portrait of an olympus trip rangefinder, a camera made famous by british photographer david bailey in the 1960s. photo ©pamela klaffke
In this scene, we find Penny and Jen out at a club, outfitted head-to-toe in their homemade mod dresses:
Jen and I are dancing and people are pointing and waving. Most of them I know, but some of them are making fun of us. This isn’t something new; it happens every time we go out on a busy night. More and more of these junior business ladies are showing up at our favourite clubs these days, in their practical pumps and pouffy skirts. They think that listening to the college radio station that just moved from cable FM to regular radio makes them somehow cool or smart about music.
They’re try-hards and they can point and laugh at me and Jen all they want — their clothes still look stupid and I’d bet all of the ticket money in my purse that when they’re at home alone they listen to Huey Lewis and the News and read Cosmo. If we want to wear matching outfits, we will, and I have to say that tonight we look good — no, better than good — in our black-and-white op-art dresses. I’m in swirls and Jen’s in checks. Those junior business ladies have probably never even seen an issue of Britsh Vogue from 1966. I feel sorry for them; they have no personal style.
"guinea pig," photo ©pamela klaffke
with all of the writing and re-writing i’m doing on other books, there’s no time to work on the mod girls (another week and i should be back to it, though, and can also continue reading the hilarious novel, chelsea bird by virginia ironside, written when she was nineteen, but more on that at a later date). so, i thought i’d post short excerpts from what i’ve written so far. today, it’s the first few paragraphs from chapter one, setting the scene and tone for the rest of the novel:
Chris is drunk and talking about The Who again. It’s so tedious and I don’t know how Jen can stand it. But at least if he’s really drunk he won’t be able to get it up and I won’t have to listen to his gross dirty talk while he has sex with Jen all night. She says she doesn’t mind when he says that stuff, but I don’t believe her and she should really tell him to stop. It’s not sexy at all.
I know pretty much everyone here, but there’s a small group of flower-child hippie-dippie try-hards smoking a joint in the corner near my sewing machine. I scan the room for Greg, but don’t see him. I need him to ask the try-hard hippies to leave. Hippies are dirty and I don’t want them in my place or near my stuff.
Having parties like this is great. Jen and I get to sell some stuff, hang out with our friends and the more people that we can pack in the space, the warmer it gets. When we moved in it was summer and we were hardly thinking about snow and insulation and how bloody cold it was going to get by November and that concrete floors and high, drafty ceilings aren’t so practical during the winter. I will never admit that to my parents.
I move around the space, looking for Greg. I finally spot him sitting behind the wheel of Jen’s MG. The top is down and he’s talking to Leah, who’s in the passenger seat, giggling at something he’s said. Leah is a bit of a bitch, but she buys tons of gear from us and looks really good in the white sleeveless mini-dress I made for her. Leah wears nothing but white sleeveless dresses and never wears a jacket or a sweater. And she’s so skinny — she must be freezing. But she has such great style.
Greg is tall with big shoulders so people tend to listen to him when he asks them to leave. They think he’s a football player or something, which is hilarious because I’ve seen him run and he flaps his arms around like a baby bird or some spazzy girl.
I lean against the car and wait for Leah to finish her story. She’s telling Greg something about her stepmother, Cate, who is English and grew up in London in the sixties. Leah is always talking about Cate, but sometime she’ll say one thing about her one day and something completely opposite the next. I think Leah lies a lot. No one I know has even met Cate. A woman answered the phone once when I called to tell Leah one of her sleeveless white dresses was ready, but she didn’t have an accent at all.
another week and i’ll be able to return my attention to the mod girls. it’s annoying to have to drop a project so suddenly (especially when it’s going so well), but i’m just recovering from a bout of illness and finishing a revision of the novel i have coming out next january. then, it’s back to the mod girls, which i can hopefully have a draft of before escaping to the desert at the end of march. in the meantime, the stash of research materials and general mid-sixties inspiration is piling up — i can’t wait to get to it all. but i couldn’t resist taking a look at this copy of salon owner magazine, circa june 1967. the pictures, the ads, the how-to’s — how fabulous. and there are more available at tellis’ super etsy shop!
seven photographs that changed fashion
bailey's original (l), rankin's reproduction (r)
after a morning of rewrites and editing on the novel i have coming out in early 2011, i settled in to watch the 2009 documentary special, seven photographs that changed fashion, originally broadcast on bbc4 last february. presented by british photographer rankin, the show follows the process of recreating seven iconic images from the 20th century: one each by cecil beaton, erwin blumenfeld, richard avedon, david bailey, helmut newton, guy bourdin and herb ritts. spanning from beaton’s thirties portraiture through herb ritts’ eighties homoerotica, seven photographs is a quirky hour-long film, as rankin has chosen all of the photographs and attempts to recreate them himself, occasionally using similar equipment and lighting as employed in the originals. it’s an interesting concept and being a fan of fashion history — as well as spending much of my non-writing professional life working as a photographer — the film’s premise had me curious.
and, as luck would have it, the longest and most involved portion of the film is devoted to the only living photographer among the bunch: david bailey. the legendary photographer watches on as rankin attempts to produce a version with his model girlfriend of one of bailey’s inimitable shots of his sixties girlfriend, jean shrimpton. it’s amusing watching bailey tease rankin for not knowing how to use a classic medium format rollieflex tlr (though rankin’s whining about how hard it is to shoot film vs. digital does get grating after a while), and while his shot is perfectly passable, it doesn’t have near the intensity of bailey’s original.
it’s a bit silly, in fact, for anyone to think they can go out and reproduce iconic photographs successfully, but the process is fascinating and that’s what makes seven photographs that changed fashion worth watching for anyone interested in photography or fashion history.
it was a treat to see bailey interviewed, especially since he’s idolized by penny in the mod girls — so much so that she constructs a “david bailey booth” for the girls’ new year’s eve bash at their studio. there, guests can be styled in sixties looks and penny photographs them with her prized olympus trip 35mm camera — the same model made famous by bailey himself in the mid-sixties. penny also does her best to emulate jean shrimpton’s look, while her friends are more into twiggy and edie sedgwick:
I like Jean Shrimpton’s look, though I’m not as tall or as thin and I’m not a model in the mid-sixties, but I’d give anything to be. Sometimes I think that I was born in the wrong era. I don’t belong in the eighties at all. When I go to the bank in the shopping mall that connects the skyscrapers in the other part of downtown, I see the women in their navy suits and sneakers marching from building to building, shop to shop. Most of them stare at me like I’m some sort of mutant. Occasionally, one will stop me and ask about my dress or my coat and tell me they had one just like it in the sixties. I don’t know why, but whenever this happens, it makes me sad – for them in a way, because now they wear navy suits with sneakers, and for me because I’ll never know what it was really like to be Jean Shrimpton and engaged to David Bailey in 1965.
—excerpt from the mod girls, novel-in-progress
the documentary also served as a reminder that cecil beaton — who is best known for his society portraits — shot some great fashion work, even into the sixties. i have a couple of beaton books, big heavy coffee table volumes that are collections of his most famous images. i’ll add them to the research pile. i’m more than a quarter of the way through writing the mod girls and i’m starting to fear that the novel will be finished before the research. maybe there will have to be two mod girls books. i never thought i’d want to write a sequel of any sort, of any book, but i have such an affinity for and adoration of these girls, i’m starting to think it’s possible. but give me another month, when i’ll likely be at the spot where i hate everything about the characters and the story and can’t wait to be rid of them. then we’ll see if i’m still feeling so warm and fuzzy.
the jam, all mod cons, circa 1978
this is my problem with so much of the music that’s been coming out the britain over the last five years or so: a lot of it sounds like the jam. not that there is anything wrong with the jam at all. while i was never much of a mod-revivalist girl in the early-eighties, i did love the jam, and later, paul weller’s the style council. the futureheads, kaiser chiefs, the list goes on — they owe so much to the jam sound, but somehow i don’t think any of these current acts will inspire anything as spectacular as “the jam army.” anyhow, since tonight was a lay-low, not-feeling-so-great night, i figured what better to perk things up than a viewing of don letts’ short documentary, the making of all mod cons (2006)?
the film follows the rise of the jam through the mid-seventies and features interviews with all three band members as well as a few key rock journalists. it gives fans insight as to how the jam picked themselves up after a dismal second album (this is the modern world), to return triumphantly with all mod cons, arguably their most accomplished album and a favourite of many. sure, the sight of a haggard-looking, bleached blond paul weller is off-putting at first, but on this lazy sunday night, it didn’t take long to get over. i’m definitely too tired to start digging through my boxes of vinyl in search of my original jam records. but there’s always tomorrow.