Plectrum - The Cultural Pick

by Guy Sangster Adams

With the current fashion feature prevalence of leather biker jackets one brand continues to blow the others into the dust, Lewis Leathers. The October 2008 Vogue feature which presaged the current ubiquity, showed Kate Moss in two vintage, customised Lewis Leathers jackets, a Cyclone and a sleeveless 391 Lightning; she also owns a pair of Lewis Leathers 191 Motorway boots The buzz that these pictures generated is still being felt at the new Lewis Leathers showroom and archive in West London, where staff are still receiving enquiries from women and men alike as to whether these styles are still available; they are, for both sexes. Enquiries redoubled with the images of Cate Blanchett in the January 2009 issue of Interview wearing a mixture of vintage and new Lewis Leathers; a fringed 391 Lightning jacket, a pair of 935 leather jeans, and an early 90s Triumph tank logo belt from their collection of motorcycle ephemera.

Commotion and excitement are nothing knew to this 117 year old company having dressed generations of thrill seekers from pioneer aviators and auto sport drivers and riders, to street racers and street punks, to say nothing of rock stars, actors and models. But in that, it is very much over the past six years in the hands of Derek Harris, who bought the company in 2003, that this evocative British brand has been thoroughly rejuvenated.

The company that was initially known as D. Lewis Ltd began trading in 1892 as a Tailors and Outfitters at 124 Great Portland Street, London. There never was an actual ‘D. Lewis’, the firm was the brainchild of the Issacs family who as the century turned caught the mood of the times and became forerunners in providing protective clothing for the newly emergent worlds of motoring and aviation. They produced their first specialist leather clothing for  racing motorcyclists in 1926 and four years later introduced the brand name Aviakit for their increasing range of aviation clothing.

An early celebrity poster-boy for the brand was Alex Henshaw, a motorcyclist turned air racer who wore his D. Lewis ‘D-pocket’ leather jacket whilst winning the 1938 King’s Cup Air Race in the fastest ever time and also in breaking the world solo record for a return trip from Gravesend to Cape Town in a single-engined plane; both records still stand. During World War II he was the chief test pilot for the Spitfire, also charged with demonstrating the plane to visiting dignitaries including Winston Churchill. There is a photograph of their meeting showing Henshaw clad in a white cotton-drill D. Lewis Prestige flying suit, which one might safely assume inspired Churchill to request the same from D. Lewis.

Post war the company once again caught the mood of changing times when in May 1956 they launched their new brand name Lewis Leathers with the highly influential Bronx, their first motorcycle jacket to bear the distinctive script logo and red quilted lining, and became, as Harris explains, “one of the earliest brands in Britain to target the teenage market with this fantastic leather jacket which made a huge impact on British teenagers; the Ton Up Boys in the 50s all wore the Bronx jacket.” The Ton Up Boys, the early forerunners of the Rockers subculture of the 1960s, would gather at transport cafés and ride hell for leather along fast stretches of ‘A’ roads in pursuit of the legendary ‘ton-up’ (100 mph).

At first, as teenagers in drab, austerity Britain looked to the USA as a place of dreams, Lewis Leathers claimed their range was designed by an American, to the degree that the early items carried a stars and stripes label and the legend ‘designed by Bud Ganz’. Though Bud Ganz did exist, he was  a Brooklyn postman at the time and later the USA agent for D. Lewis at the time, Harris believes it is unlikely that he actually designed any of the jackets, “it was really just a marketing ploy”.

One that was quickly dropped, and the British credentials of the brand reasserted with rise of the Beat boom heralded by the release of Love Me Do by The Beatles in 1962. In the same year Lewis Leathers released another style that has proved particularly influential and enduring, the 391 Lightning, a jacket which John Lennon wore, though not until the late 1960s. Lewis Leathers also became the supplier to the new motorcycle section of the 59 club, a youth club founded, as the name suggests, three years earlier by the Reverend William Shergold at the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick, east London. Now the largest motorcycle club in the world, it began when Shergold’s idea to hold a service for motorcyclists in 1962, including the blessing of motorbikes, received a phenomenal turn out. Shergold himself wore a Bronx jacket, and as Harris explains Lewis Leathers “used to do a stall at the 59, kids would get measured up, and two weeks later the jackets would be there ready for them.”

“Brighton and Clacton were virtual catwalks for Lewis Leathers,” says Harris, in reference to the clashes between Mods and Rockers that flared at British seaside towns throughout 1964, and surprisingly Lewis Leathers ‘dressed’ both sides. With the Rockers wearing the brand’s leather motorcycle jackets and boots and the Mods wearing Madison leather coats, Weekender suede jackets, Regent 3-button leather sports jackets, and Beat Boots. Coincidentally, in 1964, the actor Steve McQueen, as much a Mod icon from the 1963 Life Magazine cover shot of him wearing a Baracuta G9 Harrington jacket, as a Rocker icon not only for the famous motorcycle jump scene in the 1963 film The Great Escape, but also as an avid racer of both cars and motorbikes, brought Hollywood clamour to the client list of Lewis Leathers. He visited the D. Lewis shop with the USA International Six Day Trials motorcycle team, to get kitted out en route to the 1964 Silver Vase trophy race in East Germany.

Lewis Leathers were the sponsors of the British ISDT team in the same event, which underlined the company’s continued involvement with clothing for track racing as much as with street styles, as sponsorships deals and endorsements by other riders such as Giacomo Agostini winner of a still to be bettered 15 Moto GP world championships and John Surtees who remains the only person to have won world championships on both two wheels and four.

In parallel to clothing rebel rousers, with the introduction of the 191 Motorway Boot in 1969 and the Roadmaster Jacket in 1973, Lewis Leathers became a firm favourite with the British Motorcyle Police, to the degree that officers were given an allowance to spend in the D Lewis shop on those styles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, at the height of Glam, the 1972 catalogue announced ‘The Colourful World of Lewis Leathers’ as the company became the first in Britain to offer jackets and all-in-one race suits in red, yellow, blue, colour combinations, or coloured sleeve and side stripes.

But it was predominantly in the far more muted and classic tones of black leather and red linings, after all the colours of the anarcho-syndicalist and anarcho-communist flag, that Lewis Leathers would once more be inextricably linked to subculture again in the form of Punk. In 1976 Sid Vicious wore an old Lewis Leathers Dominator jacket, whilst later in the year The Clash and their manager, Bernard Rhodes, all went to the Lewis Leathers shop, where Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, and Rhodes all bought black 391 Lightning jackets and Mick Jones a navy Cyclone; the Cyclone, which had been released in 1973, became another enduringly iconic style. They were followed in 1977 by The Damned, with Rat Scabies buying a Bronx, and Brian James a 391 Lightning and Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist, who also bought a 391 Lightning which he wore in the video for Pretty Vacant, and a teenage Vincent Gallo on his first trip to London who bought a blue fringed 402 Lightning, which is currently for sale on the multi-hyphenate actor-writer-artist’s website for $2500… Whilst Lewis Leathers also graced the backs of Iggy Pop with a 391 Lightning, Johnny Thunders with a Cyclone, and Joey and Marky Ramone who both wore 402 Lightning jackets. By the start of the 1980s, with Chrissie Hynde wearing a red Cyclone on the cover of The Pretenders eponymous first album, the link between rock and Lewis Leathers had become firmly established.

Though this was almost the last rebel yell of Lewis Leathers. Over the next decade and a half, with four changes of ownership between 1981, when the Issacs family sold D Lewis, and 1986, which dissolved the continuity that had served the company so well, and in the face of a downturn in the popularity of motorcycling in Britain and competition from cheap, imported motorcycle clothing, the brand began to be in very real danger of just passing into legend.

Derek Harris’s professional involvement with Lewis Leathers began in 1991 when he was asked to source some British leather jackets for a Japanese street fashion company. He visited the Great Portland Street Shop and found that it had become “very stark, it wasn’t that evocative, the romance was gone and the jackets weren’t the same either; the shapes had changed, they’d got longer, the shoulders were bigger, the buckles on the waistbands were too small, and there were a lot of things that just didn’t work.” So he went to Portobello Road Market and bought the best quality vintage 391 Lightning and Bronx jackets that he could find and approached Richard Lyon, who had bought Lewis Leathers in 1986, to ask if the company would fund the re-development, re-cutting, and production of the new/old jackets for the Japanese market, and much to his surprise Lyon agreed. To return the compliment and, after Lyon’s reluctant closure of the Great Portland Street Shop in 1993, to help keep the brand going, over the next ten years Harris became in an unpaid apprentice and keeper of the flame whilst still working in his full time day job. He also began to build a Lewis Leathers archive.

From the mid-late 1990s interest in Lewis Leathers in Japan and Britain had began to grow again and after Lyon asked him to buy the company in 2003, has come firmly to fruition under Harris’s stewardship in the 2000s. He has lead the company into a number of high profile collaborations, including an ongoing relationship with Comme des Garcons, which began in 2003, with Junya Watanabe reinterpreting classic Lewis Leathers jackets in a variety of fabrics through five collections of the Comme des Garcons Man label.

Whilst the Mechanic sneaker, which Harris designed and launched in 2003 as part of a new range of Lewis Leathers products, has lead to a collaboration with the founder of Comme des Garcons, Rei Kawakubo. The style was, Harris says, “influenced by sidecar racers who tended to wear bumper boots from Woolworths or wherever, so we did them in leather, added a zip up the back and a heel strap; Rei really liked them and asked if she could work with us - she does a little bit of a twist on the style, maybe colour ways, and we produce them and they sell in Comme des Garcons outlets around the world.”

On home soil, in 2005 Savile Row tailors Gieves and Hawkes approached Lewis Leathers to make a special edition pair of trousers. Between them, after looking through the Lewis Leathers’ archive, they settled on a pair of early 1970’s Motor Cycle Scrambling trousers with a very low rise. The cut was modified by Gieves and Hawkes, and Lewis Leathers then made the trousers from vegetable tanned Italian leather.

In the new century Lewis Leather’s rock heritage has also been re-ignited across the generations. Ronnie Wood commissioned 12 bespoke customised Super Phantom jackets for the Rolling Stones’ 2005/2006 Bigger Bang Tour, Sex Pistol Steve Jones has remained a loyal customer, Jacob Dylan is a new customer and bought a Cyclone, Carl Barât owns a vintage 391 Lightning, Graham Coxon wears a red Super Phantom, and KT Tunstall wears Lewis Leathers 191 Motorway and 178 Racing boots.

Stepping down into the latest stage of Lewis Leathers’ journey, their new West London basement showroom which opened last year, one is assailed by a contradictory mixture of responses, being at once gripped with the nervous excitement that one has stumbled across a undiscovered treasure, compounded by the lack of a sign at street level, and a relaxed surrender into the we’ve been expecting you atmosphere of history and tradition. Though since this heritage is fuelled by generations of Lewis Leathers wearers who were never content standing still, once again the heady smell of leather mixed with undiluted rebel spirit cuts composure with adrenalin.

It is this mixture of history, contemporaneity, and adrenalin shot that Harris has applied so successfully to Lewis Leathers and in so doing given the centenarian such a new lease life it has been steered well and truly away from becoming a beautiful but glass cased memory and put firmly into race trim en route to its bi-centenary.

Lewis Leathers 3-5 Whitfield Street, London. W1T 2SA
+44 (0)20 7636 4314

Links

www.lewisleathers.com

www.myspace.com/lewisleathers

When in December 1965, Nigel Waymouth, Sheila Cohen, and John Pearce first opened the doors of Granny Takes A Trip they were perceptively at the vanguard of a moment of counter-cultural and pop-cultural combustion.  Hailed as London’s first psychedelic boutique—though Waymouth now charmingly says, “what does psychedelic mean, I’ve never known, actually!”—Granny Takes A Trip ground Cuban-heeled Gohill boots into the established ideas of what, how, and where a clothes shop might be, triggering reverberations that changed the face of 1960s boutiques and are still evident today.

Cohen, Waymouth’s girlfriend at the time, was an ardent collector of Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s clothing, and as her finds began to pile up Waymouth had the idea that they should open a shop and sell them. As to the shop’s name, Waymouth explains, “We were going to be selling granny clothes and everyone was talking about tripping, so we thought it was funny.” At first the stock of vintage clothing was supplemented by a small range of shirts and ties designed by Pearce, who had trained as a tailor in Savile Row. “We’d go to Liberty’s and find really unusual fabric,” explains Waymouth, “and then ask Mrs Trott in New Cross to run them up on her sewing machine, and sell them for five guineas.”

The shop was “quite conceptual” in that “it was selling clothes, but it was also an experience.” An experience which began on the pavement, as Waymouth set an innovative pattern of regularly redesigning the frontage, and breaking convention by initially not displaying the clothes in the window, and then forgoing the window entirely. The inaugural fin de siècle façade in purple with the name in red Art Nouveau letters, featured a blow up of a Victorian pin-up photograph and a gramophone. Waymouth boarded over the window in 1966 and painted the entire frontage with successive portraits of the Sioux Chiefs Low Bear and Kicking Bear, which he replaced in 1967 with a pop art portrait of Jean Harlow. In 1968, he mounted the front half of a 1947 Dodge car to the frontage, its voluptuous bonnet and bumper, painted black and gold, then later canary yellow, jutting provocatively into the shop’s forecourt. He would change the frontages over night to maximise the element of messing with the minds of customers and passers by, as he says, “it was a trip and that was what we were all about.”

The name and design of the shop made it, at once, “threatening and very alluring” and a lot of people were scared to go in. Those who did cross the threshold found that Waymouth’s interior design placed the clothes—which gradually moved away from old clothes into new designs by Cohen, Pearce, and occasionally Waymouth—on, in, and around an array of objects. An Art Deco Wurlitzer jukebox, a tasselled black silk umbrella, and a Mutoscope showing What the Butler Saw saucy pictures, shared space with jackets in William Morris prints, tight velvet or brocade trousers, and velvet and lace skirts.  “People wanted wilder clothes and we provided that,” says Waymouth, “the aesthetic idea, the Oscar Wilde idea, the very decadent look, flowery and over the top, but without being totally tasteless.” A mix which, unsurprisingly, quickly drew bands to the boutique. On the back cover of Revolver (1966) The Beatles are wearing clothes from Granny’s, as are the Rolling Stones on the front cover of Between the Buttons (1967), and Cream, The Animals and Pink Floyd were all regulars.

The choice of the shop’s location, 488 Kings Road, Chelsea, was informed by the fact that Waymouth, who had been working as freelance journalist, wrote articles for a medical journal publishers who had an office in the building. At that time, the area known as Worlds End was an unlikely location, as Waymouth says “it was the back of beyond”. But within four months of opening the boutique was featured in Time magazine’s ‘Swinging London’ cover story declaring the Kings Road as ‘the place to be seen’. Granny’s paved the way for a host of new boutiques and businesses that followed them to Worlds End, such as Hung On You, Dandy Fashions, The Flying Dragon Teahouse, Smile, Kleptomania, and Mr Freedom. Through the seventies Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Mclaren took inspiration from Waymouth in the frequent complete redesigns of their sequence of shops at 430 Kings Road: Let it Rock (1971), Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die (1972), Sex (1974), Seditionaries (1976), culminating in Worlds End (1981). Whilst Paul Smith has cited Waymouth and Granny Takes A Trip as a key influence on his shops both nationally and internationally.

In late 1966, music producer Joe Boyd and photographer, journalist, and political activist, John Hopkins approached Waymouth with the suggestion that he might team up with artist Michael English, to design posters advertising their new club, the short lived, but highly influential, UFO. They presciently believed that not only would the two get on well—Waymouth confirms “The chemistry between us was brilliant; too good to last”—but that their combined talents would result in something special. Which, under the name Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, it duly did, as they produced a body of work, including posters, record sleeves, and shop designs, which defines the ideals and visions of the time as distinctively as any of the music or fashions.

The posters were printed and distributed by Osiris Visions which was part of the International Times (IT), the counter-culture newspaper which Hopkins had founded in October 1966 with Jim Haynes and Barry Miles. IT was based at the Indica Bookshop in the basement of the Indica Gallery in St James’, which Miles had founded in September 1965, with John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and support from Paul McCartney. The  Indica Gallery, which was only open from  November 1965 to November 1967, is acknowledged as the first ‘experimental’ art space in London and was where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at an exhibition of her work. This cat’s cradle of cross-overs, including Granny Takes A Trip, played a major factor in Hapshash’s success, as Waymouth compounds, “we were all part of the same movement, whether you were a highly successful pop star minting it, or just a guy clubbing it, there was a camaraderie that swept forward this new approach to culture.”

With many of Hapshash’s posters promoting bands appearing at UFO, which with Pink Floyd as house band, and regular appearances by Soft Machine, and The Incredible String Band is an already impressive list, other key acts of the time also approached them to design to publicity material. “We were riding the crest the a wave.” Waymouth says, “you’re hard put if you’re a graphic artist now to do the equivalent of posters every week, one for Jimi Hendrix, one for The Who, one for… it doesn’t happen like that.” Hapshash also designed the posters for one of the most legendary events of the late sixties, 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, which was a fundraising gig organised by IT held on 28th April 1967 at Alexandra Palace, and included performances by Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, The Pretty Things, The Move, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.

Hapshash designed their posters for silk screen printing, and in so doing innovatively brought art processes to street posters, in addition to which they introduced a number of pioneering techniques which have since entered the mainstream. Which include developing the technique of gradating from one colour to another on a single separation which maximised the effect of the colours creating a “very punchy effect without being too garish”, and regularly using metallic inks which had not been used on street posters before. Waymouth encapsulates the vivid effects as “eye candy to match any psychedelic experience.” The shock of the new, the abstract effect of the high colour, overlaid intricate illustrations, and melting curvaceous type, made the posters illegible to most people. It was only, as Waymouth says, “young people of a particular desire who took the time to understand what was going in the poster”. The subversive element was heightened by the fact that Waymouth and English ‘hid’ “a lot of very naughty things” in the designs which only become apparent with close inspection, which was, Waymouth says, “an up-yours to our fathers”.

The most unexpected Hapshash project was the concept album Hapshash & The Coloured Coat featuring the Human Host & The Heavy Metal Kids, which was initiated by Guy Stevens, the legendary Mod DJ, music producer and manager. “He liked our creative energy,” says Waymouth, “and thought that he could shift this into some sort of musical form.” Neither Waymouth nor English were musicians and at the recording session, or more appropriately as Waymouth describes it “mad sort of party”, the band Art provided the musical underpining, such as it was, whilst Waymouth, English, and their friends “were banging tambourines and making noises”. Waymouth recalls that Art’s rhythm guitarist “got so pissed off, he said ‘this isn’t rock n roll!’ and stormed out.” With a Hapshash designed cover and inserts (that later featured in Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell’s 100 Best Album Covers) the record was released in 1967.

In 1969, the original Granny Takes A Trip trio disbanded and passed the shop onto Gene Krell and Marty Breslau who successfully reincarnated it as an emporium of crushed velvet and rhinestone for rock and roll gentry, before finally closing the doors in the mid-1970s. Waymouth and English also dissolved their partnership. For Waymouth it was a reflection of the times, he says, with a touch of melancholy, “The whole thing was changing, that sweet idealism was becoming dissolute, people were much more aggressive, the drugs became harder, and everything became much more commercial and cynical again; there’d been this oasis of time between ‘66 and ‘68, the little bit of sunshine really, perhaps a bit dipsy, but it was an ideal we thought may have stood a chance.”

As the 1970s began, Waymouth embarked on a new direction by moving full time into painting, save for two more forays into iconic sleeve design: Nick Drake’s Bryter Later (1971) and America’s Horse With No Name (1973). “I wasn’t looking for popularity,” he says, “not that I was particularly looking for popularity in the ’60s, but this was not a pop approach to life, this wasn’t commercial, this was refined luxury work.” Waymouth has also excelled in this discipline and over the last four decades has become particularly sought after as a portraitist, with many high-profile commissions and exhibitions including The Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Portrait of Joe Boyd, tempera and acrylic

But as the century turned, renewed interest in Waymouth’s involvement in the ‘little bit of sunshine’ grew exponentially. Cosmic Visions, an Hapshash & The Coloured Coat retrospective, opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2000, and Tate Liverpool, included many Hapshash designs in the Summer of Love Psychedelic Art, 1967 exhibition in 2005. As Ruby anniversaries unfolded, Hapshash’s work was also to the fore as The Riflemaker Gallery in Soho presented Riflemaker becomes Indica in 2006, and the ICA recreated 14-Hour Technicolour Dream in April 2007. Whilst a chapter on Granny Takes A Trip in Paul Gorman’s influential book The Look - Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion (2006) enlightened and inspired a new generation about the boutique and its legacy.

It is also with Gorman that Waymouth is collaborating on a fashion label again for the first time in nearly 40 years, The Look Presents… Despite the hiatus of two generations, because the label is available exclusively at Topman, the target audience are a similar age to Granny Takes A Trip’s customers: 16-24 year olds.

Waymouth decided to start by concentrating  on a range of “works of art on t-shirts”. Five designs are currently available, with two more to be added later this year, and a new range next year. To provide a sense of continuum, Granny Takes A Trip is evoked on three of the t-shirts, with variations on his designs for the Low Bear and Jean Harlow shop fronts, and the boutique’s “femme fatale” calling card. But whilst accepting that it is his “good fortune to have been in those times and so people will refer to me in that way” with future designs he says the past will feature far less. “I’m always searching,” he says, “what I do now is very different from what I did then.” This statement of intent is underlined by the other t-shirt designs. A large bluebottle fly covers one, the inspiration for which came from the hand-coloured engravings of an 18th century book on insects. “Normally we would consider it something repulsive and want to swat it,” he says, “but it’s actually an amazing piece of nature, and it looks very beautiful on the t-shirt”. The fifth is a pop death’s head design of a pair of sunglasses above a gaping skeletal mouth and the legend ‘RIP IT UP’. Which, might well be interpreted as a comment on too much reference to a brief moment of his past. Though, any instinct to look too closely into the designs is rebuffed by his response to my question as to what he would like people to get from the t-shirts. “A sense of fun, put them on and smile; I don’t think there’s anything deeper than that about them, they’re just catchy ideas, it’s pop, it’s not deep!” He concludes by laughing heartily.

The ripples of laughter underline the sense of fun with which Waymouth has always approached his work, it is perhaps the key subversive element that has fuelled his refusal to accept the established mores or practices of any period, and in so doing create waves of innovation that continue to inspire.

Watch Nigel Waymouth interviewed by Guy Sangster Adams on the Plectrum Broadcast player.