King’s Road: Fashion from Psychedelia to Punk (Part 1)
Design by Tommy Gilhooly
A history of King’s Road, London, must begin in the late 60s. No, not the 1960s, the 1660s… The newly restored Charles II struts down King’s Road on his way to Kew Gardens. Charles is alone. That’s because it’s exclusively his road. Hence the name – the King’s Road. Flashing his waistcoat of Indian silk just as much as his full head of flowing raven curls, Charles could easily be mistaken for a hippy…
Trip forward three centuries and, indeed, King Charles II could roam largely unnoticed alongside the psychedelic fashion on display. Silk, velvet and satin were the chosen fabrics of this counterculture which has come to be known as psychedelia. Throughout the 1960s, avant-garde boutiques were blooming across King’s Road like strange flowers. The most established was known as Granny Takes a Trip. Born in the haze of 1966 in the area of West London known as ‘world’s end’, Granny’s immortalising name cheekily fuses a nostalgic Victoriana (granny) with the conspicuous habits of a post-war, youth generation (‘trip’). Founded by Nigel Waymouth and his girlfriend Sheila Cohen, they recruited the Savile Row apprentice-tailor John Pearse to adapt, modify and sell Victorian and oriental garments – those floral and paisley designs which we know now as quintessentially hippy.
Bizarrely, a young Salman Rushdie was living above the boutique in a flat in 1967. After venturing at various times down the rabbit hole, filled with incense, thick smoke and blaring rock noise, Rushdie’s words stick: ‘Granny’s was the first. Like “Gone with the Wind”, it invented the cliches’.
Pearse tried to get his eclectic hands on ‘anything that was visually exciting’, such as satin and curtains, adapting such vintage textures to craft experimental pieces. Pearse lists off the inspirations behind such a project: ‘What appealed to us was Aubrey Beardsley and the Victorians, Against Nature by Huysmans. So we were all doomed Romantics at the time. Not new Romantics, Doomed Romantics. So that was the influence - Art Nouveau’. The atmosphere of Granny was thus decadent, teasing and delightfully eccentric. Beardsley’s erotic prints – he was the notorious illustrator of the fin-de-siècle and sometime collaborator with Oscar Wilde on his censored play Salomé – were plastered all over the interior of the shop. Beardsley in fact can be seen lurking, alongside Wilde, on the crowded album cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. The back of the previous album Revolver also reveals John Lennon sporting one of Pearse’s signature long-collared, paisley shirts. Beardsley’s prints celebrated femmes fatales, monstrous phalluses and hermaphrodites, transgressing Victorian sexual mores. The Beatles’ next album, Revolver, alludes to Beardsley’s seminal black-and-white ink design.
The fact that such originally black-and-white ink designs were tainted purple on the walls of Granny is the epitome of the time: the recreation and recelebration of a monochromatic Victorianism, now in the technicolour (in this instance a regal purple) of the swinging 60s. Perhaps the most famous items of the boutique were the dazzling William Morris jackets – again a revitalisation and acidification of Victoriana. John Lennon sported the Chrysanthemum pattern, George Harrison the Golden Lily design, of which only an exclusive 20 were ever made. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Barrett-era Pink Floyd all frequented the boutique. Warhol, overcome with curiosity, even flew in from New York. Granny went international when certain items were funnelled over the Channel into Parisian boutiques. The Granny label – with its depiction of an iridescent mushroom – was even rumoured to be able to take you on a trip, laughs Pearse in an interview – if you dared lick it, that is.
A counter-canon of ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ figures were forming in this counterculture. It included Beardsley and Wilde, but also the Beat generation (where the misspelling of The Beatles name derives), poète maudits like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as well as the occult magician Aleister Crowley (another figure included in Sgt. Pepper, positioned top left) – to name but a few. The photographer (and Gonville & Caius alumnus) Mick Rock’s reflections on the era are enlightening: ‘…we all saw ourselves as kind of cultural revolutionaries you know, living the lifestyle, that was really the most important thing as I recall […] Not to get a job, not to be ambitious, to really be exploring your inner landscape – this was really the philosophy of the time.’
Similarly, Kevin Ayers, early frontman of the experimental psychedelic band The Soft Machine (the name taken from the Beat novelist William S. Burrough) saw the time as one of radical questioning; ‘why do we have to have this set of rules? […] For the first time in history you had a younger generation fighting back and saying we don’t really want war and all that shit […] the younger generation got up and stood and complained and questioned.’
Granny rapidly become the centre for such ‘questioning’ by the young students, bohemians, artists and aristocrats who frequented the hip areas of the capital. Fashion was an integral part, and tool, of such questioning, such probing. To me, the psychedelic fashion of Granny seems to be the weapon, literally the avant-garde (advanced guard), against convention and conformity, perhaps the most visible, and thus valuable, weapon you could get. It was a physical manifestation and display of internal rebellion.
But it was also, perhaps more importantly, fun. Boutiques like Granny teasingly tested the safe categories and binaries of what makes up the stereotype of the conformist 1950s suburbia. Gender is central to this. The sales assistant Johnny Moke reminisces how at the boutique they ‘used to cut up blouses and dresses and turn them into shirts or tops for men. What was great about Granny's was that there were no boundaries.’ The tailor John Pearse asserts that Granny was ‘the first bisexual shop’.
Questioning what clothing could be worn by whom was just as much a political act as it was one of displaying fun, exciting sensuality. At the centre of this seems to be a theatricality and playfulness which runs in English culture all the way back to the cross-dressing of the Elizabethan stage. Psychedelic fashion was always about being adventurous, being outrageous – believing in total freedom. Such ambitions were true to the Wildean aphorism engraved above the entry of Granny Takes a Trip: ‘one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.’