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London: After a Fashion PDF

242 Pages·2007·3.13 MB·English
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London — after a Fashion AlistairO’Neill london after a fashion london after a fashion alistair o’neill reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2007 Copyright © Alistair O’Neill, 2007 Supported by All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data O’Neill, Alistair London: after a fashion 1. Fashion – England – London – History – 19th century 2. Fashion – England – London – History – 20th century 3. London (England) – Social life and customs - 19th century 4. London (England) – Social life and customs – 20th century I. Title 391.’009421’09034 ISBN–13: 978 1 86189 315 4 ISBN–10: 1 86189 315 9 contents introduction 7 chapter one 27 chapter two 51 chapter three 73 chapter four 101 chapter five 127 chapter six 155 chapter seven 177 chapter eight 199 references 222 bibliography 227 acknowledgements 233 photo acknowledgements 234 index 235 From Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans’s film Finisterre,2003. introduction 7 In November 2003 the British pop band Saint Etienne hosted a double-bill screening at the Barbican Cinema in London of their short filmFinisterre (also the name of their recently released album), and its point of inspiration, the rarely seen documentary of 1967, The London Nobody Knows, directed by Norman Cohen. The documentary had a precedent in Geoffrey Fletcher’s travel guideThe London Nobody Knows (1962), a collection of calligraphic illustrations and written anecdotes about the capital formed from his earlier regular column intheDaily Telegraph. Seen from a historical distance, as is the case for many of Saint Etienne’s inspirations, the film adaptation suggested to the pop band not only a bygone vision of the capital, but one that challenged many common-held assumptions about the representation of the city at certain points of transition. As a band member, Bob Stanley, noted: Carnaby chicks and chaps, the 1967 we have been led to remember, are shockingly juxtaposed with feral meths drinkers, filthy shoeless kids, squalid Victoriana. CamdenTown still resembles the world of Walter Sickert. There is romance and adventure, but mostly there is malnourishment. London looks like a shithole.1 8 This is a vision ofLondon rendered incoherent by virtue ofits extreme juxtapositions. It challenges our view ofa late 1960s London vibrant with youth and colour in the shopping district ofCarnaby Street. Instead, we are given a handful ofworn and austere fragments shot under a grey skyline for us to cast our eyes over. Camden Town is yet to become a shopping area for the second-hand and sub-cultural. Instead, it shows the scars ofits music-hall days and, indeed, its murders from the turn ofthe twentieth century; and these historical references collide with the modern-day grime ofthe area. This historical medley echoes both the cinematic metaphor of montage and Walter Benjamin’s idea ofunderstanding the city through montage. More than any other writer, Benjamin remains central to a contemporary understanding ofthe modern city in cultural and histor- ical terms, and his rendering ofthe city suggests that the arrangement ofthese historical picture-scenes in the topography ofthe metropolis inevitably relay something ofthe present. This is something that M. Christine Boyer crystallized in her book The City of Collective Memory, where ‘each fragment becomes a static tableau ofthe city, representing contrasting views made more explicit by their proximity to each other . . . yet each conveys some nuance of contemporary times’.2This conveying ofthe contemporary is also illus- trated by the film Finisterre, which transposed the earlier documentary’s visual sense ofhistorical discontinuity across the fabric ofcontempor- ary London. So, instead ofmourning the loss ofVictorian oyster rooms and Edwardian public conveniences, it wanted to raise awareness about the plight ofthe post-war Italian cafés, such as The New Piccadilly on Denman Street, near Piccadilly Circus, that were the setting for the begin- nings ofBritish pop culture in the 1950s. These films are tinged with the attitudes towards the past oftheir day. Both focus on what has been lost and what has survived. But where- as Fletcher and Cohen bemoaned the onslaught of office-block mod- ernism and glass curtain walls, Saint Etienne film the post-war housing blocks of Farringdon with the loving attention of those interested in the reawakened potential ofmodernism as a choice for inner-city living at the beginning ofthe twenty-first century. What these very different

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London Fashion Week is the pinnacle of the fashion season, and it features an array of native designers, from Burberry and Vivenne Westwood to Alexander McQueen and Nicole Farhi. The roots of London’s place as the international epicenter of haute couture and pr?t-?-porter stretch back centuries, a
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