on Monday. Mixed feelings about this one, since it’s both brilliantly informative (I, personally, had no idea that London Mob were created to be sold out of Pussy Galore and makes me wonder exactly how rare actual Pussy Galore labels are….) whilst missing out huge chunks of important stuff (What? No mention of The Small Faces? For shame…) and being a bit strangely put together. It is a glut of information, and it’s always nice to see anything new about things you [think you] know inside out.

However, the displays are a bit cruddy, to say the least, and the book is completely hopeless. £16 for a glossy book of photos of the cabinets. Complete with shadows, so you can’t even read all the cards. Huh? I had also just been wandering around taking photos for myself, and no one told me off. So I saved myself £16 and probably did a better job for the purposes of retaining the new information.

Hmmm. I didn't take a photo of my very unimpressed face. I will leave that to your imagination.

The clothes they had borrowed from Pop Boutique were a bit hopeless. There was one Carnaby Street piece, a slightly dull Seventies Aristos dress, and the rest were just generic Sixties. Why didn’t they call me? They could have borrowed a psychedelic John Stephen dress, a Pussy Galore dress, a Foale and Tuffin….whatever. Strange people.

Precious....one day, one day....

On the plus side, alongside the information, there was an awesome clown-frill Foale and Tuffin blouse I wanted to rescue from being hung limply in a bizarre display. A lovely spliced film reel of Carnaby Street footage projects onto a wall. And, best of all, some photos by Philip Townshend. You can’t buy them officially, it would seem, and they appear in the ‘book’ only as photos of photos. So I just took photos of the photos myself. Pah.

Anyway, the excitement ensued from the fact that there’s a photo of Ossie, presumably standing in John Stephen where his graduate collection was sold (another factoid I was unaware of prior to this), and MY ‘Lips’ dress is hanging just behind him. And then it appears in another shot of a model. Woohoo. Squee squee squee.