That's exactly how we dressed for a while.

I had a black one from Millets having initially bought a blue green one that was a bit too baggy.

Don't wear a black one now though

Thanks for this and what wonderful pictures.   The same was true for me in the early 1980s, up in Nottingham with no internet and copying older blokes from the 1970s we had never heard of Baracuta.

I now wear a Gant windcheater blouson or Farah weekender blouson jacket with collars instead of a harrington now which is much less obvious and avoids people thinking you are a Mod/scooter boy/skinhead/miscellaneous street urchin (delete as appropriate).    They look smart with a polo or shirt without being 'scene' related.

BTW - Ian looks very Steve McQueen in that photo.

Last edited by MarkCoyle (2012-07-11 09:23:39)

I thought you'd be getting full use out of that at the mo Woof!

I like them, have a few and wear them when I feel like wearing one.

The Squire shop was  close by a strip club, whereas the Ivy Shop was in well-heeled Richmond. Depends what you mean by smarter.

I started in the Squire Shop which was all skinhead at the weekends.

JFM - Yes is the short answer, I'll reply in more detail after. Time I turned off the computer!

After the Skinhead craze had died down the Ivy shop became respectable again and the smarter dressers returned. Some of the Skinheads grew up and became better dressed too, many just moved on to the next fashion of long scruffy hair.
At this point the Squire shop moved to selling the new long-haired fashions too and some people dropped the shop. Later came the Village Gate which was even worse. You could still find some nice things though but the styling of much of it was really off. There were a load of shops with this new look in them then and it was all really common. Everybody dressed the same in flares. My wedding photos of the time show my side all in conservative suits and my wife's side all in flares. That was the divide you would see then and the flared side won out for a while. It wasn't until the 1980s that a return to conservatism happened and the Ivy shop really had a second boom under its new name of John Simons in Covent Garden.

The Covent Garden shop was then the place to go. I was working in London so it was then easier for me to get to than Richmond oddly enough. The quality of the goods there was second to none eclipsing even the Ivy shop at its peak in the pre-Skinhead 1960s. I also started to visit America at that time too.
Then for about 30 years until the new shop opened and Covent Garden closed the style was very constant. You could get all you wanted there. The same clothes were cheaper in America but not when you added on the air fare! Covent Garden was a one-stop Ivy shop.

Which almost brings us up to date with the new shop on Chiltern Street and a bit of a new direction for John Simons. Getting good Ivy clothes is harder than ever now with the decline in standards in America since about the mid 1990s. The second hand market (call it "vintage" and add on another tenner!) has grown as a result, something I never thought I'd wear but now do. The internet has made things easier too but the hard thing is to get the old quality these days.

And that is just about it for my story!