Dress You Up:Mary Quant, Terence Conran, and the Bloody Swinging Sixties.

"The girls all dressed like Kathy McGowan, wearing make up by Mary Quant. The boys all dressed in velvet hipsters, pointed shoes, high bouffants" - The Boy in the Paisley Shirt, Television Personalities.

The sixties. The swinging bloody sixties. The bloody fucking permissive fucking sixties. I've written about how over-rated the decade is before but these curators keep putting things on relating to the sixties and I'm dumb enough to keep going. That's because I don't actually hate the sixties. I just think they're over-rated. There was loads of good stuff in that decade, sure, but then there is in every decade.

Imagine ten whole years with nothing of any worth created! That'd be quite a barren spell. That'd be the sort of world devoid of culture that Donald Trump or ISIS would like to preside over. A world of moral certainties, punishment, cruelty, and complete and utter male dominance.

So, on balance, the sixties weren't so bad. Nor were the seventies, eighties, and every other decade that's come since. The Fashion & Textile Museum in Bermondsey was celebrating one small part of the sixties. As befits the museum's name it was celebrating the fashion and textiles of, primarily, Mary Quant but also other designers, design groups, and, dare I say it, movers and shakers that operated within her sphere.

Furnishing textile - Terence Conran (c.1949)

The show had been given the rather uninspired title 'A Lifestyle Revolution:Swinging London' and its aim was to focus on the cultural shift that took place in Britain from the end of WWII through to the mid-sixties, brought about by young people who, following the destruction and devastation, wanted to bring about a new, fairer, more colourful, and more fun way of living.

Pop art, the Chelsea set, the King's Road, Mary Quant, her husband Alexander Plunkett Greene, Terence Conran, Habitat, the ICA, Eduardo Paolozzi, Laura Ashley, coffee bars, bistros, and the painter John Minton, along with many others, were all key components of an exciting, if very London centred, movement whose shock waves are still rippling out and affecting some of us now.

A little too much in my opinion, you'll not be surprised to read. The show doesn't really give us much of a sociopolitical overview which, perhaps, is fair enough as that's hardly this museum's remit - but a tiny bit of context or perspective would have made navigating the show a bit more useful. I'd have liked to have learned more why designers and artists moved in this direction, rather than just seeing examples of what they created.

Textile (c.1949)

Terence Conran's above textile is nice, if nothing amazing, and it was educational to learn he made it while a student of Paolozzi at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts. The Victorian undies certainly don't fall under the ambit of the era of the show so I could only assume they'd been included to provide a contrast with Mary Quant's 'mad lounging pyjamas', created for the opening of Bazaar in November 1955.

Turned out I was completely wrong. A sign on the wall informed me that Quant's design "references late Victorian underwear by 'saloon gals' in western movies and Victorian 'gaiety girls'". I was clearly out of my depth. With fashion I normally am. You only have to look at how I dress.

Original Victorian Underwear

'Lounging Pyjamas' - Bazaar Chelsea (c.1955)

Dress - Bazaar Chelsea (c.1959-60)

Bazaar's informal set up, and Quant's then avant-garde clothes that were sold there, made the shop such a hit that within two years a second boutique was opened nearby on Brompton Road. That same year Quant married Alexander Plunket Greene, who got his old mate from school, one Terence Conran, to design the new boutique. Window displays were banished and passing would-be customers could look straight in and see the workings of the store as they happened.

Much of the decor was inspired by the Italians Piero Fornasetti and Gio Ponti and the space was illuminated by 'extreme modern lighting' care of Mainz born designer/sculptor Bernard Schottlander. The continental and modern influences of the time didn't stop there though. I might not know a lot about fashion but beer is a subject I have done quite extensive research into.

I still didn't know that Long Life was Britain's first canned beer, though! We're informed it "represented modernity, youth and the new affluent celebrity lifestyle" but I'm sure it mainly represented a chance to get pissed. Still, nice adverts and I'm not sure I've heard of a beer having its own 'promotional textile' before so fair play to Long Life. In fact, a long life to Long Life.

Advertisement for Long Life Canned Beer (1960)

Promotional textile for Long Life Canned Beer (c.1958)

Flapper-style dress - Bazaar (1960-61)

Furnishing textile 'Black Goblet' - Terence Conran (c.1950)

Elsewhere, there are other aesthetically pleasing Conran textiles and Quant dresses and suits inspired by The Beatles. Pierre Cardin was seen as Quant's only serious rival at the time and The Beatles original suits were influenced by Cardin's work, suggesting that Quant was copying a copy.

Once kitted out in this gear, and once your home was furnished by Conran, there were still other markers you had to meet before you could be a thoroughly modern Millie. You needed to read the right books and cook the right food and with the help of Elizabeth David's 1950s cookbook A Book of Mediterranean Food you could do both at the same time. 

John Minton provided the illustrations for David's book, which later went on to inspire those both in domestic kitchens and five-star Michelin restaurants, and Evelyn Waugh (a friend and admirer of David) went so far as to say that "Elizabeth David would get my vote as the person most responsible for improving British life in the twentieth century". I'm not doubting that dolmades are pretty damned tasty but steady on, old chum!

Suit - Mary Quant London (c.1963-64)

Elizabeth David - French Country Cooking (1951-59)

Women's shorts - Terence Conran (1952)

Furnishing textile (c.1949)

Suit - Mary Quant for Penney's (1968)

Black Eyes and Lemonade poster - Barbara Jones (1951)

Coat - Mary Quant, London (1961)

Psychedelic Jacket - Mary Quant (1965)

One particularly informative part of the exhibition shows us how Mary Quant's experiments with the 'psychedelic' (and is there ever a word more over used and misused?) design predated Granny Takes A Trip by at least a couple of years.  Quant wasn't necessarily turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. More likely she was trying to adapt pre-existing Art Nouveau ideas and patterns into her creations when she was working on a 'revival range' for Liberty of London.

When Paul McCartney's then girlfriend, Jane Asher, was photographed wearing one of these jackets in a promo for the film Alfie in 1966 others, like Granny Takes A Trip, stood up and took notice. Which must have been difficult after so long in a bean bag smoking pukka joints whilst listening to The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter.

Miniskirt - Granny Takes a Trip (1967)

Dress - Jean Muir (c.1961)

In 1961 Quant was asked by J.C.Penny (then the biggest department store in the US, with over 1,700 branches) to create ranges of "zestful youthful clothing" to jazz up its previously rather staid stores. She jumped at the chance and worked with Penny's through to the early seventies, becoming seen as part of the 'British invasion' along with The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Animals, and, er, Herman's Hermits.

In '63 Quant launched her 'Ginger Group' and in '64 Conran's first Habitat store opened and soon the designs that had only previously been seen sported by the West London set were available to all. Or to anyone who had enough money. Fashion's not cheap.

Faiground and circus designs were incorporated into some outfits and, with this, the fashion set and the world of Pop Art grew ever closer but was fashion becoming more artistic or was art dumbing down to the level of fashion? I'm sure my friend Sanda would contend that fashion is, very much, a form of art. Quite a high one at that.

Dress - Andre Courreges (c.1966)

Bernard and Laura Ashley on their wedding day (1949)

An 'A-line' coat - Mary Quant's Ginger Group (c.1966)

This design 'revolution' (my quotes because that's an OTT word by my reckoning) didn't just stay in the cities. Bernard and Laura Ashley had, from 1953 onwards, worked as textile designers and printers from their home in Pimlico but when they moved to Wales in the early sixties their output took on a more rustic feel. 'Basic' dresses and 'Gardening' smocks were the ideas that become the cornerstones of the now internationally famous retail chain named for Laura herself. Not bad for a girl from a village on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Mary Quant was branching out into make-up, plastic shoes, stockings, and tights rather than just dresses and suits. She was, in other words, accessorising! There's plentiful examples of monochrome, and very nice, bags for the visitor to ponder but my eyes were drawn to Quant's space age raincoat, made a lustrum after Gagarin went into space but three years before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Coat - Mary Quant (1965)

A Space Age raincoat - Alligator by Mary Quant (c.1966)

Space was the place, space was ace, and, even now, the raincoat is the last word in retrofuturistic cool. I'd be very impressed to see somebody wearing that. It's hard to believe it came out about the same time as the Laura Ashley smock dress below. 

The Laura Ashley dress is fine but my favourite in the show is by John Tullis and it's covered in artwork by Eduardo Paolozzi. It's a close cut thing with the space age raincoat but Tullis and Paolozzi just shade it for me, perhaps because it's summer and that is one gorgeous sundress. Apparently the dress was presented to The Queen in 1953 but I must admit she's not the person I'd most like to see wearing it (he says, breathing heavily and rubbing his hands on the front of his trousers, Vic Reeves style).

A 'Smock' dress - Laura Ashley (c.1964-66)

Dress - John Tullis/Eduardo Paolozzi (1953)

Side chair 'Chiavari' (c.1955)

Umbrella stand/floor-standing vase, 'Roman foot' - Fornasetti (1955)

With that it was time to leave (possibly taking a cold shower along the way). It had been a mildly interesting exhibition but nothing to write home about so what did I do? I wrote home about it. Well, nobody is forced to read it.