The appetite for espresso and Italian fashions for men opened English eyes to a great many things, remembered restaurateur Alvaro Maccioni, one of the throng who came: ‘They realised that on the other side of the channel there was life after the war.’ More and more Italian restaurants could be found. ‘They didn’t want to eat roast lamb any more,’ he said of the English customers who flocked to the new trattorias. ‘Before, food was like gas or electricity: then it became another form of entertainment.’
But even more than the taste for pasta, the craze for Italian coffee swept England along with the growing prosperity. In every town, it seemed, the young people who had jobs but weren’t old or jaded enough to frequent pubs turned a coffee bar into the local hip spot. Archie McNair had been one of the first to hit on this trend, and his good fortune had left him with a little capital and the desire to compound it. He joined forces with Quant and Plunket-Greene, and with £8000 of seed money, they obtained the freehold of a building in the King’s Road that had an ideal shop space at street level and, below, just the place for Plunket-Greene to open the jazz club of his dreams. In November 1955, the boutique named Bazaar opened its doors.
Among the items for sale that day were a pair of pyjamas that Quant had designed – the only thing she’d made for the opening, in fact, other than some hats. The gaily coloured bedclothes were photographed by Harper’s Bazaar and bought by an American clothier who said he planned to copy them for sale back home. Quant resented being ripped off but was also inspired to make more of her own pieces for the shop. Buying ready-made sewing patterns, which she revamped according to her tastes, going to Harrod’s for yards of cloth of the sort not normally used for women’s clothes, she began working feverishly in her Chelsea bedsit, whipping up enough stock each day to replace whatever had been sold the day before. ‘I just went at it like any other design thing,’ she said, ‘which was clothes for the way I lived or the way one lived in Chelsea.’
Both the very concept of the shop and Quant’s novel designs for it were instant hits. ‘It was almost a violent success,’ she recalled. ‘People were sort of three-deep outside the window. The Royal Court Theatre people were mad about what we were doing. And it was very much the men who were bringing their girlfriends around and saying, “This is terrific. You must have some of this!”' Because of the shop’s erratic hours—drinking with their customer-friends, Plunket-Greene and Quant sometimes forgot to close until midnight—and because each day promised an entirely new look as dictated by Quant’s mood or the materials she found, Bazaar became an essential destination, with young Chelsea girls popping in several times daily to see what had been set out for sale.
What they got were simple, bold designs in bright colours, stripes or polka dots, dresses and suits that broke away from the closed-neck, pinch-waisted style of French-dominated haute couture, and short – and, in time, even shorter – skirts. You didn’t see stuff like it in Paris, you didn’t see stuff like it in New York, and you certainly didn’t see anything like it anywhere else in London. The Chelsea girls ate it up. Literally, too, as Plunket-Greene used the downstairs premises not to open a jazz club but rather a French-style bistro called Alexander’s, one of the first new wave restaurants in London and a decidedly trendy and popular dining spot for the crowds that hovered around Bazaar.
Apart from the predictably enthusiastic locals, however, there was at first little ballyhoo. ‘The trade ignored us,’ Quant recalled. ‘They called us degenerate. They raised their eyebrows in mystified amazement. Later, when they realised how successful Bazaar was proving, they called our success a “flash in the pan”.’
Yet Quant had hit a nerve with her work. She was making clothes that distinguished those who wore them from their mothers – or, more exactly, the girls from the women – and which proclaimed to the world that virginity and propriety, so long the basis of Englishwomen’s fashion, weren’t absolute values. Her clothes were sexy – hell, sexual – and the sense of colour, freedom and youthfulness that they imparted gradually became more and more fashionable until finally they became the norm. ‘The street,’ recalled an admiring Vidal Sassoon, ‘was her atelier.’
Said a fashion writer then with the Daily Express, ‘Suddenly someone had invented a style of dressing which we realised we had been wanting for ages. Comfortable, simple, no waists, good colours and simple fabrics. It gave anyone wearing them a sense of identity with youth and adventure and brightness.’
Quant saw the impact more explicitly. The look of her clothes, she explained, said, ‘I’m very sexy. I enjoy sex, I feel provocative, but you’re going to have a job to get me. You’ve got to excite me and you’ve got to be jolly marvellous to attract me. I can’t be bought, but if I want you, I’ll have you.’
As the most visible exponent of a new slant on life, Quant became a fount of pithy, outrageous comments.
On her ideal of a stylish woman: ‘She is sexy, witty and dry-cleaned.’
On jewellery: 'Too much jewellery makes you look old, as if you were rejected by lots of rich, old men who paid you off.’
On the new vogue for youthful fashions: ‘Suddenly, every girl with a hope of getting away with it is aiming to look not only under voting age but under the age of consent.’
On her own success: ‘Egg and chips, egg and chips, egg and chips – and finally we got a bit of steak!’
Not, in short, the traditional standard of English girlhood.
But that standard was starting to be swept away.
The great cities all bide by the water – rivers and oceans, or a confluence of the two. It was water that brought the people there to start with; water that made their profit-taking and empire-building possible; water that gave their poets a living metaphor for eternity, nature, change. However the centuries have altered the buildings, the goings-on, the people, the surging, sweeping, never-ending, ever-changing water is the same – the oldest, most unknowable part of a city.
The Thames, for one, is a world unto itself. Murky, swift and perilously tidal, it connects the city to the world and has done since before the Roman army first built a bridge across it in the age of the Caesars. It constitutes a third city, an ever-moving medium of trade, tourism, crime, sensation and, being water, romance. The Thames has its own police force – the world’s first – and ancient tunnels and bridges and docklands. Now and again it reminds those who live beside it that it is as much estuary as stream, flooding its banks with devastating frankness. Whole generations of families have lived by the Thames, worked it, eaten from it, died on it. Within London, they’re a breed apart, urbanite yet marine, as authentically of the place as the first people who ever knew it as home.
Tom Stamp was a Thamesman, born in Poplar, the canal-laced area of north-east London between the isthmus of the Isle of Dogs and the Cockney stronghold of Bow. His father was a Thamesman, too, and Tom followed him to sea as a teen. But marriage and fatherhood brought him back onto land. On Boxing Day 1936, Tom married Ethel Perrott, a Bow lass whom he’d met during the harvest in a Kentish hopfield – a common seasonal employment for young Cockneys. For a while, to stay near Ethel, Tom worked in town as a delivery boy. But when it became clear in ‘39 that war was imminent, and as he feared being called up to the army, back to the water he went, stoking coal in the guts of great ships, a ‘donkey man …