Shopgirls (28 page)

Within a few short weeks the RAF had figured out how to stop the V-1s in mid-air, so by late August the British air force was intercepting the majority of the flying bombs. Paris was liberated and the long march to Berlin was under way; prospects for peace looked strong. It seemed as though victory could be on the horizon and, to use Churchill’s words, an end to the long hard road and time of terror was in sight. Lord Woolton left the Ministry of Food and was appointed Minister of Reconstruction, tasked to plan and build a safe, functioning post-war world. At the end of the previous war, the women who had taken up men’s jobs in shops and factories and on the land had been demoted, sent back to their pre-war jobs or back to the home. Many women had gladly relinquished their wartime work, but others had felt cheated. This time around, with the menfolk soon to return, women who had been promoted to relief managers and staff managers, married women in butcher’s shops and general corner stores, former shopgirls in the Land Army and munitions factories were again faced with an uncertain future.

The government issued a poster called
A West End London Street Scene
in the last year of the war, showing a bustling, colourful spectacle around Oxford Circus, with civilian shoppers thronging the pavements in front of gleaming window displays and spilling across streets busy with red buses and sleek motorcars.
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It was a hopeful illustration of what post-war life would be like, but this utopian vision had little prospect of turning into reality for many years to come. All over the country shoppers still clutching their Utility coupons and ration books were making do in bomb-damaged city centres. Steel would not be released for rebuilding for another decade; the great John Lewis Oxford Street store was trading from a collection of partially reconstructed separate buildings on a bombsite, some of them open to the elements.
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But all anxious uncertainty was temporarily swept away as peace was finally declared. On 8 May 1945, King George VI broadcast to the nation from Buckingham Palace. He thanked God for deliverance and said, ‘As your King I thank with a full heart those who bore arms so valiantly on land and sea, or in the air; and all civilians who, shouldering their many burdens, have carried them unflinchingly without complaint.’ Kay and Arthur Harvey were released from their Bavarian castle prisoner-of-war camp and made the long journey back through the ruins of central Europe to mainland Britain. They were repatriated to England in June, but couldn’t get back to Jersey immediately because of the ongoing travel restrictions. They made good use of the enforced delay, and spent five weeks in England visiting suppliers and ordering stock. Finally, on 29 July 1945, de Gruchy’s board of directors welcomed back their general manager to St Helier. They were all determined that it would soon be business as usual and were ‘set ready for the great word “go”’, as Arthur had longed for in his letter home. The store celebrated by taking out a large yet gloriously understated ad in the
Evening Post
:

Our Mr. Harvey, repatriated to England from Germany, has taken the opportunity thus afforded of visiting Manufacturers and Wholesalers, and reports that a full share of the following goods will be forthcoming:

FASHION GOODS

WOMEN’S & CHILDREN’S WEAR

MEN’S WEAR

HOUSEHOLD GOODS & FURNISHINGS

Some suppliers already have parcels ready packed for dispatch

Shop assistant Valerie Allen, nineteen years old, holds flowers in the Biba shop in west London, 1969.

In 1955, just over a year after the end of rationing, 21-year-old art-school graduate Mary Quant set up a new shop in the King’s Road, Chelsea. She was frustrated by the failure of high streets, including their flagship stores, to offer anything that she or her friends wanted to wear. As she later wrote, ‘the young were tired of wearing the same as their mothers’.
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With the New Look on the wane, British fashion in the mid 50s had become a dour business. It was aimed at middle-aged middle-class women, was firmly in the grip of the European couture houses, and sold through department stores that were becoming dowdy backwaters. Many stores that had survived a decade of post-war austerity were not moving with the times. ‘We were all lamb dressed as mutton in those days,’ said pop journalist Maureen Cleave.
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Quant ‘wanted the young to have fashion of their own … absolutely twentieth-century fashion’. Coming from a family of teachers, she had little experience of shopkeeping herself. Nevertheless, together with her business partner, Alexander Plunket Greene, she took out a low-rent lease on Kings Road – once the haunt of Victorian writers, artists and poets, it was now an average high street, albeit one with a hint of the café culture to come. She named the shop Bazaar but discovered that, when it came to filling its rails, she just couldn’t find the things she wanted. So she set about sourcing and making clothes and accessories herself, drawing on skills she had learnt as an apprentice couture milliner.
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Bazaar’s range blew the lid off London fashion. Quant’s clothes were inspired by American ‘beat’ style and its search for free expression in everything from fashion to fiction and film. She used classic children’s fabrics, like gingham and flannel, and scaled up children’s wear, reworking knee-high socks, short skirts, cardigans and leotards. Gymslips would mutate into mini dresses and shorts would be sexed up into hot pants. Sharp seams replaced fussy frills. At a time when most young girls wore pastel colours, Quant used a bold palette, combining plum with ginger, pale blue and maroon, tobacco brown and purple. She also challenged another convention – the traditional separation between day and evening wear. The result, dubbed ‘the Chelsea look’, was all about informality, fun and freedom of movement. For many, it was as radical as the rational dress movement that had liberated late-Victorian women from their corsets.
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The young Diana Dawson, who would later marry jazz legend George Melly, was one of Quant’s first shopgirls, working there on Saturdays from the age of eighteen. She remembers how ‘radically different Mary’s clothes were from anything else available at the time’. When not working on Bazaar, she was modelling for women’s magazines like
Women’s Own
,
Vogue
and
Queen
, where ‘it was all tweed suits, pinched at the waist, finished off with hats and gloves’. During photo sessions, the young models were ‘constantly told’ to make themselves ‘look older’ because ‘fashion wasn’t something for people of our age’. Diana’s wages as a Bazaar assistant ‘didn’t stretch very far’, but she splashed out on ‘a bright pink and curvy dress with a scoop neck and bare shoulders’ and remembers feeling ‘so proud of it’.
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Diana was wowed and she wasn’t alone. At weekends, lines of fledgling fashionistas formed early outside the shop, but those who didn’t want to queue for Quant could always head a couple of coffee shops further down, to Kiki Byrne’s store, known for her trademark shift dresses. The stores were rivals – Mary had once employed Kiki – but the competition was about to get much tougher.

Within a decade of Bazaar’s opening, London boasted nearly seventy boutiques. The new pop magazine
Rave
summed up the ‘British boutique boom’ for the uninitiated: ‘Boutiques are the current “in” places to buy clothes and accessories. The people who run them, with flair and fashion sense, know exactly what YOU like to wear and how it should be worn.’ Readers needed to know where to look: ‘Boutiques are often hidden away in side streets and their fame spreads by word of mouth. There is usually an air of mystery about them with beat music playing in the background. Boutiques are fun places … and they’re often used as rendezvous for friends.’
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In 1966 a pocket guidebook was compiled for those wanting to find these exclusive hangouts. For the sum of 4s 6d, Millicent Bultitude’s
Get Dressed
offered thumbnail profiles of thirty-eight niche stores and listed another twenty-nine, inviting readers to add their own discoveries in the blank pages at the end.
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One of the most prominent of those profiled was Quorum. Founded in 1964 by Alice Pollock, and also on King’s Road, Quorum gave a platform to one of the era’s most famous design duos, Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, whose bold, nature-inspired prints and free-flowing lines anticipated hippy chic. Birtwell grew up near Manchester and had studied at Salford Art School. She also shopped – or at least window-shopped – at Kendals department store and remembers asking her mother, a seamstress, to make copies of some of the ‘little suits and dresses’ on sale there. Her father didn’t approve of her emerging fashion sense: ‘I thought I looked really glamorous but he thought I looked like a real Jezebel. He pretended not to know me in the street.’
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Across town, a rival scene was thriving in Soho’s Carnaby Street. According to one American journalist, the street was ‘no longer just an address’ but ‘a way of life’. It was Britain’s answer to Greenwich Village or St-Germain-des-Prés, ‘a colourful sartorial revolt against the Grey Establishment typified by Savile Row’.
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Where much King’s Road style had been created by and for young women, Carnaby Street seemed to be ruled by young men. One name stood out: John Stephen. Dubbed ‘the million pound Mod’, he would eventually buy up nearly half the street, though he came from much humbler beginnings. Stephen had started out as an apprentice welder in Glasgow’s shipyards but came to London as an eighteen-year-old, landing a job in the military tailoring department of Moss Bros in Covent Garden. He soon moved, finding work as an assistant in Britain’s first boutique for men, Vince, which was opened by physique photographer Bill Green in 1954 among the Soho workshops that sewed for Savile Row. Vince’s clothes were cut to accentuate the figure and catered for a gay market, well over a decade before homosexuality was decriminalised. However, John Stephen recognised that the style could have wider appeal and he set up his own boutiques, first on Beak Street and then on Carnaby Street. His reworking of Italian styling with pop design was an immediate hit, especially with scooter-riding mods.
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Ever the entrepreneur, Stephen had some of his many shops cater for modettes too, building on the look pioneered by Quant.

Despite all the creativity and ambition in Soho and Chelsea, there was one boutique that would come to rule them all: Biba. Biba was the brainchild of Barbara Hulanicki. Born in Warsaw in 1936, she had moved to England with her mother and younger sisters in 1948. They were fleeing personal tragedy: Barbara’s father, a Polish diplomat, had been murdered that year by Zionist extremists in Palestine. The family settled in a small flat in Brighton, just around the corner from Barbara’s rich Aunt Sophie who lived in some style in the Metropole Hotel. After Brighton Art College, Barbara found work as a fashion illustrator in Covent Garden and saw her drawings printed in
Vogue
and
Tatler
. In 1961, she married Stephen Fitz-Simon – Fitz to his friends – an advertising account manager and, with him, developed a new mail-order business. Biba’s Postal Boutique sold clothes designed by Barbara and stitched together by art students through an arrangement made with one of her former tutors. After a slow start, she adapted a winning look – a gingham dress inspired by Quant but popularised by Brigitte Bardot. An ad for the item in the
Daily Mirror
produced seventeen thousand orders.
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In 1964, at the age of twenty-six, Hulanicki set up her first Biba store, not on the King’s Road or Carnaby Street, but in a former chemist’s on Abingdon Road, in the shadow of three of Kensington’s best-known department stores – Barkers, Pontings, and Derry & Toms. It quickly became a London legend, one of the most powerful symbols of the swinging Sixties. Its interior was striking, ornately decorated with Victorian furniture, ostrich feathers, potted palms, mottled mirrors and antiques. Defying post-war modernism, which favoured white walls, clean lines and primary colours, Biba went ‘vintage’. Looking back to Art Nouveau, it combined fin-de-siècle decadence with daring new design.

There was nothing vintage about Biba’s shopgirls, however. From the start, Hulanicki had strong views on how her shopgirls would be different, would offer a completely new shopping experience and would transform the way shoppers acted in a store. In her autobiography she explained, ‘I was quite adamant that the girls should not impose themselves on the customers. We were not going to become another “Can I help you, madam?” shop. I wanted the customers to feel at home, not hounded by sales assistants.’ So she hired Sarah, Irene and Elly from the Harrods export department. In a radical break with shopgirl tradition, they would come out from behind their counters. They would present themselves not as servants or advisors, but as ‘friends’. Sarah was ‘the red light for the beat offspring of aristocratic families’, while Irene and Elly ‘knew the young working girls’. As the
Evening Standard
put it, Biba became ‘a place of pilgrimage for office girls seeking refuge from … dull dreary department stores’.
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