Carnaby Street

By 1965, London had become the world’s fashion capital for young people. At its centre were three streets: the Kings Road in Chelsea (put on the map by Mary Quant), Kensington Church Street (where designer Barbara Hulanicki ran a boutique called Biba), and Carnaby Street, which not long before had been a run-down back alley behind Regent Street.

Here, besides a bakery, a rather faded tobacconist’s, a harness shop with a life-size wooden horse in its window and a Central Electricity Board depot that took up almost half one side of the street, you could find innumerable little sweat-shops, an overflow from the garment industry district north of Oxford Circus.

It was here that Mr Vince got his first creations made up.

Vince (real name Bill Green) was a photographer, with a tiny basement studio in Manchester Street, Marylebone. He specialised in beefcake, but not oiled, anabolic steroid-crammed musclemen. Vince’s models were a more genteel sort, but totally ignorant of what to wear while posing.

They apparently expected to be photographed in the Y-fronts they arrived in. It became clear that Vince would have to carry a stock of posing briefs and similar clothing ready for his unprepared posers, and in the austerity years around 1950 such things were hard to come by.

The solution was obvious – he designed his own, had them made up, and found that he had a profitable line of business on the side.

Soon, you could buy Vince designs by mail order through small advertisements in magazines like Weekend or Titbits, or retail at Geo. Grose, the big motorcycle dealer and sports shop on Marylebone Road.

Next came made-to-measure jeans and Vince took a lease on a small shop in Carnaby Street, conveniently close to the workshops where the orders could be run up almost at an hour’s notice. Very soon he had a neighbour and rival, when the shop of Donis carrying a stock of ready-made jeans opened up next door.

After Donis. came Paul, and after Paul the little shops began to proliferate.

It was all so convenient. The trousers and jeans were left with unfinished bottoms: you found a pair to fit you, the assistant marked the correct leg length, and then he scampered up the stairs next door to the workshop above, returning five minutes later with your trousers finished and pressed.

A natural outcome of this set-up was instant fashion: a new style of jacket, a fancy waistcoat; a new cut of jeans — they could all be put together in sample quantities, and if they caught on they could be multiplied at will.

The Carnaby Street “men’s” boutique took over from Cecil Gee, and the sharp Italian style of the professional band musicians gave way to the slick, faintly camp suits of the Fab Four, selected for them by Brian Epstein.

Glaswegian John Stephen decided that men’s clothes should be as much fun as women’s with his first boutique selling pink hipsters and paving the way for dozens more, making the street a major drawcard for British youth and overseas tourists who came to stare at the parade of long-haired young men – many in the latest Eastern style kaftans and beads – and their mini-skirted girlfriends.

Trecamp, the first shop selling female clothing, opened in Carnaby Street. Next came Lady Jane (opened by Harry Fox and Henry Moss), which created a public sensation when they had models getting dressed in the window, and then the full flood of unisex.

Cat Stevens worked in the boutique for a short time, and customers included Martha Reeves and The Vandellas, Nancy Sinatra, Julia Foster, Joan Collins, Anthony Newley, Michael Crawford, and Georgie Fame.

Lady Jane was also frequently visited by female personalities on trips to the capital, notably Jayne Mansfield amid a huge blaze of publicity.

At a place like Tommy Roberts’ Kleptomania, round the corner in Kingly Street – more a bazaar than a boutique – you could buy a man’s shirt that would serve just as well as a minidress, and belts and jeans that could be worn either by men or women.

He moved to Carnaby Street in 1967 and later became famous on the King’s Road, Chelsea, with his Mr Freedom shop.

Carnaby Street became a Mecca for bright young things and clothes fanatics of both sexes, equally popular with followers of the mod, hippie and peacock revolution styles.

Many independent fashion designers, such as Mary Quant, Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin, Lord John, Merc (founded by Javid Alavi in 1967), Take Six, and Irvine Sellars, had premises in the street, and various underground music bars, such as the Roaring Twenties, opened in the surrounding streets.

Carnaby Street stormed into North American and international awareness with the 15 April 1966 publication of Time magazine’s cover story extolling the street’s role.

But the days of the street’s rise to fame were also the days of its first decline via printed tin badges, Edwardian relics, target T-shirts and wall-to-wall Union Jacks.

I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, dedicated to selling reproduction kitsch to tourists, originally opened in Portobello Road, but it soon found its spiritual home in Carnaby Street.

It fitted the spirit of the time and chimed with that extraordinary concept of Swinging London – “England swings like a pendulum do”, sang Roger Miller in 1966 – that went with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and Small Faces and, above all, The Who.

What a ridiculous mish-mash it all was.

The Mods in their Regency suits and fur-lined ex-US Army parkas, mounted on their Vespas and Lambrettas; The Who wearing Union Jack jackets; the tiny cardboard reproductions of policemen’s helmets, the red-white-and-blue-striped seaside rock.

Carnaby Street, where you could now buy tweed Norfolk jackets and deerstalkers and elastic-sided boots, had its pavements and roadway painted with Union Jacks, and all the kids of Europe and America seemed to be gathered there in T-shirts and climbing boots and boaters made out of recycled paper.

The big clothing wholesalers, under a variety of fancy names – the Earl of Tooting, Lord John of Carnaby – moved in, and the small specialist boutiques moved out.

In October 1973, the Greater London Council pedestrianised the street, and Carnaby Street declined into a tacky, seedy tourist ghetto during the mid to late 1970s.

It has since reinvented itself as a major tourist attraction, housing a variety of chain store shops while retaining higher-quality novelty and memorabilia outlets.

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