Stealing Good Times from Bad - 80s casual fashions in Bermondsey

In the Face magazine, July 1984, Robert Elms wrote an article 'Good Times'. A follow up to his 1982 article 'Hard Times', it highlighted a shift in street fashion away from dressing down to dressing up and focused  on shops in the Bermondsey/Tower Bridge Road in particular. Here's a few extracts:

'Down the Old Kent Road they're wearing Cerruti. Gucci and Armani, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on looking rich, and queueing up in front of anybody who can find new ways of separating them from their cash.

Amid the textbook urban decay of Tower Bridge Road there are three high-fashion, high-price clothiers, Le Pel, Platform 1 and Moda 3. In Moda 3 they sell menswear at prices that South Molton Strcet would think twice about and employ two bouncers on a Saturday afternoon to keep the kids out. That is serious business.

Hard times and suntans - the irony of recession Britain spending money like it's going out of fashion. Except that money has never been as thoroughly fashionable as it is right now. While governments tinker with redundant economics, so people, and in particular young people, have decided to buy themselves good times - whatever the price.

A Liverpool councillor said recently that despite the very real and appaling decay that his city has suffered, you'd be underestimating the resourcefulness of Liverpudlians if you thought they were bowing down and accepting Thatcher's recession - they find ways to get by. And a lot of people are getting by remarkably well. A self employed builder or plumber can earn a fair screw these days, but the standard profession in the Deep South seems to be "ducking and diving". Thatcher preaches self help. and there's plenty of helping yourself going on. There's a new euphemism for that kind of getting by: it's the one part of the economy that the Tories have been successful at boosting and it's now known as the informal sector. Considering what they're spending it on. perhaps casual might be a better word.

In Southwark there is the worst unemployment in London and among the worst housing. Yet amid the crumbling. Victorian red-brick blocks battered by the Blitz, there are half a dozen pubs on one estate alone which look like kitsch sci-fi spaceships that have landed in a barren, alien land.

These pubs are all dressed in pink and lime green with awnings that beckon like false eye-lashes and names like Gillies. EJ's. Sampsons and Southsides. Inside, the bars are stainless steel and the walls are covered in mirrors. They're a graphic. almost comic illustration of the mass desire to spend away the depression. Every night they're full of girls in cashmere sweaters downing drinks of many colours and boys in clothes with Milanese labels drinking every new overpriced bottled lager they can import. In Southsides these days the favourite tipple is champagne. In a tarted-up burger bar Dom Perignon costs £30 a throw; a bottle sent to the table is the polite precursor to an attempted pull. And outside they line up their Ford Escort XR3s with gold wheels and dream of the day it's a Porsche.

Tony Yusuff runs Le Pel, and two other equally exclusive and expensive clothes shops in the Old Kent Road and Lewisham. He makes regular trips to Italy to decide what hip South London is going to be wearing next season. He sells quality clothes to boys and girls in search of the Dolce Vita. In his new ladies shop he stocked a couple of jackets that retailed for £350 just to see how they went. They went very quickly indeed.. Money it seems is no object.

Next season he's going to move away from Italian classics into the more radical British designs of the likes of Bodymap. It's a risky move among conservative casuals, but he's sure that his increasingly sophisticated clientele will go with him. Le Pel has built up a reputation and a following by treating local kids with the kind of respect they rarely get from most of the snotty, effete shop assistants in South Molton Street.

"There's a kind of local pride. they even try to buy the bags. because like the clothes they're a status symbol".

[...]  Fashion inevitably weaves in and out, reacting against itself and everything else in an always fascinating chase. But in its broader sweeps, it's one of the most accurate barometers of an age, and we're in an age when fashion has swept broader than ever before. In the Sixties fashion was a powerful force because of new-found affluence - in the Eighties it's perversely powerful because of unabated depression. The art is one of stealing good times from hard'.

Le Pel is shown briefly in the 1985 Arena documentary 'Old Kent Road'

In his autobiography 'On a Plate' (2012), chef Gregg Wallace writes of this time: 'Bermondsey became alive with smart bars, like Sampson’s and Willows, two-floor affairs, with guys tapping their sovereign rings on their glasses of champagne in time to the music. Bus drivers pretended to be gangsters at the weekends, while dustmen with shirts from Moda 3 or Le Pel claimed they were going to have someone ‘blown away’. 

[Le Pel was at 268 Old Kent Road, its Lewisham branch was in Lee High Road; I believe Moda 3 used to do a Bermondsey t-shirt; I think the Gillies he refers to was actually  Gilly's piano bar in Wild Rents, SE1, off Long Lane; Samsons, sometimes known as Samsons Castle, was a pub in Grange Road SE1]

See also: South London Casuals: White Hall Clothiers, Camberwell Road 1983

Another Rivoli Shoot

We never tire of the seemingly endless film, TV and fashion shoots in the great Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park - where after all we have spent some of the best nights of our lives being fabulous. Brian Worley at  P4Pictures took these recently at a 'masquerade ball' themed shoot. Lots more pictures at his site.

 © Brian Worley

 © Brian Worley

Fred Vermorel on Kate Moss

Amongst some would-be radicals there is a deep loathing of popular culture that can come across as very patronising. You know the sort of thing - 'TV is for fools and the masses' interest in celebrities just shows that they are dupes of the system' etc. etc. Sometimes this critique is dressed up in language about 'the spectacle', with a suggestion that music, TV and film simply create passive consumers unable to think or act for themselves. The notion of the Society of the Spectacle derives from Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the 1960s, though it has to be said that their notion of it is more sophisticated than the cod-situ version sometimes spouted today - certainly little trace of any moralistic condemnation of 'consumerism'.

One man who knows more about the situationists than most is Fred Vermorel. He was actually in Paris during the events of May 1968, in which the situationists were actively involved, and indeed shortly after played a critical if inadvertent role in cultural history when he introduced his friend Malcolm McLaren to the work of the Situationist International at the '36 bus stop, just outside Goldsmiths College in Lewisham Way'.  Vermorel was living in Jerningham Road, New Cross at this time (more about this here). McLaren of course went on to manage the Sex Pistols, some would say applying some ideas he culled from the situationists -  a connection made by Fred and Judy Vermorel in their 1978 book Sex Pistols: the inside story'.

Vermorel's take on 'fandom' is quite distinctive. In Starlust: the Secret Life of Fans  (1985), Fred and Judy Vermorel collected together the fantasies of music fans with a suggestion that they reflected a kind of 'utopian romanticism' - a desire for a more intense way of life that sometimes exceeded the limits set for it by the cultural industry, in its own way potentially subversive.

Since then Vermorel has written a  number of books which could be described as celebrity biogs, with subjects including Kate Bush, Vivienne Westwood, and Kate Moss. To an extent Vermorel inhabits the mindset of the obsessive fan in his books, trawling tabloids and acquaintances for tales of sex, drugs and scandals, as well as the micro-detail of  celebrity trivia. But these are also biogs with a difference - for instance the Kate Bush book includes genealogical research on her forebears in Kent, and the Westwood one includes fictional first person narrative.

'Kate Moss: Addicted to Love' (2006) starts with reflections on her 'Croydon' origins, or rather as Vermorel points out the leafier suburbs of the Croydon area: 'Forget Croydon. That is a fantasy she likes to spread as much as the media  does. A supermodel from Croydon: beauty flowering out of the concrete towered, motorway infested, chav ridden wastelands... Sanderstead... is where Kate Moss really comes from - spiritually as well as spatially. "Croydon" may be the general area, and convenient shorthand, but Sanderstead - suburbia, is what's inside her'.

Vermorel then goes on to detail Kate's South London life  - birth in St Mary's Hospital, Croydon; a short period at Pagehurst Road, Addiscombe then growing up at 75 Church Way, Sanderstead; Ridgeway Primary School; Riddlesdown High School; hanging out with the teenage drinkers and smokers in Purley Town Centre; moving in with her mum in Forestdale when her parents split up; meeting early boyfriends in Croydon wine bar Rue St George - then after being spotted at an airport on to The Face,  Johnny Depp (who told Vanity Fair in 1997 'man, you can't beat that South London accent'), Pete Doherty, 'Cocaine Kate' and all the rest.

This is definitely in the mainstream 'unauthorised' celebrity biography genre, rather than some kind of cultural studies text, but Vermorel does slip in the odd Burroughs and Baudrillard quote and some wider reflections on the relationships between celebrity, money and drugs:

'There are parallels in how celebrity works, and how money works. Both celebrity and money are formless and yet endlessly mutable... They both originate in magic belief, and their extraordinary  power to reproduce and migrate across culture comes from their 'super-objective' quality: they are beyond everything yet inside everything. The stock exchange and the hit parades both float on fetishes of reputation - and of number... the essence of any celebrity is not anything instrinsic to the person who bears the Name - the magic is in the numbers - of hits, of clicks, of number ones and top tens, the milliosn of fans or  $s or £s that accrue to that 'personality''.

And:

'Heroin stands for money - trade - turnover - feverish spending - sales bonanzas - overnight fortunes - role reversals - and amazing good luck. It equally signifies fashion, which is the pulse of pure consumerism. Heroin, as the ideal commodity, creates perfect consumers... No surprize then, the trade off between those ultimate icons of conusmerism, models, and those ultimate consumers, junkies. Both work from wasted bodies and freak energies, they live on the margins of the tragic and the phantasmagorical - between the next frock and the next fix'.

Kate Moss's first front page, The Face, 1990
(from Corinne Day's famous Camber Sands photo shoot)

Fred Vermorel now teaches at Kingston University and at Richmond.

Angela Carter, Transpontine author

Angela Carter (1944-1992) died twenty years ago today, one of the great Transpontine writers. She spent her childhood in Balham, had an early job on the Croydon Advertiser, and lived her last years in Clapham.

The South London question is a recurring theme in her writings, none more so than in her 1991 novel Wise Children set in a fictional Bards Road in Brixton (presumably based on Shakespeare Road). The opening paragraphs go straight to the heart of the matter:

'Q. Why is London like Budapest?
A. Because it is two cities divided by a river.

Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks. Put it another way. If you’re from the States, think of Manhattan. Then think of Brookly. See what I mean? Or, for a Parisian, it might be a question of rive gauche, rive droite. With London, it’s the North and South divide. Me and Nora, that’s my sister, we’ve always lived on the left-hand side, the side the tourist rarely sees, the bastard side of Old Father Thames.


Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: the rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunken song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city’.

And of course she knew how to use the word Transpontine! In a review of Iain Sinclair's Downriver (London Review of Books, 1991) she compared Sinclair's East London to her more familiar territory:

'But I never went to Whitechapel until I was thirty, when I needed to go to the Freedom Bookshop (it was closed). The moment I came up out of the tube at Aldgate East, everything was different from what I was accustomed to. Sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban. I felt quite thecountry bumpkin, slow-moving, slow-witted, come in from the pastoral world of Clapham Common, Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec. People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it. They focused their sharp, bright eyes directly on you: none of that colonialised, transpontine, slithering regard. The streets were different - wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys. Cobblestones. It was an older London, by far, than mine. I smelled danger. I bristled like one of Iain Sinclair's inimitable dogs. Born in Wandsworth, raised in Lambeth - Lambeth, “the Bride, the Lamb's Wife”, according toWilliam Blake - nevertheless, I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End'.

In a 1977 essay published in New Society, D'you mean South?, Carter reflected at length on growing up in South London (you can read the whole thing in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, published in 1993), including the girls' fashion styles:

'The girls, I remember, always had wild aspirations to style. Around their fifteenth summer, they spread out all their petals -- like flowers with only one season in which to cram all their blossoming. I recall a giggling flock of girls, some white, some black, at the tube station entrance in 1959. They must have assembled there in order to go "up west" (i.e., to the West End). They were as weird and wonderful as humanoid flora from outer space, their hair backcombed into towering beehives, skirts so tight you could see the clefts between their buttocks, and shoes with pointed tips that stuck out so far in front they had to stand sideways onthe escalators. There was a shoemaker in Brixton who custom-built these shoes to the girls' requirements.


It was a style they had invented all by themselves. They were shackled by those skirts,crippled by those shoes, as if the clothes they had selected symbolised the cramped expectations of their lives in the cruel confinements of sex and class. Their dandyism triumphed over the limitations of their circumstances, and made them objects of bizarre and self-created beauty, a triumph of mind over matter. My mother would never have let me go out looking like that. Hadn't I gone to a direct grant school?


After an absence, I now live in south London again. And the girls, I see, still do have a style all of their own. Last autumn, it was ankle-length, knife-edged pleated tartan skirts, with ankle socks and plastic sandals. This summer it seems to be a decorous punk - tapered jeans,rouge, and a lot of chains everywhere - as if to indicate that, however much things might seem to have changed, everything remains fundamentally the same'.

She also reflected in the same essay on the gentrification of Clapham, presumably in its early stages in 1977:

'When the bourgeoisie got priced out of, first, Hampstead and Highgate - how long ago it seems! - and then from Camden Town and Islington, and the alternatives got priced (who'd have thought it?) out of Ladbroke Grove, there was nowhere else for all, repeat all, the poor sods to go, was there? That's typical south London usage. Every statement is converted to a rhetorical question'.

History Corner: Surrey Docks 1925

Another treasure from the BFI Archive - Port of London Authority Aquatic Sports Gala Day in 1925, with dockworkers, families and friends swimming, diving and playing water polo at Surrey Commercial Docks.

Some great 1920s haircuts, especially woman second from left
who also seems to be modelling Burberry

Mary Quant: from New Cross (& Blackheath) to the World

Mary Quant played a key role in creating the women's fashion look associated with 1960s 'Swinging London', popularising the mini-skirt and the bob haircut. Quant was designing and making her own clothes from an early age, and attended Blackheath High School, but it was via attending Goldsmiths in New Cross in the 1950s that she eventually managed to make a living out it, partly because it was there that she met her future husband and business partner, Alexander Plunkett Greene.

According to Shawn Levy 'The impetus to Quant's starting a revolution in quiet, arty Chelsea was her marriage to Alexander Plunket Greene [1932-1990], one of the very first old-line Britons in whom something like the spirit of the sixties blossomed. Born to a family of English eccentrics who included among their lovers, friends and acquaintances such diverse lights as Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh, he was a teenage scene unto himself in the early fifties, wandering through Chelsea in his mother's disused pajamas and slacks, hanging around Soho jazz bars where he aspired to play the trumpet, and showing up only when he felt like it to classes at Goldsmiths College, an art and technical school in New Cross, near Deptford, where he tried to further distance himself from his fellow student - as if it were possible or necessary - by walking about with a film script under his arm. He was, in short, the sort of nutter one expected to find in Chelsea, London’s nearest answer to Montmartre: moneyed, bred to leisure, artistically inclined - a definitive bohemian, if he said so himself'.

Alexander Plunket Greene

'Among the mere mortals who found themselves dazzled by Plunket Greene's antics at Goldsmiths was Quant, a pixie-size but blunt and strong-willed student who'd been raised variously, as her parents followed schoolteaching careers, in Kent, Wales and, after the war, in Blackheath, south of Greenwich, which would always be, in her mind, home. Quant, who was born in 1934, was attending Goldsmiths out of a compromise arrangement with her exasperated folks, who thought they could channel her penchant for designing and sewing her own clothes into a useful career: teaching art or some such. But she found herself swept into an exciting new way of life by Plunket Greene, with whom she became romantically involved, and she forsook the chance to get a teaching certificate for a life of gadding about with her beau and the ragtag bunch who came to be known as the Chelsea Set' (Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, 2003). 

After Plunkett Green inherited some money, the pair opened a boutique called Bazaar on the Kings Road (Plunket Greene opened a restaurant and jazz club in the basement), from where Quant started to build her fashion empire. Like some other Goldsmiths notables, she never actually finished her course there.

Quant getting her hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, inventor of the modern bob
and sometime militant anti-fascist

Incidentally Quant didn't claim to have invented the mini, a look which came from the streets: "It was the girls on the King's Road who invented the mini. I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes; in which you could move, run and jump. We would make them the length the customer wanted, they would say "shorter, shorter" and we followed by command".

Twiggy wearing a Mary Quant dress

Quant later came to see her clothes from this period as embodying a kind of emergent feminism. In contrast to the the 'old attitudes' that  'a woman was daddy’s daughter until she became somebody’s wife. In the mid-1950s women started, without analysing it, to grab a time when they were their own person by moving out from under daddy’s roof and sharing a usually overcrowded, usually scruffy flat with other girls. The mini was part of that. The mini said ‘Look at me’. It was very exuberant, pure glee. Looking back it was the beginning of the women’s movement. Clothes always say it first, you know, then comes the effect. All those retro fashions of the 1970s betrayed the nervousness that was to come’ (Quant, 1982, quoted in The Great Fashion Designers by Brenda Polan, Roger Tredre, Berg, 2009).

Interesting idea of fashion prefiguring social change - in which case what do the clothes we are wearing now say about the near future?

Music Monday: Jamie N Commons

Jamie N Commons is a singer who sounds a bit like he's from the Southern states of the US, but is actually based in our very own Southern Gothic homeland of New Cross. He was on the Q magazine 'Ones to Watch' in 2012 list, and got a similar treatment in The Guardian: 'Returning to the West Country at 16 with a skewed accent, he taught himself the brass tacks of the guitar and, aged 18, moved to London to study music at Goldsmiths in New Cross, a requisite for any modern musician: recent alumni include singer Katy B and electro-composer, and classmate, James Blake, "Although I didn't really know what he [James] did. It wasn't until the third year that suddenly he was off to meet Universal and it was like, oh." A graduate in the guise of Struwwelpeter, Commons certainly dresses New Cross: plaid shirt, tight-ish black jeans and felt Preacher's hat bought (alarmingly) from TK Maxx: "Not cool, nope, but I lost my other hat*."'

The video for his song The Preacher looks like it was shot in Dungeness, Kent, complete with 'True Blood' references.




* Was that the New Cross TK Maxx? I think we should be told. Anyway it's good to see the New Cross dress code (or one of them) getting national recognition. Hopefully we will see Kate Moss in an advert soon saying 'get the New Cross look'