All good and amusing stuff no doubt.  Half my wardrobe is ancient; some of it might well meet with Ian Strachan's approval; but how do I add to it other than via the usual channels?  Let's be honest, how many of us refuse to use the Internet for at least some of our purchases?  Wouldn't it be something to have a UK-based shop - an on-line shop if need be - that offered nothing made before, say, the end of the 70s?  The focus, I suppose, would be on the Boom Years; nothing of compromise. 

How unlike the present situation. 

Brooks were my first love, but it didn't take long for the shirts I bought from them to be of inferior quality.  No need to sandpaper those particular collars!

A good video on the subject of Kenneth Williams...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6MbkSjixNY


Austins is the shop of dreams.
Will anything ever exist like it again?
Unlikely, but we can dream...

Sorry to have to say this:  Strachan's strictures would almost certainly rule out anyone 'hardcore' buying from 2 Russell Street.  On the whole.  Chinese-made Haggar at £50?  And Baggie - a shirt the Ivy Shop really didn't rate very highly because of the stiff collar and placket?

In the past I've wrongly given the impression that Ian was a bit cool with Pete Townshend when in fact they where really quite matey I now know - even to the extent of Pete coming up to Ian in the street to ask how business was (and there's another nice annecdote in that one too).

Elvis Costello was often in the Ivy for the shoos I. informed.

Also I. well remembers Dexy's shopping trips to Richmond back in the day & their curious photograph taking fans who followed on...


There really is a book in all this.

Orton dressed quite well once he made himself a few quid.  There's a photograph of him wearing some exceptionally nice looking chukka boots.  On the distaff side, he would have flirted with hippydom, in true Swinging Sixties fashion, had he lived.  He was far too taken with the hashish-induced side of things not to have succumbed.  Basically, then, a Carnaby type.  I must say it's news to me about KW.  A complicated, often miserable so and so who has always appealed to me for being so unfashionably right wing. 

"I might be an old poof but I'm not right wing"
(Archie Rice in Osborne's 'The Entertainer').

There is but one True Trad - and it is not called 'Trad'!

Let's hear it then...  Was he smiling?