Granny Takes a Trip (Granny’s) was a boutique in the 60ties through mid 70ties,  founded by Nigel Weymouth and his girlfriend Sheila Cohen. Nigel was/is a graphic designer, who was mostly responsable for the interior, originally decked out as a psychedelic New Orleans bordello complete with an old horn gramophone and exterior of the boutique. Sheila, who was a dedicated collector of vintage clothes, Victorian and oriental, was responsable for the garments which were sold in Granny’s together with John Pearse, an ex mod and former apprentice tailor at Hawes & Curtis on Savile Row.

The name of the boutique was giving away its policy – ‘Granny’ symbolized the influence of the past, and ‘Trip’ , a colourful world of bougeoing hippie movement and its drug of choice – LSD. Granny’s opened in February 1966 at 488 King’s Road, a previously unfashionable part of the road also revered to as the World’s End, in London. The trio originally started “simply because we think young people have got the money to spend but they want to see more style. So many boutiques are beginning to sell the same things. We can offer an exclusive thing to everyone, because we rarely find two dresses which are identical. Probably the next biggest reason was that we all wanted to work for ourselves.”

A videoclip for the 1967 single, Granny Takes a Trip by the Purple Gang.

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The garments sold in Granny’s were vintage clothes, twisted by John Pearse into the shapes preferred in the 60ties. They mended and cleaned all of their vintage fashions, using “a theatrical costume cleaner who cleans the things beautifully”, and then adapted other items which were handcut and beautifully made into brand new styles. The high prices at Granny’s were determined by the use of expensive fabrics Sheila and John were buying at Liberty fabrics and they were using the same outworkers as Savile Row tailors. As a result, shirts from Granny’s were prized at anything between 4 to 10 guineas. A floral jacket inspired by William Morris designs would set a buyer back an extortionate 15 guineas. Skinny trousers made out of velvet or satin (John: “They were sort of more foppish alternative to levi’s” ) would cost 6 guineas, and satin ties were priced at £1.10. However, the quality of the clothes was very good and John was putting a lot of emphasis on fine tailoring. Velvet suits were tightly fitting with tight buttoning. Double – breasted jackets were tailored in floral-printed fabrics.

One of the sales assistants, Johnny Moke remembers: “We used to cut up blouses and dresses and turn them into shirts or tops for men. What was great about Granny’s was that there were no boundaries. Anything went and they kept on changing. The effect of Granny’s clothes was foppish, flamboyant and decadent – a 1960’s reinvention on fin-de siecle dandyism.

Granny Takes a Trip quickly developed elite clientele. Nigel: ” The first people to sniff us out were the mixture of Chelsea gays and debutantes. Then pop stars started quickly coming after them. We had all these personalities coming through and groups like the Animals would have their photos taken outside”. The relaxed atmosphere was one of the attractions of Granny’s. Anybody who was rich enough to shop there – young upper middle class men, young aristocrats and pop stars enjoyed buying fancy clothes in the casual atmosphere of the boutique which epitomized Swinging London as a fashion epicentre in the 1960’s.

When the unique new designs became a major element of Pink Floyd’s shows (Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett notoriously carried his dirty clothes into the London boutique because he thought it was a dry-cleaners) at the UFO club their clientele soon expanded to include The Small Faces, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Rolling Stones and of course The Beatles. Nigel: “One morning we were sitting around cross-legged on the floor, passing a joint around and these two blokes came in. They looked around and said, ‘This is a nice place isn’t it?’ We looked up and it was John and Paul.”

But not only the clothes sold at Granny’s were revolutionary, the boutique also became known for its changing facade. In 1966 it featured giant portraits of Native American chiefs Low Dog and Kicking Bear. In 1967 the entire front was painted with a giant pop-art face of Jean Harlow and was later replaced by an actual 1948 Dodge saloon car which appeared to crash out from the window onto the forecourt.

Granny’s success, however was short-lived.When Granny started selling Afghan coats, there was a row between John and Sheila over the priorities of their business establishment. John did not like the increasingly hippy image of the shop: “My partners went more in that direction, but I was considered to be more urban creature(…) I never wore jeans (…) I was always more streamlined in my appearance. We may have been construed as being in the centre of hippydom, but we weren’t; what we did had a subtle difference”. Nigel, Sheila and John ended up selling the shop to manager Freddie Hornick in 1969.

Freddie brought in two New YorkerB, Gene Krell and Marty Breslau. They introduced a new, more dandified phase with rhinestones and applique’d velvet suits and stack-heeled boots.

In 1970 a branch was opened in New York and an outlet in Los Angeles. The London boutique closed in 1974 with the acquisition of the name by Byron Hector, who moved the premises along the King’s Road. It finally closed in 1979. The New York and Los Angeles also closed, mid-70ties.

Granny Takes a Trip became a legendary boutique that defined King’s Road of the 60’s. Original garments from Granny’s – especially from John Pearse-Sheila Cohen-Nigel Weymouth  era, are highly sought vintage items. In 2012 a Royal Mail stamp, commemorating contribution to British fashion by designers from Granny Takes a Trip along with other revolutionary fashion designers as Ossie Clark, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood.

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John Pearse, Salman Rushdie & Paul Smith talk about Granny Takes a Trip

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(I found a lot of information about Granny Takes a Trip on the fantastic blog: http://www.dandyinaspic.blogspot.nl/   )

The BBC4 drama ‘We’ll Take Manhattan’ shows a young photographer David Bailey in 1962, who got commissioned (by fashion editor Lady Clare Rendlesham) to create a 14 page story for British Vogue in New York and the style had to be ‘young and fresh’. Bailey , as Jean always called David, insisted on using his girlfriend Jean Shrimpton as the model. Jean had a very clean, fresh look to her and was different to all other models working for Vogue. At the time almost everything was shot in  a studio and all followed a classic guideline of poses and looks. David Bailey, being passionate and stubborn about his work, changed all this by breaking the rules. He took offbeat, realistic poses against gritty backgrounds. This changed fashion forever and made David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton fashion icons.

Trailer ‘We’ll Take Manhattan’

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Jean Rosemary Shrimpton (born 7 November 1942) was born in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire and brought up on a farm. She enrolled at Langham Secretarial College in London when she was 17. Director Cy Endfield suggested she attend the Lucy Clayton Charm Academy’s model course. In 1960, aged 17, she began modelling and later appeared on the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. During her career Jean Shrimpton was widely reported as ‘the world highest paid model’  and ‘the most famous model’. She was described as having ‘world’s most beautiful face’, was dubbed ‘The It Girl’  and ‘The Face of the ’60s’.

Jean contrasted with the aristocratic-looking models of the 1950s by representing the fresh, cute coltish look of the 1960s Swinging London. Breaking the popular mould of voluptuous figures with her long legs and slim figure. Jean (nicknamed ‘The Shrimp’, a name she hated. ‘Shrimps are horrible pink things that get their heads pulled off! ) was also known for her long hair with fringe, wide doe-eyes, long wispy eyelashes, arched brows and pouty lips.

Jean was once engaged to David Bailey. They met in 1960 at a photo shoot that Jean, who was still an unknown model, was working on with photographer Brian Duffy. Duffy told Bailey she was too posh for him, but Bailey was not discouraged.

Jean Shrimpton:”‘Bailey’ was how he introduced himself and that was all I ever called him.” Aged 18, Jean rapidly found herself entwined with the East End boy on the up, who was five years her elder. “We were instantly attracted to each other.” She broke off a relationship and Bailey ended his marriage so they could be together. “He was a larger-than-life character, and still is. There’s a force about him. He doesn’t give a damn about anything. But he’s shrewd, too. He made a lot of money out of me. I’m not bitter, but I’m irked. That’s all. Bailey was very important to me. I’m sure today’s models are a lot more switched-on than we were. Image rights didn’t exist back then. What happened – the creation of the fashion industry – just happened.”

Jean started to become known in the modelling world around the time she was dating Bailey. She has stated she owed Bailey her career. In turn she was Bailey’s muse and his photographs of her helped him rise to prominence in his early career. Yet she was never comfortable with the trappings of their success-when Bailey took her to trendy nightclubs, Jean would take her knitting along…

Bailey ones said of Jean: “She was magic. In a way she was the cheapest model in the world-you only needed to shoot half a roll of film and then you had it.”

Jean’s romance with Bailey did not last long, only 4 years. It was the heady, early days of the swinging 60s and the couple worked tirelessly together, but Jean left Bailey to begin a relationship with Terence Stamp. “Our paths first crossed when Bailey photographed us together for Vogue and then we met again at a wedding. I was aware of him because he was so good-looking. But it was Bailey who accidentally brought us together. Terry seemed ill at ease, self-conscious and standoffish, but Bailey talked to him, as he always does with people, and ended up inviting him to come with us to see my parents in Buckinghamshire later that day.”

But if Stamp’s looks captivated  Jean, his personality was less straightforward. The beautiful duo were soon an item – to Bailey’s dismay – but their three years together left Shrimpton puzzled. Certainly, there is no love lost now: “Terry has said that I was the love of his life, but he had a very strange way of showing it. We lived together in a flat in Mayfair, but he never gave me a set of keys; one day I walked into his room to talk to him and he simply turned his back on me, swivelling his chair to stare silently out of the window. That sort of thing was typical. He was very peculiar.”

Work, though, was good. By her mid-twenties she was known the world over and she’d also made a major, if unwitting, contribution to fashion when she was hired to present prizes for the Melbourne Cup in Australia. Jean’s dressmaker, Colin Rolfe, was given insufficient fabric, but pressed ahead regardless, making four outfits which were all cut just above the knee. The miniskirt was born – to the shock of conservative Australia at the time. (this is one of a few stories about how the miniskirt was born….)

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But for all the fame, the exotic travel and approaches from famous stars such as Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson – “they’re the kind who can’t help themselves, it’s in their nature, though Jack was more subtle than Warren” –Jean was not happy. She loathed the name “The Shrimp” and felt disenchanted with the fashion world. With hindsight, she said her true self only began to emerge in her next relationship, with photographer Jordan Kalfus, 12 years her senior, in New York. “I discovered museums, art and literature. It was an awakening. There was so much happening in American literature at the time. Mailer, Bellow, Burroughs, Ginsberg – they were all the rage.”

She began to read eagerly and bought fine art. Back in Britain a turbulent relationship with the anarchic poet Heathcote Williams was followed by another with writer Malcolm Richey, with whom she moved initially to Cornwall. By now, in her early thirties, Jean was only too pleased to forsake modelling completely. She opened an antiques shop in Marazion and took a series of intriguing black-and-white photographs of local Cornish characters. She has never exhibited the images and has no intention of doing so, but one was of Susan Clayton, then a waitress at the Abbey Hotel. After Jean met her husband, Michael Cox and became pregnant with their son, Thaddeus, she was told by Clayton that the Abbey might be up for sale.

“I jumped at it. If we’d had a survey, we wouldn’t have bought it and running it has been a labour of love, but it’s been my life for over 30 years.” She and Michael had their reception at the Abbey, a million miles from the fashion-world weddings of St James’s. “We had champagne with fish’n’chips, but the only guests were our two registry office witnesses.”

Jean Shrimpton loves the raw, wild beauty of the far west of Cornwall, but does she have any regrets about turning her back on the life she once led? “No, but I am a melancholy soul. I’m not sure contentment is obtainable and I find the banality of modern life terrifying. I sometimes feel I’m damaged goods. But Michael, Thaddeus and the Abbey transformed my life.”

Steven Meisel photographed Natalia Vodianova as Jean Shrimpton voor Vogue May 2009

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Jean Shrimpton : An Autobiography

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jean-Shrimpton-Autobiography-Unity-Hall/dp/0852238584

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