Drive-In Sunday

I found these in a copy of the AA's 'Drive' magazine, Spring 1967...

Perhaps not surprisingly, there were a few chippy responses to these from women in the following edition.  (Other correspondence in the same issue included suggestions that cars should be fitted with rear-screen wipers and that push-button pedestrian crossings are a washout....)

Can't stop the work...

Seems like ages since I last posted.  It’s been - and continues to be - a bit of a busy time for me with work, so here's something brief just to keep things moving. Sandy Sarjeant's frantic leg work seems strangely appropriate to the way I feel right now…

Sandy Sarjeant: Can't Stop The Want

Pretty pennies

 courtesy 'The Artist' 1967

Here’s a rather neat little ad for Winsor & Newton oil paints from one of my 1967 copies of ‘The Artist’.  I love the bold, simple graphics, and those flowers plus the combination of purple and orange could only really have originally come from that era.  I can just imagine them on dress material, wallpaper designs, sofa fabric, etc.

I’m reliably informed that the coins here are: half a crown, a threepenny bit and three pennies.  I remember the threepenny bit and the pennies – being just a nipper at the time of decimalisation these were probably the only old coins I'd ever needed to handle in order to buy packets of Spangles and sweet cigarettes (what an idea! But it seemed so cool to my undeveloped mind to be seen sucking on a confectionary ciggy!).  I also recall those cute little silver sixpences on which I nearly choked several times after they’d been hidden in the Christmas pudding. They were probably the same ones that turned up later underneath my pillow in exchange for bloodstained molars. (What on earth does the tooth fairy do with all those gruesome little teeth?  She must be a closet goth…)

But then it all went decimal and I didn’t ever have to fully learn the complex mathematics of the previous currency: that there were 12d in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound, and that half a crown was two shillings and sixpence - never mind tanners, guineas and florins….

I’m relieved we don’t have to use that complicated coinage any more.  I miss the Spangles, though.



Drive into yesterday

 (courtesy Drive magazine 1967)

It’s amazing how much mileage you can get out of two little ‘Drive’ magazines from 1967.   I now understand not only how to pack 10 wives in a mini (see March) but also how to feel birdsong... and that a shirt can have linearmatic cuff control with no overshoot.  (I do rather like the sound of 'cuff control', I must confess...)

Oh, I'm feeling bri-nylonissimo!

(courtesy Drive magazine 1967)

French connections, part one

Salut!  Quite by chance (well, you know, the usual ‘one thing leads to another’ scenario that happens when you start Googling stuff)  I’ve just come across ‘Dim Dam Dom’ – not a new Chinese takeaway dish or a comedy trio, but a TV series from France.  First broadcast in March 1965, it ran until 1970 and was an hour-long monthly Sunday variety/magazine programme, aimed mostly at women but definitely of some interest to men too (and there were certainly lots of attractive female presenters…)  The concept of the programme was used to create its catchy title: ‘Dim’ for dimanche, ‘Dam’ for dames and ‘Dom’ for d’hommes…(a little contrived, perhaps…)

Aiming to be both informative and light-hearted, it included plenty of music, not just popular French singers such as the pretty blonde France Gall and the sharply dressed Serge Gainsbourg, but also some interesting British bands: Manfred Mann, The Nice, Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & the Trinity, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Soft Machine…   Each programme was presented by a woman of note at the time, including Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Jane Birkin and Romy Schneider.  And if you’re into yé-yé, it seems there’s plenty to be found on here.

With its set designs, choreography and particularly some of its choice of music, it’s a great little period piece from across la Manche.

Amazingly several of the clips from as early as 1967 are in colour.  We in the UK only had an extremely limited colour service which began on BBC2 in July '67 from just a handful of transmitters around the country.  Apparently even by December '68 only 25 hours of TV a week were in colour and it wasn’t until the following year that BBC1 and ITV were also regularly broadcasting in the full spectrum… 

I can remember when I was first aware that colour TV existed it seemed a real novelty and, before my parents finally got one several years later, I’d tried to imagine what ours might look like by staring at its monochrome screen through the tinted cellophane wrappers found around Quality Street chocolates. The bonus of this being that you had to eat the chocolate first  - and you could get a great purple image after you’d had the Brazil Nut Caramel, which just happened to be my favourite.  But it was purple only, which was a bit limiting… The first colour TVs also seemed to display their hues very luridly, but then again maybe that suited such colourful times?

Anyway, whilst my counterpart in France was perhaps spending some of her Sunday watching Jimi Hendrix in his gorgeous turquoise suit, sadly I was probably viewing ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook’ through the bright yellow wrapper of a Toffee Penny.  Still, I suppose it did at least make its Scottish setting look permanently sunny - and that’s not something you can imagine too easily.

...Mais maintenant, je dois partir.  J’espère que je vous verrai bientôt…!

A(r)t your service

Just wanted to share this advert, also from a 1967 edition of The Artist.  It’s hard to imagine the government needing so many full-time illustrators in its employ, but it’s rather nice to think that being a Civil Servant could include, for some, the chance to spend their entire working day creating ‘illustrations…posters… magazine layout’ etc.  In my brief spell working in a Civil Service office I seem to remember doing quite a bit of that kind of thing too, but somewhat more surreptitiously… doodled portraits and random sketches on telephone pads were not exactly what I was being paid to do.

courtesy 'The Artist' magazine, volume 73, 1967

To put the starting salary of £653 per year into context, the average house price in the UK in ’67 was a little under £4000, and you could buy a brand new MGB sports car for £960.  And had I been an illustrator for the Civil Service in 1967, my annual pay could have bought me 593 paper dresses, which I might have worn to work (no such thing as the paper-free office then…) as long as I resisted the temptation to doodle portraits and draw random sketches on them – although, thinking about it now, that might have been pretty cool.

How to pack 10 wives in a mini

As well as having some copies of ‘The Artist’ from 1967 I've inherited a couple of editions of the AA’s ‘Drive’ magazine from the same year.  Alongside articles on how far £50 will get you on a continental holiday or how to drive and grow slim (it’s all about the way you sit and how you can exercise your head and shoulders while waiting at traffic lights, apparently  –  presumably not by leaning out of your window to shout abuse at the driver in front…) plus stylish adverts for the Triumph Herald and the Ford Corsair, I came across this

(courtesy Drive magazine Spring 1967)

So, how do you pack 10 wives into a mini, and why would you want to? (don’t answer that…)

As titles go, it's eye-catching, so I’ve borrowed it.  But all is not as it seems.  Those women pictured are in fact, one and the same (no!!!) and represent the ideal wife who knows how to pack holiday suitcases that take up so little room it won’t force her husband to have to sit on the roof-rack.  In fact they won’t need a roof-rack at all.  Just one suitcase will do.  A suitcase which contains no more than ten items of clothing, each of which can be worn for a different holiday occasion and each of which will ensure that the (one) wife will dazzle and impress and invite much admiration and, well, just do all the things that wives in 1967 were required to do.

Here we have a ‘go-anywhere-at-anytime’ dress made of creaseless Tricel jersey in bright orange, pink and yellow (I think it should be re-titled the ‘be-seen-anywhere-at-anytime’ dress), an evening trouser suit in pink, purple and blue made of ‘silky nylon and acetate jersey’ and a striped motoring jacket with trousers made from ‘Dacron and cotton’.  Tricel?  Acetate?  Dacron?  I love how fabrics were made to sound as synthetic as possible.  Now that we are beckoned by the promise of all things made from natural fibres, organic cottons, real wool from alpacas that have only eaten grass that has never been trodden on by human feet, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day sackcloth and ashes literally become an eco fashion choice (the ashes clearly fit into the recycled category).  Yet back then it seemed the more chemical sounding something was, the better.

But the best is yet to come.  See that groovy green and pink dress, second from left, modelled by our lovely wife-for-all-occasions pretending to be four years old?  It’s made of paper. 

Paper dresses were a short-lived but rather amazing phenomenon of ‘60s fashion.  You can see how the idea caught on at a time when disposable items were so desirable.  In the US, the Scotts Paper Company's advertisers said this about their paper dress, "...Wear it anytime...anywhere.  Won't last forever...who cares?  Wear it for kicks - then give it the air."  

They were cheap (the one in this picture cost 22 shillings, compared to the £5 you’d have to spend on the orange shift dress) so you didn’t even have to wash them - just go out and buy a new one.  If you got bored with it you could throw it away and replace with a different design.  Same goes if it gets creased or damaged – just get another.  . But of course damage was one of the pitfalls.  They did rip easily.  Chemicals – yes, those beloved chemicals – could be added to the paper to make them more fire-resistant, but there were still risks.  On the other hand, if you thought your dress was a bit too long, or a bit too tight around the neck, or you even wanted to make it a little bit saucier with some strategically placed holes, just take a pair of scissors to it and – sorted!  And they were ideal for displaying bright, bold patterns and graphics.  One famous version was called ‘The Souper Dress’ inspired by the Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup can print.  The dress featured Campbell’s red, black and white soup labels in its striking design and was used by them as an advertising campaign. 

Another successful paper dress was made by Hallmark and known as the ‘hostess dress’.  These were created to match their paper party napkins and tablecloths.  Oh, lovely!  (Although I would have thought there was a danger of your guests wiping their fingers on you, greasy from potato puffs and Smiths exciting new salt & vinegar crisps.)

In 1967, such was the delight at how modern and practical paper clothes could be that someone predicted that in 1980 a quarter of all clothing expenditure would be on paper ones.  But then the world of the future seen through 1967 eyes was so different in many ways from our reality.  Speaking of the advantage of paper clothes in years to come, one textile designer even said, "After all, who is going to do laundry in space?"  Presumably not one of the 10 wives he'd have packed in his rocket...

Starkers with Straker

I do like the simple graphic covers for these 1967 editions of The Artist magazine that were given to me a few years ago.  They look quite contemporary, with their lower case titles and the sans-serif typeface, although I suppose all that’s really saying is that a lot of current design trends have been influenced by work from this era.

The magazines aren’t the most exciting or stimulating to look at, but I was intrigued by these adverts in the back pages which seem to offer something indeed very exciting and very stimulating to look at (if you like that kind of thing).

(courtesy The Artist magazine volume 74, 1967)

I love the wording in these ads.  I’m not sure what ‘affective perception’ is, nor quite how one does actually ‘kindle aesthetic experiences that merge a feeling of tomorrow with the pattern of the past’ but it does all sound rather impressive, only to be somewhat let down by the rather more basic line drawing.  Take a look at it in close-up.  There seems to be a good deal of emphasis on a nude female’s rather ample behind and a slightly strange hand gesture from the portly gent in the foreground.  I can only imagine what he’s saying…. “Hey, look what I’ve found, it’s a microcosm of the forces which play upon the mind and emotions of the creative person!  And she does have a lovely arse…”

It seems that Jean Straker (1913-1984) - Jean as in Jean Paul Gaultier, not Jean Shrimpton - was quite a figure in photography circles in the ‘50s and ‘60s, well-known for his prolific depictions of the female nude.  During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector and had a photographic career recording hospital operations (eww), but in 1951 he founded the Visual Arts Club in Soho, where he offered members the chance to participate in anatomical observations of a very different nature in the form of nude photography sessions.  (Presumably it was just the models who were nude.)  His work featured in a (then) notorious book, ‘Nudes Of Jean Straker’ (does what it says on the tin) published in 1958, and whilst he was insistent that his work was pure art and not pornographic, he had trouble convincing the authorities.  Many of his prints were in fact confiscated and he was prosecuted in 1962 under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.  He naturally argued that his photographs were of ‘artistic value’ but, unlike Penguin Books winning the case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover for it being considered to be of ‘literary merit’, he lost.  Jean went on to campaign for freedom of expression and freedom from censorship in the arts.

One of the most interesting things I discovered about Jean’s work is that he was rather imaginative with his compositions.  His subjects can be seen wrapped in theatrical masks, amongst strange branch-like structures laden with tinsel; in one he pictures his model on a set that includes various items of ironmongery and a bed frame, whilst she wears a skirt made of chicken wire (so not strictly nude, then…)  But my favourite is ‘Nude Study 1963’ where you could be forgiven for thinking that the model is not nude at all.  She is ‘clothed’ in some kind of projection of black with white dots, which make it look as if she is wearing a dark, patterned cat-suit, creating shapes on her body and shadows around her.  The effect is strikingly modern.  (Do look it up - it's on various sites - but I don't wish to reproduce it here due concerns about copyright). Also, rather refreshingly, his prints were not, ahem, touched up. We are reminded too that this was an era before cosmetic surgery.  For all the surrealism of the sets, his subjects were very much real.