Fish and chaps

This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book.

This is the ultimate ‘niche’ book. It focuses on that singular decade between the years of rockers and punks, when toffs, freed from school or army uniforms, and toughs, discarding skinhead aggression, found a sartorial meeting point.

This new style, the cool child of late Fifties mods, had been given a huge public oomph by the Beatles and ‘their silly little suits’ as David Bailey (who has stated that he, along with myself, was the unwitting originator of the look) succinctly puts it. It was sharper, leaner and hinted at androgeny. Its creators were no longer found in caverns down Carnaby Street, nor high in the King’s Road, but centered round that time-honoured dandy’s inferno, Savile Row.

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Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

Certainly West End tailors had been turning out the archetypal three-piece for decades, but the author makes the somewhat dodgy statement that the Duke of Windsor’s clothes were ‘classical’. Classical? Those huge clown-check plus-twos and fairy Fair-Isle pullovers? And he maintains that teddy-boy gear was Edwardian inspired — though I would say it was more Mississippi river-boat gambler/western sheriff. The real retro Edwardians were that cast of hour-glassed figurines, Peter Coats, Bill Akroyd, Hardy, Cecil, Bunny et al, whose suits were wildly exaggerated versions of what clubland codgers had worn for a century and still are wearing, though somewhat whiffily, dry cleaning having always been absolute athenaeum to St James’s habitués.

Around this time were two (unmentioned) pretenders to the Peacock Throne: the ‘dandy’ Kim Waterfield wore gleaming white suits, while Kenneth Tynan (whose middle name was, appropriately, Peacock) wore flamboyant turquoise, liberally doused with Guerlain’s L’heure bleu.

But Geoffey Aquilina Ross misses an important point: namely the sudden change in female fashion during the period.