Interesting clothing back then, seemed so rare that I can only remember admiring and desiring a single mainstream piece, a 1950’s style leather biker jacket offered as a part of a small capsule collection from an Italian leather house by a freelance designer not really yet know outside Italy named Giorgio Armani which I saw featured in a layout in L’uomo Vogue in 1972. And with the exception of Gigli in the late 1980’s who was referencing the “street” and the fashion museum archives for many years the only place I could find the elements I needed to pull together an outfit was in the charity and thrift shops and the flea markets.
If you saw me back then, out clubbing or promenading on the Kings Road, I think you would have consider me to be a New Romantic. Without knowing it then, I now realise that The New Romantics had picked up on the zeitgeist of the times and were foretelling the future fashion cycles we were all about to live through.
With the constant recycling the styles of previous generations which in the coming years fashion as a whole would embrace as mainstream designers rehashed the 1940’s in the early 80s and the 1950’s in the late 80s and so on. With us all now back full circle, as the current crop of young designers reference the 1980’s. Although these days, I find, I am increasingly going back to the source, the 1940’s!
Each day as I create my new clothing collage I am careful to try to keep it original and avoid creating a direct pastiche any one period but rather try to keep it interesting; mixing it up a bit as Paul Smith would say, “do the look with a twist”.
For example a couple of years ago we photographed this fabulous couple in Camden and when I asked him to confirm his look “it's definitely 50's” he said.
And as you will see this couple were clearly delighted to be photographed and have their skills as amateur costume designers acknowledged. Continuing with the arts analogy, it was as if they were very proficient watercolour artist who were able to accurately paint a landscape.
However, I feel it is more demanding and exacting rather than just to copy the scene to go one step beyond in the style of a collage artist and create something completely new which evokes the same emotion in the viewer that would have been experienced seeing the original scene painted and then goes beyond.
The challenge is to try to avoid being too obvious as you perfect your own process and style as a fashion collagist and going beyond the two-dimensional aspect of a fine art collage. Using yourself as the medium to create 3-D collages as a means of creative self-expression and develop and build your own distinct visual vocabulary, putting together great outfits having lots of fun, as you become a part of a discreet club of Fashionista who check each other out as they pass one another on the street.
*Back then by day, I worked as a buyer for Flip of London, which at the time was the largest vintage clothing shop in Europe and at night hung out at the Blitz bar looking stylish and drinking with friends including Steve Dagger, who many considered the 6th member Spandau Ballet acting as the bands business manager.
