Shopgirls (29 page)

Like Quant before her, Hulanicki dispensed with traditional plain sales assistant dresses. Instead, Sarah, Irene, Elly and the ‘powerful band of girls’, as she described them, wore Biba clothes at work and started modelling Biba clothes for catalogues and magazines. Another London look was born. As a young illustrator, Hulanicki had been inspired by Hollywood films and ‘mesmerised’ by Audrey Hepburn, ‘the first young person’s hero to wear couture clothes’. Like Hepburn, the ‘classic’ Biba girl was a world away from the full figure of 1950s femininity. She was ‘square-shouldered and quite flat-chested’, her head ‘perched on a long, swanlike neck’, her face ‘a perfect oval’ and her eyelids ‘heavy with long, spiky lashes’.
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The look would be famously personified by south London teenager Lesley Hornby, otherwise known as Twiggy.

Biba, and the other ‘London looks’ embraced by the baby-boom teenagers, may have been inspired by comic-book fantasies of childhood, but this was a generation rewriting the rulebook – at work, at home and in the bedroom. Although a Biba girl may have ‘looked sweet’, she ‘was as hard as nails’. She ‘did what she felt like at that moment and had no mum to influence her judgement’. There was no question of the Biba shopgirls living in or abiding by byzantine rules about boyfriends. They rented and shared their own flats and bedsits and, as Hulanicki put it, ‘had no mother waiting for them to see if they came home with a crumpled dress’. They seized their independence and, as they did so, played their own part in Britain’s sexual revolution. Hulanicki summed it up: ‘I don’t think our girls were promiscuous; they picked and chose. If they fancied someone they went right out and got what they were after instead of weaving webs and hypocritical traps, as we had to in the Fifties.’
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Biba girls became not just shop assistants and models but personalities in their own right, whose very lives embodied the store’s challenging brand. When American TV company CBS made a documentary about a young country girl who came to the big city and was transformed into a swinging Sixties dolly, they used Elly as their girl. Sarah Burnett was among four from Biba whisked off ‘by a Frenchman to go and dance in a club in the South of France … We were called Les Minis Anglais or something like that. It was very innocent. It was extraordinary.’ Her workmate, Madeline Smith, moved from a summer job at the store to find fleeting fame as a horror-film star, with credits on
The Vampire Lovers
and
Theatre of Blood
. And the much-photographed ‘Biba Twins’, eighteen-year-old assistants Rosie and Susy Young, became two of the most famous faces of the day. They’d dropped out of Bournemouth Art School and travelled around Spain before heading to London. Rosie remembers that ‘shop girls were so glamorous then … a real part of the swinging scene … and there we were at the centre of it all’. Over in Fulham, new designs by Zandra Rhodes and Sylvia Ayton drew in the crowds at their Fulham Road Clothes Shop, but so did their staff: ‘the shop was like an open house to strange people, who liked sitting on the big banana seat and talking to the shop girl’.
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Boutiques certainly placed shopgirls centre stage, accessible to customers who were usually around their age and close enough to them in background to create a personal connection. The stores’ appeal was built on this emotional bond between them and their customers, but these faux relationships functioned like real teen friendships, based as much on idolising envy as on empathy and trust. Boutique impresarios were all too aware that this intimacy and insider status, however illusory, kept the shop buzzing and the tills ringing.

From the late 1880s, well-heeled women had flocked to Whiteley’s, Harrods, Jenners, Kendals and the rest for their social scene as much as for the shopping. They could meet friends, style gaze, watch the world go by and, in the more adventurous establishments, enjoy the occasional – and, at the time, highly daring – mid-morning glass of wine and a biscuit. From the late 1950s, their great-granddaughters and their friends made a beeline for boutiques. If you could get through the door, you could make the free coffee last a while, hang out and, if you looked the part, maybe pick up an invitation to a party later. Their unique fusion of fashion, art, design and music came to define new British bohemianism. They were Britain’s fragmented answer to Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Diana Dawson, working at Quant’s Bazaar, lapped it up. So did her genuine friends. She recalled that they ‘would come in to gossip and giggle, though we tended to shut up when Mary walked in’. The neighbouring boutiques and coffee bars, sometimes combined in one venue, were the ‘haunts of the Chelsea Set during the day’. In the evenings, the action switched to local pubs, particularly ‘the Markham, round the corner from Bazaar, or the Pheasantry’, where ‘you went to find out where the nearest party was’, following the sound of Paul Anka records, ‘armed with a bottle of cheap red wine and some cigarettes’.
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Boutiques came with their own distinct soundtrack. And they didn’t just play records, they also played host to the singers and bands that made them. According to
Rave
, Sandie Shaw was a regular at Hem and Fringe, while Lulu favoured the Victoria and Albert. The Pennyhapenny Boutique was owned by members of the band The Pretty Things. And Apple’s founder, the model Jenny Boyd, found that being the sister-in-law of a Beatle did her business no harm: her sister Patti was married to George. At Top Gear, John Lennon was known to ‘sit on the window sill and put 78s on the old record player’, while Mick Jagger kept accounts for ‘all his girlfriends’ there, but ‘stopped paying the bills’ after each break-up. Quorum’s catwalks were in a league of their own. Choreographed by Ossie Clark, they broke with every couture convention, with models moving down the runway to Hendrix, The Doors and the Velvet Underground. These ‘happenings’ attracted A-listers and rising talent – musicians, journalists, photographers, artists, aristos and assembled hangers-on. The store played another intriguing but less well-known part in British music history. Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett dated Lindsay Corner, one of their shopgirls, and one Dave Gilmour was their van driver.
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Outside the central London bubble of King’s Road, Carnaby Street and Kensington, boutiques blossomed in other cities across Britain. In Manchester, new stores linked to new bands and new celebrities flourished. In 1965, Tony Bookbinder opened Pygmalia in Back Pool Fold, a small alley a few blocks from Kendals on Deansgate. He was the drummer with Billy J. Kramer’s band The Dakotas and his younger sister, Elaine, was breaking into the British blues scene under her stage name Elkie Brooks. Nearby, shop assistant Christine Shipley worked at Contrary in Barton Arcade, selling ‘maxi coats with trousers to match, wet look tops, hot pants, split knee velvet trousers, maxi dresses and lurex tops’ to ‘great customers’, including younger members of the cast of new soap
Coronation Street
. On the city’s real Bridge Street, Britain’s best-known footballer, George Best, opened his Edwardia store in 1969, selling trademark menswear. In Nottingham, young designers Janet Campbell and Paul Smith set up The Birdcage in an old tailor’s shop. For Campbell, like so many other young entrepreneurs, it was all an experiment: ‘None of us had any formal training in retailing, or worked in a shop before, so nobody knew the “right” way to do it … I employed a girl called Valerie because she’d got the right sort of hair.’ The big difference was that the set-up was, for Campbell at least, ‘completely classless’, attracting ‘girls who worked in banks, students, offices – and rich girls, too’.
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In Barnsley, 23-year-old Rita Britton decided she wanted a piece of the action. She wasn’t an art student and had no famous friends, but in 1967 she quit her job in a local paper mill, where she’d worked since she was fifteen, borrowed £500 from her dad, rented a dank basement in town and created what would become a legendary store – Pollyanna. With few connections, she jumped in at the deep end. She remembers starting off ‘with just two rails of stock from Mary Quant’. Her dad, a lorry driver, had helped her out there, too: ‘I can remember my dad coming home at six in the morning after a double shift and driving me down to London. He’d park outside Mary Quant, sleep in the car, drive me back to Barnsley and then go back to work.’ She adds, ‘Incidentally, I remember the people at Mary Quant serving me tea and cucumber sandwiches with no crusts. I thought: “They must be incredibly hard up.”’
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Britton pressed on: ‘I rang up Ossie Clark from a call box at the end of my Gran’s road and he agreed that I could buy from him.’
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Not surprisingly, the young-blood boutiques rattled the old department stores. Those that had survived the war now faced a challenge from within retail’s own ranks to renew their cultural edge for a new generation. Some stores, however, relished the challenge. In the early 1950s, Woollands department store in Knightsbridge was struggling. In its pre-war heyday, it had successfully catered for a servant class whose mistresses shopped a few streets away at Harrods and Harvey Nichols, but now it found itself stuck in an Edwardian time-warp. Its fortunes were turned around in 1961, however, when a young manager named Martin Moss succeeded in bottling some boutique magic by opening the first 21 Shop in pride of place on the ground floor. Moss had gone back to the drawing board, bringing in Terence Conran and interior design students from the Royal College of Art to strip out the stuffy sales space and give it a more open feel. In a bold move, he also promoted Vanessa Denza, a 22-year-old Woollands shopgirl, to the position of fashion buyer for 21. Denza whisked new styles straight from art-student studios to her shopfloor. Among them was a daring needle-cord women’s trouser suit designed by Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin. Denza recalls, ‘In 1961 you didn’t wear trousers. That’s when I started buying in a lot of trousers from France. I used to go over to the factories and hand pick what I needed.’ In another break with store tradition pioneered by boutiques, she rapidly accelerated turnover by only running a few styles for a short time rather than buying in bulk for an entire season. If customers blinked, they would miss the chance to buy. Fast fashion was born.
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Woollands’ owners, the Debenhams Group, seized the opportunity and sold Moss’s successful concept of an in-store boutique to others. By 1965, there were four new 21 Shops: three in their Marshall and Snelgrove stores in London, Birmingham and Manchester and one in Williams and Hopkins in Bournemouth. Other stores were quick to follow the model of 21. In 1966, Selfridges launched Miss Selfridge as its own boutique brand. The following year, the brand was occupying its own premises in Croydon, Brighton, Regent Street and Brompton. Boutiques were branching out and moving slowly but surely towards the mainstream or, as some would claim, towards their own demise.

Meanwhile, on the high streets the chain stores were also learning fast. The story of one – Chelsea Girl – is particularly telling. For all the hype, the real Chelsea set and the real Chelsea look were still exclusive and expensive. According to Twiggy, a suburbanite catapulted to stardom in this new world, Bazaar and the rest of the better-known boutiques were only ‘for rich girls’. Quant had once claimed that boutiques had helped to push ‘snobbery out of fashion’ and that in her shop ‘you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dresses’. They may have aspired to the same look, but a Quant pinafore featured in
Vogue
in 1960 cost sixteen and a half guineas, almost three weeks’ wages for an average office girl.
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Step forward Chelsea Girl – a ‘new’ chain that was in fact a bold rebranding of a much more sedate one. Lewis Separates had been a well-known interwar family clothing business and had itself grown out of the family’s original stores, which had sold groceries and then knitting wool. In 1965, alert to the money to be made from Quant’s Chelsea look, owner Bernard Lewis bit the bullet and rebranded, launching across the country in local high streets. Art-student style immediately became more accessible and more affordable. It was a pivotal moment. Traditionally, the quality of a shop’s goods had been guaranteed by the trusted family name above its doors. Now, young customers would only buy clothes where they sniffed style.

The boutique movement and its big store imitators were tapping into a whole new generation of consumers. The post-war baby boom had brought about a massive demographic shift, producing record numbers of teenagers. At the start of the 1950s, there were three million fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds; by the end, there were close to four million. This post-rationing generation now left school at fifteen. They took up jobs in shops, offices, hairdresser’s and hotels, on production lines and in manufacturing. Their living costs were low because most lived at home. Nevertheless, many young workers were desperate to escape family houses they found stifling and parents they found overbearing and out of touch. Marriage still offered one escape route and young workers could afford to get hitched earlier than ever. As a result, the average age at which women married fell from twenty-five in the 1920s to twenty-two by the late Sixties. The sexual revolution wasn’t all about ripping up the rulebook. Rather, it could shore up old social norms, like marriage.

Of those who didn’t head down the aisle, some broke new ground by heading to university. Student numbers doubled in the 1960s, from 100,000 to 200,000, with many admitted to the new ‘plate-glass’ universities – Sussex, Lancaster, Warwick, Kent, York, Strathclyde, Essex and others – that now joined their red-brick predecessors. The Biba shopgirls and their peers also challenged convention by leaving family homes for bedsits and flat-shares with friends as part of a growing number of Likely Lads and Liver Birds. All these groups – young single workers, young marrieds and young students – contributed to a burgeoning counter-culture in Britain that marked one of the most decisive breaks with traditional social values ever seen.

Their younger brothers and sisters were not to be left out. As household sizes shrank, older siblings left home and new housing stock began to rise in war-torn cities and new towns, many younger teenagers gained their own bedrooms – the first generation to do so en masse. Wherever possible, teenagers started to transform their rooms into self-reflecting shrines to football players, pop stars, bands and models. New kinds of teen magazines fuelled these subcultures, particularly among girls.
Jackie
,
FAB
,
Petticoat
and
Marty
swapped pre-war ‘girl’s own’ adventure stories for fashion features, photo stories and problem pages.
Honey
, launched in 1960, was aimed at readers who were ‘young, gay and get ahead!’. By 1967, it had nearly a quarter of a million female readers and in an intriguing move from printed page to fixed premises, Honey boutiques briefly appeared as pop-up outlets in regional department stores.
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