When Bob Dylan said in Ballad Of A Thin Man ‘Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?’ he could not have dreamt how the words would resonate with those of us growing up in the 1960s, the Ms Joneses who actually did know vaguely what was happening, but whose efforts to find where it was happening were doomed to failure.
We found – how could we miss – Carnaby Street and King’s Road, the celebrated epicentres of ‘Swinging London’, but it was as if Cinderella finally got to the ball only to find that the real dance had already finished.
Entering Carnaby Street, a stone’s throw from the mumsy familiarity of Oxford Street and John Lewis, was like being plunged into a different world. In the mid-Sixties this formerly unremarkable street, now the centre of Britain’s youthquake, was a dazzling concentration of boutiques, a riot of garish décor, a Peacock Alley full of strutters and paraders.
And it was easy to join the parade. For a relatively modest amount of money, you could get clobber which you’d never find in Dorothy Perkins or Neatawear. Chainmail culottes? Pop into Sweet Fanny Adams. A skirt the length of a belt? Try Carnaby Girl. Pink hipster trousers? A purple shirt with a white collar? Multi-coloured fur coats? Take your pick – Lord John, Lady Jane, Gear, Mates… Everyone could be a mod.
All mods gone
But the real mods had gone. The original mods, the quite scary, ultra-cool tribe who for whom mod was not just a way of dressing but a way of living, had disappeared from this particular scene.
With their penchant for French and Italian style, their liking for Nouvelle Vague film-makers, their taste for black American music and hip American literature, in some ways they seemed to be cut in our mould, a little bit Beatnik, a little bit French left-bank intellectual, a little bit acquainted with Kerouac and Sartre…but they had driven away on their Vespas and Lambrettas and disappeared into the depths of the Marquee and the Flamingo.
You wouldn’t have wanted to be a mod girlfriend, though. Girls sat behind the boys on their scooters, trailed behind them in the street, waited patiently as they chose their three-button mohair suit, checking that the centre vent was exactly 14 inches long, that the trousers were precisely 17 inches wide, that the jacket would fall just so to reveal the all-important ticket pocket.
Even Stephen
The person responsible for this was John Stephen, who started the revolution in men’s clothing in 1957 with his first Carnaby Street shop, catering for all the young dudes who snapped up the sharp, affordable clothes which became the objects of their obsession and fastidious attention.
As for the King’s Road, we were too late by a decade, and not nearly grown up enough or rich enough. The transformation of the King’s Road into the playground of the new generation began when Mary Quant opened her shop Bazaar in 1955.
She was to King’s Road what John Stephen was to Carnaby Street, but her clientele was from a different class and background. The clothes were amazing and ground-breaking, bold and sophisticated, fun yet serious at the same time. They weren’t dirt-cheap. They were street style for those who owned streets.
Granny was no orphan
The same was true of Granny Takes A Trip and Hung on You which opened in the mid-Sixties. They catered for pop stars and aristocrats, upper class dandies and people who didn’t buy their own furniture. They weren’t for the likes of us.
It was fun, all the same. You could sip cappuccino in the Picasso coffee bar and feel part of the scene. There was more to do, more to see than on Carnaby Street. You could walk right down to World’s End, browsing in boutiques and bric a brac shops. You had a walk-on part in an ongoing performance which was partly real, partly fantasy.
Carnaby Street’s unique vibe disappeared by the end of the decade and it became just a tourist trap. The only reminder of its glory days is a blue plaque at Number 1 which honours John Stephen as the Founder of Carnaby Street as World Centre for Men’s Fashion in the 1960s, and another which celebrates the street’s mod connection with a dedication to The Small Faces, who had an office office at Number 52/55 from 1957-1967.
The legacy of Chelsea
King’s Road too became unexceptional, apart from its brief association with punk, courtesy of Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s shops. But its history is vibrant and lives on in the fabric of its buildings. You can still see cutting-edge drama at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. You can still buy a book at John Sandoe, the bookshop established in 1957. You can tread the path ridden by Charles II, after whom the road was named.
Chelsea was established as the habitat of the bohemian poor and the aristo rich, the home and stomping ground of artists, writers, photographers and eccentrics long before London swung. The ghosts of some of those associated with the area, the Pre-Raphaelites, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Dylan Thomas, Marc Chagall, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, Quentin Crisp will linger on long after granny came down from her trip.
So it has to be hats off to King’s Road. Although I remember with fondness a pair of elephant cord hipster trousers bought from John Stephen’s Trecamp in Carnaby Street…