Inspirational Illustrations: The year of the beautiful body

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Heavenly. And it’s Wendy Buttrose again! Scanned from Vogue, January 1970.

Guy Day: Alan Bates

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Clothes by Gieves

While Oliver Reed is my declared rugged-actor-of-choice, I must admit that Alan Bates looks pretty hot in this feature from Vogue, September 1973. Not only are the tweedy, wooly clothes damn sexy, but he’s also got a red setter – my dream dog! Perfection…

Photos by John Vere Brown.

Alan Bates, photographed in his native Derbyshire, wearing the kind of country cashmeres and tweeds that the British do so well. He’s now in his first season with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford playing Petruchio in The Taming of The Shrew. He had previously completed over two years in the title role of Butley—first in London, when he won the 1971 Evening Standard Best Actor Award, then in New York where he collected a Tony Award, and earlier this year shooting the film version to be released here after its premiere in the States in October.

Clothes by Burberry

Clothes by Jaeger

Barbara Hulanicki: Art Deco W14

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A section of the studio. Beneath the gallery one discovers a sink, kettle. cooker below a thirties’ Grecian frieze. Art Deco chairs in peach moquette. Screen, with beaded shawl. purple plastic grapes behind a delicate nasturtium-leaf lamp hung with beaded fringe

Barbara Hulanicki at home in one cavernous studio which she found three years ago and filled with Art Deco from floor to ceiling. Walls, ceiling, stairs, all painted a rich matt brown, merge into the shadowy interior; angles and lines are softened and blurred. Colours, not walls, mark out living areas, a different shade for each section of space. Light is filtered through the brown-tinted glass of the high, patterned perpendicular window and a long fanlight in the roof. A brown spiral staircase, leafy with plastic twisting plants, leads to a long gallery which forms the dressing-rooms. Everywhere, an endlessly intricate arrangement of colour, pattern, space; a deep, dark brown jungle of the ornamental, the exotic, the glittering.

Photos by James Mortimer. Vogue, October 1975.

The dressing-room. Shades of peach and deepest brown, Creamy lighting from bulbs set behind opaque glass. Peach mirrors hung with beads, the dressing table, a darker shade of smoked peach, made up of tiny individual drawers. Stool topped with smoked peach glass.

The bath, a riot of peach and plastic flowers. Ornate brass taps, Art Deco screen. Brilliant blue glass, candlesticks and pearly plastic grapes.

Barbara Hulanicki in the sitting-room, the window open to reveal a jungle of climbing plants outside. In the background, a collection of Art Deco glass below the enormous mirror, at least six feet in diameter. Everywhere lamps, small, fringed or mushroom-topped on long, slender stems: everywhere figures, ferns, flowers. In foreground, a set of black/silver/turquoise vases and modelled head on decorated brass tray and glass-sided table: replica of a twenties’ cigarette girl, now bearing a tray of jewellery.

Looking down from the gallery into the studio, arranged into its separate “rooms”

The bed, above, hung with shawls, scattered with sequinned brocaded cushions. Barbara Hulanicki reflected in the bedside mirror on the writing desk and in the centre of the mirrored bed-head. On the right, a peach mirror flex set of shelves, with photographs, figures, eight Art Deco plastic handbags.