Читать книгу Ready, Steady, Go!: Swinging London and the Invention of Cool - Shawn Levy - Страница 8

For as long as there’s been a Bond Street in Mayfair, it’s been a fashionable place to shop, be pampered, live and stroll. Shirtmakers and silversmiths, stamp dealers and hosiers, auction houses, art galleries, antique dealers and tobacconists – always the finest and most expensive, always catering to upper-class money. It’s a place where the fictional Clarissa Dalloway saw Queen Victoria buying flowers, where both the real Admiral Nelson and his fictitious inheritor Horatio Horn-blower lived, where shops have been in business – and serving royalty – for centuries.

Hardly the setting for a revolution, in short, and yet, in 1963, in a beauty salon at number 171, that was exactly what was going on. Sitting having her hair done was Mary Quant, the Chelsea fashion wizard and madcap. Behind, beside, above and around her buzzed Vidal Sassoon, owner and eponym of the establishment, working away with short scissors – five-inchers, which let him get closer to the hair, he felt – and applying a theory he’d been developing about haircutting to Quant’s already famous Buster Brown bangs.

A few days earlier, Quant had asked Sassoon to come up with something new for the hair of the models who would present her latest fashion line in an upcoming show. Sassoon had blurted, 'You could cut the whole damn lot off.’

Quant laughed, but he was serious. ‘I’m going to cut the hair like you cut material,’ he explained. ‘No fuss. No ornamentation. Just a neat, clean, swinging line.’

The idea had come to Sassoon through his study of architecture, particularly the works of the Bauhaus, pioneers of the International style of rigorously straight, clean lines that gave even massive skyscrapers an affecting lightness. ‘I dreamt hair in geometry,’ he remembered, ‘squares, triangles, oblongs and trapezoids.’ More specifically, he had intuited that it was possible to cut a woman’s hair so that it would hold a shape without recourse to gels, chemicals or applied heat, so that its shape would persist because of its structure, as it were, rather than the way in which it had been sculpted. ‘It is not the hemline but the outline that matters,’ he reckoned. He had been working gradually towards the ideal form of his vision; his 1960 design known as ‘the Shape’ came close. But he hadn’t ever really applied his theory to its fullest extent: what he wanted to do was crop the models’ hair into a squared-off shape of straight lines, short back and long sides – a modern approximation of a flapper’s bob but without any fixatives or styling: a bob cut.

Quant was excited by the prospect and said he should go ahead and use it for her upcoming show. However, Sassoon pointed out that it was only an idea – he’d try it out first on an experimental subject.

‘It’ll work,’ she declared, ‘and I’ll be your guinea pig, so what the hell.’

And so she sat, and when it was over she was delighted, insisting that the girls in the fashion première have their hair done just the same way. On the morning of the show, Sassoon cut all the models’ hair just as he had Quant’s – and then covered them up in scarves so as to deploy the new look as a surprise on the catwalk.

At the show, the haircut was even more of a sensation than the clothes. A Vogue editor rhapsodised, ‘At last hair is going to look hair again,’ and went in for the cut herself. An editor at the Sunday Times lashed out against the look in print. David Bailey, of all people, sided with the antis, arguing with Sassoon heatedly as Sassoon recalled years later:

‘Well, at least, Bailey, I’ve made some sort of a mark!’

‘Is that what you call it? It looks more like a bloody scar to me!’

But the thing had grown beyond the bounds of critique. A few weeks after its début, the new haircut, which Sassoon still called the Bob but which was becoming known in the business as ‘the Quant’, received an enormous boost when the actress Nancy Kwan, preparing to shoot The Wild Affair (in clothes designed by Quant), was brought to Sassoon’s salon for the new look. Kwan was famous for her long, thick, straight curtain of jet-black hair, but Sassoon went to work on it all the same, while the actress played chess with her manager. When it was over, she offered no commentary save a smile. A few days later, Terence Donovan was hired by Vogue to help show off the new look in both the British and American editions of the magazine. When Sassoon arrived at the photo studio to help get Kwan ready, he found her beaming: ‘I like it. Everybody likes it.’ Donovan took the photo – one of the most famous of his career – and thus began a long association with Sassoon, whose work, he felt, made a splendid subject: ‘Because the cuts were so strong they were very easy to photograph,’ he explained.

Donovan’s shot of the Bob – now also known as ‘the Kwan’ – went everywhere in the world: a real style sensation. One of those inspired by it was the French designer Emmanuelle Khanh, who flew to London for it (yes, it now became known in some places as ‘the Khanh’) and then ordered it for all the girls in her forthcoming show. The gimmick in this one was that the models would all come onto the catwalk wearing gigantic hats, then simultaneously remove them and shake their heads – astonishing the crowd of fashionistas as their new haircuts fell naturally into shape.

The ensuing publicity pushed Sassoon’s thriving business and growing reputation to unprecedented heights. There had always been celebrity crimpers around London’s posher neighbourhoods – Sassoon had worked for some, such as ‘Teasy Weasy’ Raymond, and others, such as Leonard of Mayfair, had worked for him in the near-decade that he’d been running his own salon. But none of them—not even the ones who won prizes in hairdressing competitions – had anything like the fame that was now enveloping Sassoon. He was in magazines and newspapers, both as an interview subject and as a matter of debate. Business on Bond Street increased dramatically – so impressively, in fact, that the managers of the Grosvenor House Hotel invited Sassoon to open a second salon on their premises; they’d been surreptitiously eyeing the traffic at various chic salons and observed that Sassoon’s Mondays and Thursdays were as busy as other people’s Saturdays.

And beyond even all the fame and success, Sassoon had discovered that the Bob/Quant/Kwan/Khanh had made concrete all his abstract thoughts about hair, haircutting, hair care and the new lifestyles that were sweeping London. In another few months, he would create another cut, the Five Point Cut, ‘the finest cut I have ever created, the geometric design in its purest, most classical form’.

More impressive even than this triumph – the obsessive’s realisation of his dream vision – was the totality of the achievement: Sassoon’s new vision of hair-styling changed the lives of looks-conscious women everywhere. Before Mary Quant submitted to his ministrations, women – even the most modern and chic – went to salons to have their hair dressed – permed, gelled, fried, baked and bent into shapes that enslaved them both to their coiffeur and to the people who had built it – twice-weekly visits to salons were common. Sassoon’s new cuts liberated women from the tyranny of the hairdresser; he had become a haircutter, providing women with a look that they could maintain on their own without costly, even dangerous treatments and finicky protective measures – space helmet hairdryers, curlers, hair spray, sleeping with their heads wrapped in tissue paper, that sort of thing. A chic hairstyle – a flip or a beehive or some other bit of sculpture – had once been the province of ladies of leisure and means; now anyone could have it.

Like most overnight successes, it was painful years in the making. Sassoon declared: ‘It took me from ‘54 to ‘63 to do my work, which was to untangle what was there – the teasing, the backcombing, the hairdressing – and turn it into a haircutting art form. I’m not disparaging in any way the hairdressing art form, because it was very clever, and it made people look extremely pretty. But it wasn’t for me. My work had to look much more architectural.’

And when his theory had been realised, an entire world embraced it. In less than a year, Sassoon had perfected his ideas and become known for them all around the world – you could realistically compare him to the Beatles, who were doing the same to pop music at exactly the same time. His innovations – like those of the Beatles – completely remade the field he’d mastered. The only thing more impressive, perhaps, was the path he took to his singular station.

Like so many of the people who made London swing, Vidal Sassoon was an East Ender, born in Shepherd’s Bush but moving to Aldgate in 1932 at the age of four. His father, a Sephardic Jew who sold carpets and had the gift of guile, had just left his mother, Betty. In order to support Vidal and his younger brother, Ivor, Betty moved the family to Wentworth Street, near the mythic Petticoat Lane, so that she could work—under Dickensian conditions and for Dickensian wages – in the area’s garment sweatshops. After a year of struggle, she felt she had no choice but to hand the boys over to the Orphanage for Sephardic Jews in Maida Vale, where for the next six years they saw her only during Sabbath services and a regular monthly visit.

When Betty remarried, she brought her boys home, but the Nazi blitz forced them to relocate to Wiltshire and then, when London was safe again, to a condemned house in Lawrence Road, West Ham. Sassoon, now an adolescent, skipped school for a job as a messenger boy and a life of hijinks with friends. And his family didn’t like the trend. One night they sat him down to tell him outright that he would have to learn a trade and that they’d chosen one for him: he was to report to Professor Adolf Cohen in Whitechapel Road where he would be apprenticed as … a hairdresser.

Sassoon, who liked the rough-and-tumble of football and larking about on bomb sites, couldn’t believe his ears: ‘They were trying to make a ladies’ hairdresser out of me!’ But he was a dutiful son and reported in his one good suit at the appointed hour. Cohen, who wasn’t really a professor but certainly had a donnish air, asked a few questions, ascertained Sassoon’s aptitude (if acknowledging his disinterest) and announced that he would take the boy on – for the standard apprenticeship fee of 100 guineas. He might as well have asked the Sassoons to square the circle. They apologised and started to leave.

And then Sassoon did something: by one of his accounts, he tipped his cap and then held the door open for his mother; by another, he thanked Cohen for his time as he made to leave. Whichever it was, Sassoon’s deferential mien caught Cohen’s eye, and the old master bade them stay. ‘It’s not every day I see a polite boy around here,’ he told Betty. ‘Let’s forget about the fee.’

And so Sassoon began his career, partly as a janitor, partly as a shampooer, for a grand total of five shillings a week. For two and a half years, Sassoon studied under Cohen – really studied, practising every technique over and over again until he got it right, attending whatever night-school classes Cohen recommended, honing his skills on models and down-and-out men at an East End homeless shelter.

When the time came for him to leave, his ambitions pointed west to the posh salons of Mayfair. He was an apt boy and presentable, but, despite his earnest efforts to imitate the actors he’d watched in West End plays, he still spoke with a raw Cockney accent. The most polite salon proprietors suggested he was too young to work for them; others responded as if to a trained monkey looking for a job. He found a position in a Shaftesbury Avenue salon that catered to the streetwalker trade – classy streetwalkers, mind you – and then moved on to salons in Putney, Bayswater, Stamford Bridge, Camberwell, Knights-bridge and Maida Vale: just another youngster learning a trade, building a clientele, making a living.

Well, almost just another. Unlike most of the legions of aspiring young hairdressers, Sassoon was a Jew – not Orthodox, but certainly observant – and was well cognisant of what that meant. He had been raised, after all, in a Jewish neighbourhood that, especially before the war, had been besieged by Fascists marching against the Jews, whom they accused of poisoning the global economy. ‘The East End of London was a very political place,’ he remembered, ‘an area of disquiet with loads of anti-Semitism. You had to be careful where you walked. I never went into Bethnal Green because it was a very Fascist area.’ Just before the war, the English Fascist Party had been outlawed and some of its leaders jailed. But they were given their liberty after the war and, amazingly, used it to once again march against England’s Jews. Said Sassoon, ‘They started holding their meetings and wearing Fascist uniforms – if you can believe Fascist uniforms in London – sometimes helped by the police, depending on which neighbourhood they were in. And you thought, “Didn’t we defeat all this?”’

Others had the same reaction – and not just young men, but war veterans from the Jewish East End who’d come home from battlegrounds in Germany and Poland with reports of the Holocaust. These men were decorated combat heroes – tough guys, to their bones – and they weren’t going to sit still for any hint of anti-Semitism in their midst. When the re-emergent Fascists began making their presence felt in Jewish neighbourhoods in the East End and North London, these veterans, loosely confederated in a gang known as the 43 Group, decided to fight them in the streets.

Sassoon wasn’t a born fighter, but he knew some of the neighbourhood tough guys such as the human colossus known as Big Jacky Myerovitch, who worked as a bouncer for a Soho gangster and came calling on the Sassoon brothers one night in the winter of ‘47-8, asking them to attend a meeting of London Jews who were massing against the Fascists. The rendezvous point was a room near Leicester Square that drew young Jewish men from all over the city – ‘any of us’, Sassoon remembered, ‘that were fit enough and could run fast enough and could actually conquer the fear, the extraordinary fear, of being a foreigner in your own country. When I was a kid we were made to feel as if we were foreigners in the country that we were born in. You had to conquer the fear before you could conquer the Fascists.’

A few nights later, several 43 Group members attacked a Fascist meeting in Hackney; after the Jewish combatants were arrested, they appeared in court to face charges wearing the decorations they had won from the Crown for fighting the Nazis. Sassoon, and other East End boys who decided to join the 43s, were taught how to fight – and not à la Marquess of Queensberry, but scrappy stuff: real guerrilla combat. They engaged in attacks on Fascists in Whitechapel Road, Kilburn High Road and the West End. These were carefully mounted battles, with carloads of back-up fighters called in at crucial moments and other tactics of military warfare. Sassoon got beaten – he’d show up at work occasionally in bandages, bruised – and he was once arrested. But he was thrilled by his actions, by the defeats the Fascists suffered – ‘they were beaten in the streets, it was as simple as that’ – and by the sense of belonging to something bigger than himself and his world.

When another meeting was called, this time to recruit young London Jews to help fight for Israeli independence, he heard the call. He hadn’t served England, but he would join the Israeli army. This was, technically, illegal: England had only recently sanctioned the partitioning of Palestine, and British subjects were banned from joining the infant nation’s armed forces. Sassoon and his fellow recruits were forced to travel to France in small, secretive groups, pretending to be tourists. Then they assembled in a tent city near Marseilles, where they were evaluated and trained. After several weeks, they were flown, via Rome and Athens, to an airfield near Haifa and assigned to training camps. Eventually, Sassoon was outfitted and armed and sent into the Negev desert to fight the Egyptian army.

Even compared to mêlées in the London streets this was terrifying stuff – the frontline of a real war. Sassoon fought in a seventeen-day campaign intended to capture and secure a nameless desert hill in the Gaza Strip, surviving both aerial bombardment and frontal attack by Egyptian soldiers, witnessing the deaths and maimings of friends and acts of mortal bravery on both sides. When it was over, victorious, he was taken to a kibbutz to recuperate and regain his strength. While he was resting up for another rotation to the front, a cease-fire was declared; the Israelis had won. He joined in the wild celebration, but then he was left with the reality: he was English, not Israeli, and the battle was only his – no matter how he’d paid with fear and sweat and effort – in an idealistic sense. He would return to London, to hairdressing. It was, for better or worse, who he was.

‘During that year in the Negev,’ Sassoon reflected, ‘I developed a sense of self that I’d never had before.’ But back home, he found himself drifting from job to job, not entirely sure he was following the right path. He was hired at a salon on the Edgware Road, where he became interested in the world of competitive hairstyling – designing new looks which were executed and judged tournament-style. He moved on to a smarter salon on Albermarle Street – Mayfair proper – and then thought about going to Paris to study and work. Finally he surfaced, through connections, at Raymond’s in Grafton Street, the most prestigious salon in Britain.

Raymond, also known as ‘Teasy Weasy’, was a grand master of theatricality and quasi-celebrity, a man who breezed camply into a room and air-kissed and tutt-tutted and charmed, if you were charmed by that sort of thing – a professional character (and, by the way, a fine judge of horseflesh, who owned a successful stable for decades). But he was also a master hairdresser, innovative, energetic and encouraging to his young staff, including Sassoon. After a few successful months, Raymond offered him the opportunity to run a salon that was soon to open in Cardiff. Sassoon had confided to his boss that he wanted to open his own shop and he liked the look of the new set-up in Cardiff, but he wanted some input and, more, recognition: ‘How about calling it Vidal Sassoon at Raymond’s,’ he asked. No dice. ‘How about publicity, then? I’d like my name mentioned on all photographs taken.’ Not likely. Ah, well: they parted on friendly terms.

Which was fine with Sassoon, whose ambition had come to the attention of a client who offered to help him fund a new venture. When the meeting came, Sassoon had his pitch ready: ‘In most salons, the client tells the hairdresser what she wants and he gives it to her, no matter how hideous, how ludicrous the result. In my salon they will get what I think is right for them. If they don’t want it, they can take their business elsewhere. In some salons the smarm is all-important—the “yes-madam”-ing and “no-madam”-ing, the bowing and scraping. In mine, clients will get simple, downtown politeness. We’re not going to waste our breath on compliments that cost nothing and mostly mean nothing. We’re going to put all our energies into producing great work. There’s going to be no stuffiness, no cathedral atmosphere, no plush-lined hush. We’re going to have cool, cool jazz and fabulous classical music, Mahler and Sibelius, playing in the background. Those who don’t like it can find a morgue of their choice.’

Most importantly, he had a financial plan. He would keep costs down – he himself would work for a salary – and his brother, Ivor, now a qualified accountant, would see to the money. The financiers agreed, and in mid-’54 Sassoon opened his first salon in third-floor premises above a shoe store and a photo studio at 108 Bond Street.

It was cramped – with room for only twenty bodies at a time and a lift that held only three at most (and they’d better be on friendly terms, at that) – and funky for the neighbourhood. Sassoon ran it true to his word, refusing to follow the ‘Madam-knows-best’ dictates of wealthy women who’d occasionally wander in, ask for some antiquated look or treatment and then leave in a huff, their hair untouched.

Slowly, the salon’s reputation for quality work and a relaxed new feel spread. Business – and staff numbers – grew. Sassoon hired Peter Laurence Taylor, a master tinter and lifestyle experimentalist – a proto-hippie whose wardrobe was a source of daily amused scandal among both employees and customers. He hired Leonard Lewis, another Shepherd’s Bush Jewish boy with a yen for the grand life; later on, after disagreeing with Sassoon over technique, he would leave and become Leonard of Mayfair, almost as famous as his old boss. And Sassoon hired Nigel Davies, another clothes horse, this time from North London, who called himself Mr Christian. Davies wasn’t at all serious about hair – or, in fact, about much else besides looking sharp, getting paid and getting laid. He insulted customers and disappeared for knee-tremblers in the lift and generally drove Sassoon mad. Sassoon finally sacked him in a fury: ‘Out – and stay out! Never let me see you in this salon again!’ Davies grinned: ‘Blimey, would you listen to old God, going on!’ But leave he did, only returning after several years had passed and he had renamed himself Justin de Villeneuve and discovered Twiggy.

These colourful characters – plus an assortment of clients from the theatre and jazz circles in which Sassoon had begun to run – gave the salon a hot name. Nevertheless it wasn’t making enough money to satisfy the investors, who had hoped to compete with the stuffy sort of Mayfair salons that Sassoon was revolting against. So he bought out his backers and sought new capital. ‘There were many times,’ he remembered, ‘when you walked into the bank and said, “I need. Please.” It was not easy. Once London became it, then, of course, it became much easier. Then the City wanted to invest in you and all kinds of people were after you.’ When the lease became available on a large, old-school salon at 171 New Bond Street, another backer emerged, a brassy Australian named Charles Prévost. Maybe because he was a visionary, maybe because he wanted to meet girls, Prévost gave Sassoon £40,000 to redecorate and open the place. Sassoon hired the celebrated society interior decorator David Hicks to apply his hand to all four floors – which he did up in stark and airy black and white. In April 1959, the new salon opened.

The change in location – just a few streets – wasn’t nearly as important as the timing. Where just a few years earlier Sassoon had to dig up old friends who’d tasted fame to give his shop a bit of chic cachet, now his salon was a destination for celebrities, well-to-do ladies and others feeling the flush of never-had-it-so-good prosperity. Women who were wearing clothes made by Mary Quant started to come in for the loose new style Sassoon had designed – the Shape. Some of the adventuresome London men who’d been leaning toward new looks came in, including young acting stars Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Christopher Plummer, Terence Stamp. (In recruiting such customers, Sassoon was no doubt aided by the fact that he was an East End boy himself, with a known reputation as both a scrapper and a skirt-chaser; by the time he opened his second salon, in fact, he already had one marriage behind him and another on the horizon.)

Energised by what was going on around him, Sassoon began sparking ideas: hand-held blow-dryers were used to create body in hair and eliminate the use of big space helmet dryers; conditioners and other treatments were created to nurture the hair of clients who’d been subjected to years of harsh chemicals, gels and sprays; electrically heated rollers helped speed up setting time. Sassoon became such a sensation that Clairol, the American hair product company, sent him around the US in 1960 on a barnstorming demonstration tour; he followed up with a similar trip through the UK.

Yet, for all this success, he was still haunted by his ideas of hair sculpted geometrically and freed from all the encumbrances that many of even his newest styles still required. He pursued studies of shapes and forms, even sitting down with architect Philip Johnson to show him some sketches. He knew there was another way; he could feel it simmering under his feet.

And then in 1963 Mary Quant showed up and told him she wanted something new for her girls.

Kaboom.

Quant had that kind of power – indeed, she had virtually invented it. She had single-handedly reinvigorated the idea of modern British fashion with designs that bubbled up out of her head and into the window of a boutique on the King’s Road in Chelsea, a thoroughfare which, though a ten-minute taxi ride from Piccadilly, was thought of by most Londoners as the heart of some quaint riverside village.

The impetus to Quant’s starting a revolution in quiet, arty Chelsea was her marriage to Alexander Plunket-Greene, one of the very first old-family Englishmen in whom the spirit of the ‘60s blossomed. Born into a line of English eccentrics, who included Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh among its lovers, friends and acquaintances, he was a teenage scene unto himself in the early ‘50s, wandering through Chelsea in his mother’s old pyjamas and slacks, and hanging around Soho jazz bars, where he aspired to play the trumpet. He showed up only when he felt like it to classes at Goldsmith’s College, an art and technical school in New Cross, near Deptford, where he tried to distance himself even further from his fellow students – as if it were possible or necessary – by walking about with a film script under his arm. He was, in short, the sort of harmless eccentric one expected to find in Chelsea, London’s nearest answer to Montmartre: moneyed, bred for leisure, artistically inclined – a definitive bohemian, if he said so himself.

Among the mere mortals who found themselves dazzled by Plunket-Greene’s antics at Goldsmith’s was Quant, a pixie-sized 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 Goldsmith’s out of a compromise arrangement with her exasperated family, 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 abandoned the chance to get a teaching certificate for a life of gadding about with her new boyfriend and the ragtag bunch who came to be known as the Chelsea Set.

As much as the Jazz Age and the Beat Generation (and, later, Swinging London), the Chelsea Set was a creation of myth and media that nevertheless had a basis in the real lives of its so-called members. The Chelsea Set was invented by gossip columnists – or promoted and publicised and brought to the public’s attention that way,’ according to Christopher Gibbs, the antique dealer and scene-maker who seemed always to be at the heart of the groovy and the new. But there was, for the truth of that, something going on.

In the mid-’50s, at a few pubs, clubs and coffee bars, mainly along the King’s Road, various restless and creative young people – many from old families, some with money – began to hang out, live fast and look for kinkier diversions than the norms of the day allowed. The first real instance of jeunesse dorée in England since the Bright Young Things of Waugh’s ‘20s, they dressed outrageously, partied hedonistically, consorted with rough types, including gangsters, and courted headlines beyond the usual society page notices reserved for the activities of young people of their background and breeding. Chelsea Set folks did sensational things like holding a maverick drinking party on the Circle Line of the London Underground that climaxed in a chaotic free-for-all, or throwing a pyjama party at a Soho nightclub which, again, ended in near riot. They became famous – the men, especially – for what they were seen wearing: ethnic outfits from colonial outposts, exaggerated versions of gentlemen’s clothes from previous generations of English fashion; colourful, form-fitting trousers and flowing shirts, even blue jeans, then generally worn mainly by labourers.

They had good educations and trust funds and other advantages. Perhaps that’s why they were among the first to act out their frustrations with the long post-war malaise that gripped the country. Some of them had jobs – they kept small shops or photo studios or worked in advertising or public relations or the media – but mostly they gave themselves over to scene-making and the husbandry of outrage in others. ‘We were all very spoiled and very tiresome,’ recalled Simon Hodgson, who ran with the Chelsea Set. ‘Most of us were subsidised by our families and our lives were built around going to parties and getting drunk and meeting gangsters. Nobody had ever spoken to gangsters before – they seemed rather chic. But we were really frightfully snobbish. Everyone had to be rich, funny or famous, or at least notorious.’

‘Chelsea was very much removed from the rest of London,’ remembered Christopher Gibbs. ‘There were people who hung out in Chelsea who might not go east of Sloane Square for months. West of Sloane Square was a kind of dark land. You went perhaps to an amusing Italian restaurant or a snappy coffee bar. It was a very bohemian world. It had long-established, well-off people who were living on Cheyne Walk and such. It was a daytime culture, really; there weren’t any nightclubs in Chelsea.’

For those sorts of entertainment, Chelsea Setters gravitated towards the bohemian enclave of Soho, where you could feel some of the upsurging change – or, rather, feel an energy that was distinct from the prosperous after-dinner hum that Harold Macmillan bragged about. Soho was, along with Chelsea, the one place in London you could count on running into artists, writers, drunks, loons, and the daft on a regular basis – with the difference that in Soho you also rubbed shoulders with gangsters, pimps, hookers, strippers, pornographers and slumming actors from nearby West End theatres rather than the aged soldiers and genteel shopkeepers of the King’s Road. Soho was hardcore bohemia, a place where foreigners ran the restaurants and pubs, where homosexuals felt relatively safe, where vice businesses were permitted if not free rein, then certainly lots of elbow room. ‘Soho was more louche and more cross-fertilised,’ remembered Gibbs. There were East End kids coming up for a good time in the West End. There were jazz clubs and night spots and coffee bars and a sprinkling of gay bars and such. It drew a lot of people from the provinces and east London.’

The best jazz music could be heard in Soho, often in tiny little basements that had been converted, with self-avowed grandness, into clubs. There were a number of after-hours (and, given the erratic licensing hours of the era, afternoon) drinking clubs in the area. And it was the best neighbourhood to haunt in search of ethnic food other than haute cuisine: French, Italian, Jewish and Chinese families in particular did substantial business there as restaurateurs.

But if you had the right spirit, daytime in Chelsea offered sufficient opportunities. ‘The world was full of chancers from all over the place,’ Gibbs recalled, ‘a lot of wild colonial boys from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean. You could live on £10 a week. You could take a taxi ride to Hampstead for seven shillings. Just as in the nineteenth century you could live the life of a gentleman on £700 a year, you could skate by on not very much.’

Mary Quant, who hadn’t been raised with money or privilege and was, perhaps, less jaded, had a slightly different take on the scene: ‘I think it grew out of something in the air which developed into a serious effort to break away from the Establishment. It was the first real indication of a complete change of outlook.’ For her, the Chelsea Set – or the loose group of people who went by that name in the papers – was like a genial extension of art school: 'We felt very much a sort of isolated group because there was so little else in Chelsea. So as a group, the Chelsea lot would sort of hang together.’ She saw the humour and the essential frivolity of the scene, as evidenced in her pleasure in recounting the story of the elderly publican at the Markham Arms who thought that the newspapers had been referring to the ‘Chelsea Six’, and had reckoned that Quant, Plunket-Greene and a couple of their drinking buddies constituted the entire gang.

But then, Quant probably felt kinder towards the idea of the Chelsea Set because she stood so distinctly apart from it, distinguished by her raw talent and by ideas that no one else had ever had. Ever since girlhood, Quant had designed her own clothes in pursuit of a Peter Pan-ish idea about what constituted – or ought to constitute – women’s fashion: ‘I grew up not wanting to grow up,’ she explained. ‘Growing up seemed terrible. It meant having candy-floss hair, stiletto heels, girdles and great boobs. To me it was awful; children were free and sane and grown-ups were hideous.’ Even as she hit her 20s, she still refused to kowtow to fashion diktats that she evolve into some sort of stoic, matronly mannequin. When, in mid-'55, she and Plunket-Greene had the idea to go into business together, they agreed to open a boutique for young Chelsea women that offered the sorts of gear that Quant couldn’t find anywhere else for herself: jewellery, clothes, accessories and the hats that Quant had been designing and selling to a handful of other shops and friends. They discussed the idea with Archie McNair, one of their set, a fellow who had a track record of succeeding with unlikely inspirations.

McNair was the owner of the Fantasy, a rising King’s Road hot spot – the first coffee bar in the district and one of the first anywhere in London outside of Soho. In the early ‘50s, Soho had become the centre of a trend that would serve as an important catalyst to the lifestyle changes of the following decade – the vogue for Italian-style coffee bars. In 1953, Frith Street became home to the first Gaggia espresso machine imported into England, and the hot little cups of steamed coffee became, along with a taste for Italian food and fashion, a staple of au courant city life. The new Italian lifestyle – the famous dolce vita that hadn’t even been named yet in Federico Fellini’s movie – was imported to England by a small army of young Italian men who had come to the UK to avoid National Service back home. When the Italian government renewed National Service after the war, it allowed men to defer their conscription up to the age of 36, provided they were working abroad and left before they had their induction physicals. They didn’t need much incentive to leave in the first place – unemployment was at nearly 30 per cent by this time and, as the United States had clamped down on immigration, England found itself filling up with a steady stream of Italian workers who, naturally, brought their tastes and manners and clothes and foodstuffs with them.

The appetite for espresso and Italian fashions for men opened English eyes to a great many things, remembered restaurateur Alvaro Maccioni, one of the throng who came: ‘They realised that on the other side of the channel there was life after the war.’ More and more Italian restaurants could be found. ‘They didn’t want to eat roast lamb any more,’ he said of the English customers who flocked to the new trattorias. ‘Before, food was like gas or electricity: then it became another form of entertainment.’

But even more than the taste for pasta, the craze for Italian coffee swept England along with the growing prosperity. In every town, it seemed, the young people who had jobs but weren’t old or jaded enough to frequent pubs turned a coffee bar into the local hip spot. Archie McNair had been one of the first to hit on this trend, and his good fortune had left him with a little capital and the desire to compound it. He joined forces with Quant and Plunket-Greene, and with £8000 of seed money, they obtained the freehold of a building in the King’s Road that had an ideal shop space at street level and, below, just the place for Plunket-Greene to open the jazz club of his dreams. In November 1955, the boutique named Bazaar opened its doors.

Among the items for sale that day were a pair of pyjamas that Quant had designed – the only thing she’d made for the opening, in fact, other than some hats. The gaily coloured bedclothes were photographed by Harper’s Bazaar and bought by an American clothier who said he planned to copy them for sale back home. Quant resented being ripped off but was also inspired to make more of her own pieces for the shop. Buying ready-made sewing patterns, which she revamped according to her tastes, going to Harrod’s for yards of cloth of the sort not normally used for women’s clothes, she began working feverishly in her Chelsea bedsit, whipping up enough stock each day to replace whatever had been sold the day before. ‘I just went at it like any other design thing,’ she said, ‘which was clothes for the way I lived or the way one lived in Chelsea.’

Both the very concept of the shop and Quant’s novel designs for it were instant hits. ‘It was almost a violent success,’ she recalled. ‘People were sort of three-deep outside the window. The Royal Court Theatre people were mad about what we were doing. And it was very much the men who were bringing their girlfriends around and saying, “This is terrific. You must have some of this!”' Because of the shop’s erratic hours—drinking with their customer-friends, Plunket-Greene and Quant sometimes forgot to close until midnight—and because each day promised an entirely new look as dictated by Quant’s mood or the materials she found, Bazaar became an essential destination, with young Chelsea girls popping in several times daily to see what had been set out for sale.

What they got were simple, bold designs in bright colours, stripes or polka dots, dresses and suits that broke away from the closed-neck, pinch-waisted style of French-dominated haute couture, and short – and, in time, even shorter – skirts. You didn’t see stuff like it in Paris, you didn’t see stuff like it in New York, and you certainly didn’t see anything like it anywhere else in London. The Chelsea girls ate it up. Literally, too, as Plunket-Greene used the downstairs premises not to open a jazz club but rather a French-style bistro called Alexander’s, one of the first new wave restaurants in London and a decidedly trendy and popular dining spot for the crowds that hovered around Bazaar.

Apart from the predictably enthusiastic locals, however, there was at first little ballyhoo. ‘The trade ignored us,’ Quant recalled. ‘They called us degenerate. They raised their eyebrows in mystified amazement. Later, when they realised how successful Bazaar was proving, they called our success a “flash in the pan”.’

Yet Quant had hit a nerve with her work. She was making clothes that distinguished those who wore them from their mothers – or, more exactly, the girls from the women – and which proclaimed to the world that virginity and propriety, so long the basis of Englishwomen’s fashion, weren’t absolute values. Her clothes were sexy – hell, sexual – and the sense of colour, freedom and youthfulness that they imparted gradually became more and more fashionable until finally they became the norm. ‘The street,’ recalled an admiring Vidal Sassoon, ‘was her atelier.’

Said a fashion writer then with the Daily Express, ‘Suddenly someone had invented a style of dressing which we realised we had been wanting for ages. Comfortable, simple, no waists, good colours and simple fabrics. It gave anyone wearing them a sense of identity with youth and adventure and brightness.’

Quant saw the impact more explicitly. The look of her clothes, she explained, said, ‘I’m very sexy. I enjoy sex, I feel provocative, but you’re going to have a job to get me. You’ve got to excite me and you’ve got to be jolly marvellous to attract me. I can’t be bought, but if I want you, I’ll have you.’

As the most visible exponent of a new slant on life, Quant became a fount of pithy, outrageous comments.

On her ideal of a stylish woman: ‘She is sexy, witty and dry-cleaned.’

On jewellery: 'Too much jewellery makes you look old, as if you were rejected by lots of rich, old men who paid you off.’

On the new vogue for youthful fashions: ‘Suddenly, every girl with a hope of getting away with it is aiming to look not only under voting age but under the age of consent.’

On her own success: ‘Egg and chips, egg and chips, egg and chips – and finally we got a bit of steak!’

Not, in short, the traditional standard of English girlhood.

But that standard was starting to be swept away.