It says here:
"Central Saint Martin's graduate, Danielle Scutt took the ancient gladiators of Rome - and the beasts they battled - as a reference for her tough, body-conscious dresses and catsuits in tiger and zebra-stripes embellished with black patent-leather bondage straps."
Questions: Did those beasts have purple hair? Does Ms Scutt - starring at London Fashion Week - know you can save money by cleaning patent leather with banana skins?
Back to school with you, young lady.
Wedding party, Chieveley service station, M4.
From the allegedly Roaring Twenties. For source blog and more info look here.
This is Don Medlock who in 2003 attempted via this website to contact anyone else who'd been a Butlin's Redcoat at the Barry Island camp at the same time he was. I don't know if Don's had any luck but finding his photo brought back my two sets of Butlins memories. The earliest is of the Minehead camp in roughly the year Don was employed by its south Wales counterpart. Elderly cine camera footage shows a rather anxious blond boy wearing an Airtex shirt and fiddling with his fringe. The second set of memories are of taking some of my older kids to an allegedly revamped south coast Butlins about twelve years ago. The food was terrible, the facilities poor and the Redcoats inept and miserable. I was left wondering if I'd witnessed a sign of modern times or whether with Butlins it was always so.
What a guy. He was born in Somerset in 1903 but moved to the States where he became a major figure on Broadway, writing, dancing, directing and working with Al Jolson. Reader returned to Britain in the Twenties, working in movies and the West End, and in 1932 produced the first Gang Show - a campsite variety fundraiser for the London Scout Council. Reader had been a scout ever since he was old enough. See, the great movement isn't only about woggles and repressing homosexuality. And, boy, did those old-timers know how to wear shorts!
If the second part of Mark Easton's Radio 4 series on crime continues tomorrow in the vein of last Thursday's opener it will surely refer to the Mod v Rocker ruckus on Brighton beach in May 1964 which inspired, among other things sociologist Stan Cohen's classic study of youth culture, criminality and the media, Folk Devils & Moral Panics. By expert consent, the most authentically Mod band of the Sixties was The Small Faces, formed the year after the famous riot. Actually, I used to dress as cool as them. No, really...
I'm married, happily married, but I don't believe in marriage per se - that is, I don't believe it has the automatic beneficial effects that its evangelists claim. I also hate conventional wedding photographs; they make me almost physically ill. Which may be why I like this one so much. I found it here.
A day later than Wednesday. A sad day too.
[Photo: The Guardian's Eamonn McCabe]
Red tie, eh?
