Cosmopolitan, August 1974. Scanned by Miss Peelpants.
McCann by Bailey
Amongst the many new items I have just listed over at Vintage-a-Peel, is a superb piece by Gerald McCann. I have a huge fondness for McCann’s designs, and he was pretty easy on the eye as well.
Gerald McCann dress at Vintage-a-Peel. A snip at £85.
My own Gerald McCann dress was exhibited at the V&A in 2006 and remains one of my favourite pieces (although the size of my bum prevents me from wearing it, much like my beloved early Ossie Clark piece). I also have a beloved faux fur pea coat which has seen me through many a cold spell and pretty much goes with anything.
Similar coat scanned from Boutique by Marnie Fogg.
Thankfully he was also heavily featured in Marnie Fogg’s book Boutique, and the V&A hold an interview with him in their archives, so his place in the history books is somewhat more assured than many other ‘lost’ designers.
"The Young Individualist Thinks Nobody Can Like McCann Can".
McCann's designs in the window of Lord and Taylor in New York. Scanned from Boutique by Marnie Fogg.
My dress, beautifully photographed by the V&A
McCann designs illustrated. Scanned from Boutique by Marnie Fogg.
I was also delighted to find a rare bit of footage of the great man himself from 1967. It was a slightly convoluted journey to get there; an email from the lovely Miss Rayne got me searching for a certain Ann Ladbury, which then led to the BBC’s new Archive website. Turns out that Ann Ladbury was involved with a programme called Clothes That Count, and episodes from 1967 and 1969 were available to view. Each episode approached a different aspect of clothing, helping viewers to create their own versions at home, and each episode would have a guest designer. Lo and behold, who should have appeared in December 1967 but Gerald McCann!
I do hope that the BBC archives are viewable outside the UK, although I have my doubts, and that you can all follow this link and enjoy. Mr McCann first puts in an appearance at around 21:45, if you can’t be doing with all the home dressmaking malarkey early on…. I particularly love that he admits he can’t set a sleeve!
Hang tag scanned from Boutique by Marnie Fogg.
Many thanks to Paul Gorman for the invite to the opening of the superb Lloyd Johnson exhibition at Chelsea Space on Tuesday night. True to my usual form, I found it mighty hard to take any half-decent photos amongst the crowds so I must apologise for the poor quality which lies herein. I’m also definitely planning to return on a quiet weekday, so I can absorb it all properly.
I must confess that menswear is not one of my great areas of expertise, but I do know what I like. And those early Johnson and Johnson printed shirts and jackets are incredibly covetable – I actually cannot resist a novelty print. I know Mr Brownwindsor fancied a few of them, and it is yet another reminder of the tragedy of how dull most modern menswear is. (Snuggling up in a sloppy ‘La Rocka’ jumper, seen below, would also be very desirable!)
The highlight of the exhibition is probably the original ‘Johnsons’ shop frontage from within Kensington Market. Such a hallowed place, formerly full of many of my favourite designers of the Seventies and Eighties, it’s remarkable to see something like that having survived!
For me, La Rocka was just one of those names (like Red or Dead and Joe Bloggs) which stuck in my head during my childhood but which had little contextual information. This exhibition is a terrific insight into one man’s journey through several different eras of street style in London, always managing to stay idiosyncratic but never stalling at the one style. And as someone the other night said to me, you can’t really be different if you look the same as everyone else.
The exhibition runs until the 3rd March, so make sure you make a trip!
The wondrous Affendaddy, over at Flickr, has uploaded lots and lots of amazing street photos from his visit to London in 1976. Inadvertently, he has also captured the immediate aftermath of the death of Big Biba on Kensington High Street. These photos make me want to weep a little…
 |
| Rare non-grinning photo of me. My birthday outfit of Fifties rustic print cotton skirt and plain black strapless top, crochet shawl and vintage carved bone bracelet. Photo courtesy of Mr Brownwindsor. |
 |
| Photo courtesy of Mr Brownwindsor. I live in my crochet shawl during summer evenings… The one thing you can’t see in these photos is the beautiful pendant I was given that morning. I will give it its own special blog post soon! |
 |
|
Closest I could get to birthday-thunder-thief Jim Morrison |
 |
| I’m sure this happens a lot. I still couldn’t help myself though. |
 |
||
Petit Serge!!!
|
 |
| If you don’t buy my gear, one day I’ll probably take it for myself. Case in point, this dress has been on my site for ages and I finally caved in and wore it myself. I am going to keep it now. I love the colours and the cut (although it’s hard to see here). My ‘first day’ outfit. Photo courtesy of Mr Brownwindsor (whose photography skills are clearly superior to mine…). |
Brigitte and companion in Cannes, circa 1953
Brigitte rocking the headscarf look here, in an unusual candid shot.
I can’t help but love her as a brunette. Her very early period (seen here) and her later Sixties, early Seventies looks are my favourites. I resisted the Bardot love for a long while because it seemed such a cliché. I mean, who doesn’t cite her as an inspiration? But she’s a hard one to fight…
Scanned from Woman’s Mirror, May 1962
Years ago, in my hardcore Diana Rigg-memorabilia-collecting phase, I noticed and coveted a copy of Woman’s Mirror from 1966 with La Rigg on the front cover. I’ve only seen it this one time, on eBay, and it went way out of my price range. And considering I paid £30 for the Sunday Times magazine which featured John Bates’s designs for Diana, it must have been very steep for me to have not won it.
I mentioned it to Mr Brownwindsor a few weeks back, for some reason I can’t recall. I say mentioned, it may have been more like a moan. Wahhhh, poor me, I want this magazine, blah blah. The only difference now was that I am considerably more interested in the John Bates article it contains, than the Rigg one!
A few days after this, he mentioned having seen some copies of Woman’s Mirror in Snooper’s Paradise in Brighton. Spooky! No sign of the coveted issue (what would be the chances?) but definitely worth having a look in case there might be other interesting articles. So we mooched along on the Bank Holiday Monday. Had a look at some other issues of Woman’s Mirror, Woman’s Realm, Woman, Women!, Womanly, Women’s Troubles….etc etc. Then M noticed there were some more magazines in a glass cabinet. I look up, and there it is. Diana Rigg, with cut-out dotted line. THE issue. All other issues had been £3, surely this would be much more. But no. £3 it was.
I am a very happy lady, and I will be scanning/writing up the John Bates interview in due course.
…looking like, well, every other bride. One of my pet peeves is the current “phenomenon” where wedding dresses are concerned. If you watch an entire series of ‘Don’t Tell The Bride’ on BBC3 (which I haven’t done. Honest. Well, ok, maybe I have…) you might come away with the impression that wedding dress manufacturers have only got one dress on offer, then coming with various additional swags and sparkles but basically just the one silhouette. It’s the strapless cake. Oh yes.
This is not a strapless cake. It’s brilliantly bonkers!
The fact that all the Frustrated Bridezillas appear to faint with delight upon being strapped into something so vile, despite perhaps having bleated on for the whole episode about wanting something ‘different’ to the norm, confirms my belief that most brides lose all sense of reality somewhere along the way…
As a caveat, and as you can tell from what I’ve already written, I should point out that I’m probably not the best person to be reviewing an exhibition about wedding dresses… but, in the interests of being a good blogger, I went along anyway!
It was actually quite refreshing to take a look at The Fashion Museum’s current exhibition, What Will She Wear, which, despite the slightly cheesy Royal undertones in the title, is a wonderfully curated exhibition of Bath’s collection of wedding dresses down the years. As the ever lovely Iain R. Webb explained to me, they weren’t trying to create any kind of timeline or demonstrate particularly defining styles of any era. In fact, the pieces are grouped together in themes: silhouettes, fabrics, types of decorations. It’s certainly fascinating to see a Gina Fratini wedding dress alongside the Victorian styles which influenced her. Or a Bruce Oldfield facing a Victor Stiebel, both slimline and simple in silhouette, but a good sixty years apart.
It casts aside notions of one style for one era, which intrigued me. My mother was married in the prevailing ’empire line’ style, which had been popularised by John Bates’s mid-Sixties bridal designs for Jean Varon and continued to be popular until the late Seventies. Judging by many of the images you see from this era, you might be forgiven for thinking that it was the only style on offer, much like the modern ‘cake’ shape. But if all the ‘I wore this for my wedding’ Ossies I’ve seen down the years, and someone like the gorgeous Elegancemaison in her Biba coat and trousers, are anything to go by then there was a far wider variety of styles on offer at the time. It’s just a question of what you want to say about yourself as a person. Frankly, I think it’s the last time in your life you’d want to be thinking ‘I’ll have what she had!’.
A dear friend of mine is getting married towards the end of this year, and I couldn’t be more excited for her. (She knows I’m going to disown her if she turns up in a meringue! Only joking…. or am I?) So I’m not totally immune to the excitement of a wedding, despite my snippy cynicism I’m a big old romantic deep down. I just wish that more people would show a bit of imagination!
If you’re in or near Bath then I would recommend a trip to the Fashion Museum to see the exhibition. Unsurprisingly, thanks to Iain’s involvement, it’s been curated in a gorgeous editorial-style with newly-handmade white flower headdresses and corsages to unify the displays. I’m a bit of a museum purist, I have to admit, but I think this works very well in an exhibition which doesn’t try to be purist about its subject matter, just instinctive.
There’s also a series of beautiful photographs from the Worth archive, which are well worth a look as well!
Petticoat, November 1969
(Probably still applies, but now across the whole of London…trendy or not.)
The brilliant illustration is uncredited, but looks like a Malcolm Bird to me.
There are a few boutiques, Alkasura and Che Guevara included, whose work is painfully abugly. Flat feet are not sexy and elegant.”
Hollywood Clothes Shop sounds like it was one of the best examples of those playfully indulgent Boutique interiors at the time, although its brevity of existence means that there’s not a lot of imagery to correlate with the descriptions of old cinema seats, and the mannequins, paintings and photographs of movie stars. So I was rather delighted to spot some delicious photos of Edina Ronay sporting some of the frocks in the boutique itself. Thank heavens for the ‘Vogue’s Own Boutique’ feature. From February 1971.
Here, Edina Ronay stars in clothes from the new Hollywood Clothes Shop, on Hollywood Road, where else? Zipped plaid jacket, below, 14 gns (£14.70). Stylish crepe and sparkling sequin cocktail suit of deep claret, 12 gns (£12.60), with turban of wrapped velvet and snakeskin, with authentic pin, 8gns (£8.40).
Liz Eggleston 
