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Saturday, December 10, 2022

Carnaby Street


This looks like Carnaby Street meets California.

 

12 comments:

  1. That thong hides nothing, does it?

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  2. The grass roots pop culture that emerged from the very conformist 1950s was ultimately to become part and parcel of a social and sexual revolution. What is often overlooked is that in what has since been called the "post war consensus", most of Britain's heavy industry was nationalized and run top-down by bureaucrats while the American corporations dominated what was left of the private sector, which left little room for small and medium size home-grown enterprises. (By the time we get to Margaret Thatcher's liberal economic policies, 54% of British industry was state owned, with a further 20% of small companies dependent on it.) Carnaby Street was equally a reaction to this. Quite literally hundreds of sole traders and manufacturers, employing equally hundreds of people, sprung up overnight carrying styles and goods the major stores would not handle and came together in Carnaby Street, on the edge of the artistic and Bohemian - and increasingly gay - village off Oxford Street called Soho. The irony was that this alternative culture voted left and yet economically, behaved as if on the right. It was a phenomenal, outstanding cultural and economic success that resonated throughout the Western world. Into that mix came male underwear manufacturers whose styles would never, ever have seen the light of day elsewhere. Whereas in America, these were largely available by mail order, in Britain, it was in the "boutiques" of Carnaby Street - and like venues - where such could be found. Harry Bush was slap, bang, wallop right on the money with this illustration, which speaks volumes with regard to the social history of Britain in the 1960s.

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    1. As a teenager, I spent nearly every penny I could scrape together on Carnaby Street inspired clothes and accessories. I could only afford knock-offs, but some good ones were available in such unlikely spots as JC Penny & Co. Thanks for the background on this cultural phenomenon.

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    2. Canarby Street designers often parodied the all-pervasive militarism of the day and souped up the Victorian morning coat, giving it a military collar - whence Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover - and the trench coat came back into fashion, big time. I nagged and I pestered and eventually my father gave me his Royal Navy bridge coat - by that time, he could no longer get into it. Beautifully made in RN blue, high-quality wool doeskin, it had enormous lapels, a huge collar to turn up, and came down mid-calf (cocktail length, darlink). I felt like a million dollars!

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    3. There is a type of coat in the US Navy called the P or Pea-coat. Those things have had an enduring popularity (and practicality) that is nothing less than amazing. Men still covet the real ones.

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    4. A full bridge coat in the RN in the 1930s and 40s went below the knee. It was a modification of the peacoat, which originated in the Dutch navy. One of my pals has one, with the original nickel buttons, festooned with an embossed anchor. He says he has left it to me in his will, but if I find he hasn't, I'll murder him...

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    5. Why take chances? Go ahead and murder him now, and you'll be assured of getting the coat. Just sayin'.

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  3. When you see the words "Mod from London" you know it's the 60s.
    Calorman, thank you for the run-down on the economic roots of Carnaby Street. I would never have guessed in a million years. But I don't think the 50's were as staid as they are made out to be, at least in the USA. Beatniks, rocket-bras, tailfins, sex-ed, Kinsey, the proliferation of cigarettes and booze, skid rows with their winos and heroin addicts, a thriving underground press et-al
    It all started in the 50's and even before. -Rj/IE

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    1. My Aunt Barbara wore a rocket bra, scandalizing the women of the family and enthralling the men. Being a nascent little homo, I noticed the hubbub, but didn't really get the point, no pun intended.

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    2. I remember talking to my grandmother about the 50s and what shocked her was Jayne Mansfield and her low-cut dresses and the girls with the rocket bras. Talk about in your face! By the time the 60s rolled along nothing shocked my grandmother, it was par for the course. -Rj

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    3. Thank you for your kind comments.

      I had no idea they were called "rocket" bras. I am familiar with them if only at a comfortable distance. My school had a music teacher called Miss Dalrymple (pronounced Dah-Rimple), who was bussed in for private lessons and seems in hindsight to have been some sort of social leftover from the Jazz scene. She wore them to very great, ageing effect. We called her Miss World. I remember a boy who, legend now has it, was savagely beaten for asking her if she wanted to borrow his razor.

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