http://www.modculture.co.uk/images/culture/ivyshop.jpg
http://i.pbase.com/o6/03/448103/1/73460198.XlVyw089.DSCN0681_resize.JPG
Last edited by Alex Roest (2009-05-08 13:09:01)
most of you have probably already seen this, but in case someone missed it....
here's part 2 from British Style Genius on youth subculture. Has a few bits of J Simons talking about mod, the natural shoulder, etc..more JS in part 3 as well as Hewitt's "3 finger rule"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7SjJt6fjr4&feature=related
You can navigate thru youtube to find the other parts. Part 4 is particularly interesting as it focuses on the skinhead years
Last edited by Get Smart (2009-05-08 15:39:47)
Note how stripped back John Simons is: essential cool. Effortless. Probably didn't even have to glance in a mirror.
Last edited by Hard Bop Hank (2009-05-10 09:17:42)
Re: purism/ "hardcore Ivy"....
I also think that it must have been a long process that led to the so-called "hardcore Ivy"...
I refer once again to the JS/JG interview.... when he talks about the 50s he says, it was also the time of the first designers doing things with Ivy League... Stanley Blacker? or so... and he talks about Continental/Ivy, Anglo/Ivy and Anglo/Continental styles that were around, along with the purist stuff...
Clothesville in the early 60s must have been different, too....
The purism for JS probably started in 1964, after Clothesville, and just before the Ivy Shop was opened... The USA must have been a magical place for a London modernist, at that time...
My interests are certainly tied up with the Americans arriving in Britain in preparation for the Second Front: bringing with them all those goodies and images. I love all the movies that explore it a little, like 'The Dirty Dozen', and find endless fascination in visiting places where American servicemen trained. None of this is specifically 'Ivy League', of course, but it can be profitably stirred into the mix.
Last edited by Chris_H (2009-05-10 11:39:19)
I've read before about how expensive the stuff was. No wonder blokes like Georgie Fame and Charlie Watts went to Austin's - and wonder young lads had their noses pressed against the glass, eh? I've often done the same at Number 2 Russell Street.
Last edited by Chris_H (2009-05-10 12:07:25)
Great stuff, Chris!
BTW, I'm looking for a Gretsch Country Gentleman... but I can't afford it...
aspirations...
I thought, in spite of the blanks, that this was worth bumping.
Chet often went too far.
Interesting comments about the relative lack of 'Ivy' items at Russell Street in the years before closure. It may be, therefore, that Chiltern Street is a much stronger continuum than I've been giving it credit for.
We live and learn. Chet was then, AFS is now, a good many years later.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7SjJt6fjr4&feature=related
Interesting to watch this again particularly JS and Charlie Watts comments.
John Simons original mod? FFS. Their motto: don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. My motto: truth is stranger than fiction. In other words: instead of simplifying and sanitising the mod scene they could have presented it as it really was and it would have been just as or even more interesting.
I'm no expert on teddy boys but I think they did the same thing to that era too.
I'm pretty sure I saw this on TV at the time and thought it ho-hum, here we go. Wasn't Elms involved? The entire 'Mod' thing has been allowed to get out of hand. Furthermore, Yuca is probably right about teds - particularly the original bunch, who were around when Elvis Presley was still nursing the pimples on his back. I think they listened to ballads. Jo Stafford? The teds I knew as a teenager were mostly cartoon revivalists who took themselves very seriously, spending a lot of money on their clothes etc.
The more I read the more confusing the invention of 'Ivy League' in the UK becomes. John Simons was a visionary - I accept and celebrate that. 'Mod' is even hazier in my mind.
Yes the very first teds were around a little before rock'n'roll hit the UK. I believe that once Rock Around the Clock arrived in UK cinemas, teds adopted the music immediately. By the late 1950s teddy boys stood for violence and racism and the look was very dated. Yet a few years earlier I think the teds were quite forward-thinking and individualist.
Something similar happened to the mods really, although the mod thing became far bigger than the teds ever did.
None of which is remotely touched on in that documentary.
Roger Mayne's photographs of Notting Hill are interesting. Very cool-looking West Indians, menacing teddy boys in thick-soled shoes (not, I don't think, 'brothel-creepers'). Rather an expensive book, though now, I should have thought.