Apple Shop just before opening

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The Apple shop was a retail store located in a building on the corner of Baker Street and Paddington Street, Marylebone, London. It opened on 7 December 1967 and closed on 30 July 1968. The shop was one of the first business ventures by The Beatles’ newcomer Apple Corps.

The concept of the shop was that everything in it was for sale. The aim, as described by Paul McCartney, was to create “a beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things”. In practice, the stock was overwhelmingly fashion garments and accessories. John Lennon vetoed the use of the word “boutique”, but the venture has come to be popularly called the “Apple Boutique“.

Apple Boutique window

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The launch party on 5 December 1967 was attended by John Lennon and George Harrison with their wives, as well as Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Cilla Black and Kenneth Tynan, who were sipping apple juice as the shop had no alcohol licence.Jenny Boyd, sister in-law of Beatle George Harrison

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Lennon’s friend Peter Shotton managed the store with Pattie Boyd’s sister Jenny Boyd. The Apple shop was a financial disaster. Theft was endemic. Customers helped themselves to the stock, as did staff members, who had difficulty determining which things people had come in with and which they had picked up in the shop. The ethos of the venture and those operating it was antipathetic to making accusations of shop-lifting or of calling for the police. The Fool’s members also made a habit of taking their choice of the merchandise.

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The Mural

The Fool 

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During the 60’s three Dutch designers, Mr. Simon Posthuma, Ms. Josje Leeger, and Ms. Marijke Koger had an initially successful fashion boutique called the Trend in Amsterdam. It was closed due to financial problems. Simon and Marijke wandered around Europe before moving to London where they met Simon Hayes and Barry Finch. Hayes became the business manager while Finch joined the 3 Dutch designers who became known as “The Fool.” Pattie Harrison was familiar with them and even wore some of their designs. How it all started is not clear, but in September 1967 the Beatles gave The Fool 100,000 pounds to design and stock the first outlet of a planned national chain of “Apple” shops. 

Barry Finch employed art students to paint a psychedelic style mural, designed by The Fool, across the building’s facades between 10 and 12 November 1967. The concept was borrowed from the painting of the facades of the Lord John shop in Carnaby Street, albeit executed to a figurative design with greater density and color.

Lord John shopThe Fool outside the Apple Boutique The Apple Boutique after The Fool’s psychedelic murals were painted over

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Westminster City Council had not, however, granted consent for the mural, which could be construed as an advertisement, nor had a licence to do this been sought from the landlord, the Portman Estate. Complaints from local traders resulted in the Council issuing Apple with an enforcement notice to paint over the façade mural. In addition, the Portman Estate were prevailed upon[by whom?] to enforce the terms of the lease.

Apple Boutique Fashion, designed by The Fool

Between 15 and 18 May 1968 the façades were duly painted white with the word “Apple” in cursive script painted on each fascia. This transformation and shift in style from the florid “psychedelia” of the original mural, already anachronistic by the end of 1967, to the minimalism of the “approved” scheme prefigures the contrast in record cover design between that of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band released in June 1967 and that of The Beatles to be released in November 1968.

Inside the Apple Boutique

In an interview conducted for The Beatles’ Anthology, George Harrison said of the artwork: “If they’d protected it and the painted wall was there now, they would be saying, ‘Wow, look at this. We’ve got to stop it chipping off.’ But that’s just typical of the narrow minds we were trying to fight against. That’s what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: ‘Go away, you bunch of boring people.’ The whole government, the police, the public — everybody was so boring, and then suddenly people realized they could have fun. Once we were told we had to get rid of the painting, the whole thing started to lose its appeal”.

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The Failure and Closing

The retail business lost money at an alarming rate, due to (among others) the shop-lifting, eventually running to £200 000 and the shop was closed on 30 July 1968.

Jenny Boyd (bottom) with Beatle wives Pattie Harrison, Cynthia Lennon and Maureen Starr modelling Apple boutique designs, 1968

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The night before the closing The Beatles, their wives and girlfriends came to take what they wanted. The next morning it was announced that all the remaining stock was to be given away on the basis of one item per person. In his interview on The Beatles’ Anthology george Harrison describes the event: “We ended up giving the contents away. We put an ad in the paper and we filmed people coming in and grabbing everything”. Word spread quickly and the shop was empty within hours. The public, numbering in the hundreds nearly rioted trying to get their share and the police attended.

One item per person were given away

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Marijke Koger & Simon Posthuma 
Jackie magazine, 
1970

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info:

Wikipedia

http://www.strawberrywalrus.com/applestore.html

http://dandyinaspic.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-fool-beatles-and-story-of-apple.html

self portrait Terence Donovan

Terence Daniel Donovan (14 September 1936 – 22 November 1996)[1] was an English photographer and film director, best remembered for his fashion photography of the 1960s and the video clips he directed for Robert Palmer. No one was better at capturing partly-dressed models in expensive hotel bedrooms. The Alaia-clad mannequins strutting to Robert Palmer’s hit Addicted To Love – for which he was nominated one of Vanity Fair’s ‘Men of the Decade’ in 1989 – seemed to epitomise everything that Terence Donovan represented.

In June 1971, Nova magazine ran “Is There Any Truth in the Rumour?”, three pages of black-and-white fashion photographs by Donovan. The feature was about blazers, an ostensibly uninspiring subject for London’s most adventurous magazine for women.

But Donovan’s photographs, knowing and ironic, made the story a classic of the new wave. Rejecting Sixties zaniness and high colour, he made a set of images which were closer to street documentary than high fashion photography. Models were photographed in harsh black and white, standing in the courtyard of a block of council flats, waiting in front of the post office, sitting on a bleak concrete flight of steps.

The women were beautiful and the clothes classic, but the settings gave the twist to the story. You could say it was a metaphor for Donovan himself, a lorry driver’s son turned celebrity from the Mile End Road. In “Is There Any Truth in the Rumour?”, Terence Donovan was not only revisiting his past, but also paying homage to it, acknowledging the dour and fragile glamour of inner-city London while making intricate comedy at the expense of the haute bourgeoisie.

The famous Julie Christie photographs, 1962

The transformation of East End boy into charismatic Sixties celebrity is an enduring myth of London life. But there is some truth in the cliche. As many photographers from the 19th century onwards had proved, the close- knit streets of the East End, the crowded marketplaces, the expanses of the docks and a remarkable history of deprivation and resilience were inspiring visual catalysts. For those born and brought up there, the overwhelming urge was to escape.

Terence Donovan’s route out was by way of a time-honoured East End profession – the print. After leaving secondary modern school at the age of 11, Donovan signed on for a course in blockmaking at the London School of Engraving and Lithography in Fleet Street. He was fascinated by the world of the press, its speed, its influence and its glamour.

By the age of 15, he had discovered photography and soon afterwards joined the studio of John French, painter, designer and (from the mid-1940s) leading fashion photographer.

Cecilia Hammond,1961Unpublished shot of Alejandra Dolfino, Bish Vogue, February 1986

Cecil Beaton, by then ageing and somewhat weary of the image-making business, was cautious in his assessment of the new generation of fashion photographers, warning that “often there is a danger that young photographers who meet with wide popular success quite suddenly are pushed further than they can naturally go”. He admired Donovan’s fashion photographs as “strong, stark” and was clearly fascinated by the way he managed to make his young models “look as if they were were wearing soiled underwear”.

Along with David Bailey and Brian Duffy, Donovan captured, and in many ways helped create, the Swinging London of the 1960s: a culture of high fashion and celebrity chic. The trio of photographers ( nicknamed “The Terrible Three” by  Beaton) socialised with actors, musicians and royalty and found themselves elevated to celebrity status. Together, they were the first real celebrity photographers.

Fashion PhotographyGrace Coddington, Harper’s 1964 

By 1959, Donovan had set up his own studio. He had learnt much from John French, but was determined to establish his own style and to compete for work in the new markets which were opening up in the soon-to-be-swinging London. Two magazines, Queen and Town, though conservative enough when compared to the later iconoclasms of Nova, were open to new ways of thinking about fashion. In Queen’s Mark Boxer and Town’s Tom Wolsey, the new generation of fashion photographers found enthusiastic supporters.

“It was working for Town,” Donovan told the fashion historian Martin Harrison in 1991, “that really got me started and got me a name.”

For a story on men’s suits published in Town in 1960, Donovan took his model to a gasworks and pictured him against the harsh ironwork and angular structures, juxtaposing the soft and the hard, the luxurious and the evreyday. It was a strategy in picture-making that he would adopt time and time again.

Other, more traditional magazines were soon eager to adopt the new London style. Young editors at Queen and Town moved on to work in the expanding British edition of Vogue, and commissioned Bailey, Duffy and Donovan to make spreads. But the enduring legend of the Swinging London photographer was created not on the pages of the fashion magazine, but rather in celluloid, in that emblematic Sixties film, Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), a peculiar mystery story with a young fashion photographer as its central character. For ever after, in the minds of the British public, every fashion shoot would be seen as an inevitable prelude to sex and every fashion photographer as cool, totally heterosexual and utterly charismatic. As the American critic Owen Edwards wrote in 1973.

Blow Up was one of those fairly ordinary movies that had the good fortune to appear at precisely the magic moment, crystallising the longings of an enormous audience. 

In 1974, Donovan travelled up to Manchester to speak to a group of photography students at Manchester Polytechnic. He told the students that, some time before, he had bought three identical suits so that he would no longer have to decide what to wear in the morning. Having to think about his appearance, he said, got in the way of the important things in life. He also advised his audience never to work for an employer, but simply “to find something you want to do, and get someone to pay you to do it”.

Donovan’s biography does not appear in the traditional histories of art and photography. Not until the 1990s did fashion photography assume a cultural importance which went beyond the fashion pages. He moved away from photography and into film production in the early Seventies and became a half-forgotten Sixties hero irrevocably trapped within a myth. Prominent women like the Princess of wales, Margaret Thatcher and the Duchess of York still sought him out in the hope that his photographic alchemy would still work wonders, and usually they were right.

Terence Donovan both challenged fashion photography and took it for what it was, an imperfect, compromised and inevitably comic set of contradictions with which we are endlessly complicit. Donovan knew that there are never any completely new ideas in fashion photography, only a constant recycling and adaptation, a process of finding the image to suit the Zeitgeist, and making us believe that we have discovered something completely new. Secrets shared on a grandly public scale, fairy stories told with skill, comedy and a certain austerity, tarnished tiaras among the East End grit.

Terence Donovan died London 22 November 1996.

Portraits

Mary Quant, 1966Terence StampNorman ParkinsonMaggie Smith
Brian Ferry, 1996
Kate Moss
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Book

Terence Donovan Fashion

Terence Donovan was one of the foremost photographers of his generation–among the greatest Britain has ever produced. He came to prominence in London as part of a postwar renaissance in art, fashion, graphic design and photography, and–alongside David Bailey and Brian Duffy (photographers of a similar working-class background)–he captured and helped create the Swinging London of the 1960s. Donovan socialized with celebrities and royalty, and found himself elevated to stardom in his own right, and yet, despite his success and status, there has never been a serious evaluation of Donovan’s fashion work: he allowed no monographs to be published during his lifetime. Terence Donovan Fashion is therefore the first publication of his fashion photographs. Arranged chronologically, and with an illuminating text by Robin Muir (ex-picture editor of Vogue), the book considers Donovan in the social and cultural context of his time, showing how his constant experimentation not only set him apart, but also influenced generations to come. Designed by former art director of Nova magazine and Pentagram partner David Hillman, and with images selected by Hillman, the artist’s widow Diana Donovan and Grace Coddington, creative director of American Vogue, this volume is indisputably a landmark publication in the history of fashion photography.
Terence Donovan (1936-1996) is regarded as one of the foremost photographers of his generation. From the beginning of the 1960s until his death more than 30 years later, he shot regularly for magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. He also directed some 3,000 commercials, the 1973 movie Yellow Dog and numerous music videos, for Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” and “Simply Irresistible” among others.

Celia Hammond, 1962
Celia Hammond, 1962
Cindy Crawford, 1988
Police Woman, 1983
Nancy Kwan for Britisch Vogue, 1963Twiggy,1967
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Info:

Wikipedia

http://www.theguardian.com/
http://www.independent.co.uk

What started out as an excuse for a party – Molly Goddard’s first collection was put together in six weeks for £500 and shown off schedule – became a business almost by accident. “I had no production plan, it was just fun. It was in a church hall in Mayfair. Somehow Dazed & Confused and i-D covered it. I thought I would get a job from it – but I didn’t think I’d get sales.”

Quickly Dover Street Market, the influential multi-brand store set up by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, put in an order, as did I.T in Hong Kong. “I spent all my youth going to Dover Street and feeling very intimidated,” she says. “I was almost too scared to look at things but now I know everyone is so friendly there and interested in you.” They even gave her a window.

Goddard (a former intern for John Galliano and Meadham Kirchoff) spent the next few months working morning till midnight cutting, smocking and sewing until the orders, for more than 80 dresses, were complete. She didn’t even have a studio – she did it all from a small spare room in her parents’s house in Ladbroke Grove in west London.

Collection  S/S 2015

It was her mother who taught Molly Goddard to sew. “She used to make loads of clothes for me and my sisters in gingham, rickrack and frills. For our birthdays she would always make us something, like a skirt.”

Collection A/W 2016

“Heart of Glass” is a dreamy pop hit that at the very least is pleasing to anyone sane and addictive to those who love to dance. And the video delivered so much more: a beautiful blonde front woman whose delivery matched her persona: Detached, willful, feminine, feminist, bored and flirtatious. And the style! Was she disco, New Wave, rock or punk? Was she an uptown princess or downtown cokehead? Her outfit—a scrap of a dress paired with clear plastic heels—hints at posh but also feels like a one-off. The duality made Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry endlessly alluring and enigmatic. Through “Heart of Glass,” Harry was introducing the world to fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, who styled her rock goddess image from the tips of her bleached roots to the transparent toes of her Cinderella slippers, East Village style.

Debbie Harry before Stephen Sprouse
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Sprouse met Harry in 1975, after he moved into the East Village loft above a liquor store where Harry lived. The two shared a kitchen and bathroom, and Harry would often feed the designer’s cats. Sprouse had some clothes he’d “been dragging around for years,” and started to put a look together, cutting up dance tights and T-shirts into outfits and helping her dress. Rock music was a primary source of inspiration for Sprouse, and in 1978 he took a picture of lines of pixels dancing across the TV, photo-printed the enlarged image onto diaphanous chiffon and designed what became “the Heart of Glass dress” for Harry. When that song shot to number one on the dance charts, even in those pre-MTV days, Sprouse’s reputation quietly crept above ground and uptown.

Watch any Blondie video and it quickly becomes clear that it is next to impossible to draw attention away from stunning Harry—her band mates tried in vain to do so through the lifespan of the group—but Sprouse’s dress does it. In fact, all of the costumes he created for her various videos and appearances hold their own against Harry’s magnetic “It factor,” precisely because they are so perfectly styled for her; they are her. The Heart of Glass dress, for, fits and drapes superbly and, with its hip-high asymmetrical hemline, might have looked Halstonesque were it not for the single, off-kilter strap and DIY print. It hangs from her tiny frame like an oversize kerchief; torn, filmy and strangely unforgettable.

Years later, Harry told People magazine that Sprouse “put a layer of cotton fabric underneath and a layer of chiffon on top, and then the scan-lines would do this op-art thing.” A shadow of a stripe is repeated on the thin scarf Harry bats about and on the coordinated T-shirts the rest of the band wears. In the world’s first glimpse of the band, Sprouse’s styling created the image of Blondie, a group not quite disco and not quite pop, one with punk-rock roots that appeals to the upper-crust set.

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info: written by Ali Basye
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Comment by kafkette   /  http://trashilove.wordpress.com

wait.
i like debbie harry, blondie, stephen sprouse, & yr blog.
but the photo of her with the dark hair is from much earlier, c1969, when she was in a band called wind in the willows. & ‘heart of glass’ was ABSOLUTELY NOT the world’s first glimpse of her. all the punkrocker types knew who she was for YEARS before that, since ’75-’76, maybe? and the only worry over what type of music blondie made showed up maybe at the time of ‘heart of glass’ by people who actually had never heard them before. they are from the same scene as television, the heartbreakers, the ramones, every-new york-one who then mattered. blondie was a fixture on the tiny punk scene—maybe 500 core people WORLDWIDE, not what people think at all.
other than that, do not worry, yr article is very good. and even my friend, who does not follow fashion in the least, loved the one about koos. i sent it to her, as i will send this one to another friend, who will enjoy it. i just wanted to make the abovenoted clear, because so much of our tiny culture’s history is lost, gone with so very many of our dead. i’m still here, not very druggy & one of the youngest so count me still alive. sadly.

Vogue UK December 1974, ph. David Bailey
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Bianca Jagger (born Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias, 2 May 1945) is a Nicaraguan-born socialite turned human rights activist.

She was born in Managua, Nicaragua. Her father was a successful import-export merchant and her mother a housewife. They divorced when Bianca was ten and she stayed with her mother, who had to take care of three children on a small income. She received a scholarship to study political science in France at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. 

Bianca & Mick Jagger

Bianca Jagger is known for being both the first wife of Mick Jagger and one of the most impeccably stylish women in the world. Bianca’s exotic beauty caught the Rolling Stones’ frontman’s eye at a party in France after one of their concerts in 1970 and they married ( Bianca wore a YSL Le Smoking jacket on her wedding day) a year later in St Tropez. Bianca has since said that her marriage was over as soon as it began, but black and white photographs of the cooler-than-cool pair dripping with ’70s glamour suggest it was beautiful while it lasted. Their split did little to snuff out Bianca’s jet-setting, party-going reputation, and she was a solid fixture on Manhattan’s Studio 54 scene always decked out in luxurious furs, glittering sequins and exquisitely tailored white YSL trouser suits.

A close friend and photographic favourite of Andy Warhol (her daughter Jade once urinated on a piece of his artwork), Bianca also personified the elegant Halston woman along with Liza Minnelli and Lauren Bacall. It was Halston she wore to her 30^th birthday party at Studio 54 where she famously rode on a white horse lead by a semi-clad man.

Studio 54

Steve Rubel(owner Studio 54), Halston and Bianca Jagger at Studio 54, 1978
Halston, Bianca & Andy WarholWith Angie & David BowieElisabeth Taylor, Halston & Bianca
Halston, Bianca,Liza Minnelli & Micheal Jackson
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The It Girl of the decade, Bianca’s glam look ranged from unbuttoned blouses, wide-lapel suits, bold choker necklaces, one-shoulder dresses, and fierce facial expressions. As she puts it well, “Style is knowing what suits you, who you are, and what your assets are. It is also accepting it all.”

Wearing Zandra Rhodes Wearing Ossie ClarkWith Yves Saint Laurent.

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Studio 54 Fable

Bianca Jagger wants to set the record straight about a certain night at Studio 54, which has haunted the annals of night life lore since 1977. “Mick Jagger and I walked into Studio 54,” she wrote in a letter to the editor in the Financial Times, finally setting to rest the rumors that she rode into the famed nightclub on a white horse.

As with most rumors, the story has some basis in fact. Fashion designer Halston threw a 30th birthday party at Studio 54 for Jagger, who at the time was married to Rolling Stones frontman, Mick Jagger. At the party, a naked giant covered in gold glitter led Bianca, clad in Halston and Manolo Blahniks, around the night club on horseback. The moment was captured by noted fashion photographerRose Hartman and the image went whatever was the 1977 equivalent of viral, slowly becoming emblematic of the excesses (read: fun) of the era and eventually becoming a legend.

However somewhere along the way, the story was twisted to include the detail that Jaggerrode into the nightclub on the horse, which would certainly be a memorable feat. However, Jagger took to the Financial Times today to declare that detail preposterous and, as an animal rights defender, downright offensive. In the letter to the editor, she wrote: “It is one thing to, on the spur of the moment, get on a horse in a night club, but it quite another to ride in on one.”

She explained that the club’s owner, Steve Rubell, had brought the horse into a club as a lark, after seeing a photo of her riding one in her home of Nicaragua. When she saw the horse inside the club, Jagger thought it would be fun to hop on and take it for a quick spin. Contrary to rumor, she did not ride the white horse down 54th street and into the velvet-roped doors of Studio 54. In her letter to the editor, Jagger wrote: “I often ask myself how people visualise this fable . . . Where was Mick during this time? Was he holding the reins and pulling me and the horse through the streets of New York, or following submissively behind me!?”

She closed the note with the hope that her letter would finally “put this Studio 54 fable — out to pasture.”

By Melissa Locker for Vanity Fair

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Wearing her backstage pass on het shoe

info:

WikiPedia

http://www.oystermag.com

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/04/bianca-jagger-studio-54