Retro popular culture in all its glory

A new touring exhibition which celebrates British pop culture, fashion, design and pin-up art has just arrived at the Barnsley Civic. Chris Bond reports.
Curator David SinclairCurator David Sinclair
Curator David Sinclair

“Fashion is not frivolous,” Mary Quant once remarked, “It is a part of being alive today.”

The high-minded among you may mock, but coming from the woman credited with popularising, if not inventing, the miniskirt and pioneering the high street revolution, it’s perhaps a salient point.

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Quant is just one of a string of cultural icons featured in a new exhibition that has opened at Barnsley Civic this week. Pop! – Design – Culture – Fashion, a touring exhibition from the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, is an unabashed celebration of pop culture in all its technicolour glory, bringing together everything from poodle skirts and 60s psychedelia, to the kitsch glamour of the 70s.

Half a century ago the fusion of popular images and music with art and fashion changed the way many people dressed, blurring the boundaries of commerce, culture and style. And between the optimism of the mid-50s and the disillusion of Punk, pop culture created a lifestyle not seen before.

David Sinclair, curator at the Barnsley Civic, is delighted to see this vibrant exhibition coming to Yorkshire. “I saw it about a year ago down in London and it just blew my mind. It was really exciting and a fantastic concept and I thought it would fit in perfectly with the kind of thing we do here.”

There is a strong focus on fashion and design from a time when Britain led the way in style and innovation and when lime green was a colour to embrace, rather than run away from.

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The exhibition features the work not only of Mary Quant but fashion designers such as John Stephen and Betsey Johnson.

It includes 30 garments ranging from Quant’s early modernist designs, through to an embroidered waistcoat worn by Elton John in his Glam Rock days, and original items from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road boutique Sex.

“If you look at some of the outfits we have in the exhibition, you could buy similar things now because people are interested in 50s fashions, just as they are with those from the 60s and 70s,” says Sinclair.

There are also more than 70 objects including pieces of retro furniture highlighting the casual throwaway nature of much pop design, as well as iconic record covers by the likes of Andy Warhol, Sir Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, and rock art prints depicting the likes of Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. All of which taps into our collective memory.

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“We have an original dansette record player which I remember having as a teenager years ago,” says Sinclair. “There’s also a lot of beautiful Mary Quant outfits. There’s a great JVC videosphere, which was a round orange TV that looks like an astronaut’s helmet. So we have lots of fun and engaging objects.”

The post-war era through to the 70s has become soaked in nostalgia in recent years, but why are we so enthralled with this particular period of British culture? “We can relate to it, whether it’s the fashion or the music and it still feels relevant to a lot of people,” says Sinclair.

“The 1950s was a formative period, it’s when rock‘n’roll started and people’s attitudes to music and culture began to change. People’s eyes were opened to new ideas and everything seemed to move forward in society.

“This was taken further by the liberation movements of the 60s and then by Punk in the 70s and it all happened in a relatively short space of time.”

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Although the fashion and music from these periods was often wildly different, the rebellious spirit behind rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t that far removed from the one that imbued the whole Punk movement.

“If you take the pop imagery of the 50s it ends up as prints on T-shirts in the 70s. So however much we think something has moved on there’s still a nod to what’s gone before and we have these historical elements that people draw on,” he says.

“If people come and see the exhibition, hopefully it will evoke memories and remind them of their youth or things they recognise from those eras. I think an exhibition should have that human element that evokes some kind of warm feeling, rather than just being a cold space that people walk around.”

Running in tangent with this exhibition is a Pin-Up Art show featuring seven oil paintings by local artist Fiona Stephenson.

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Her work is inspired by the glamorous images of the American pin-up era during the 1950s, the influence of which can still be seen today in popular TV shows like Mad Men.

“This period celebrated shapely women and I think many women today are fed up with being told they have to be slim,” she says. “A lot of the images we associate with this period are quite glamorous but I always try and tell a little story in the picture so it’s not just an image of a pretty woman.”

If her work was produced by a man today it might be labelled sexist by some, but Stephenson disagrees. “A lot of the people who buy my pictures are women and they buy them mostly for the lifestyle idea they represent and the glamour.”

She points out, too, that although the world of art and advertising was very male dominated half a century ago, women weren’t totally shut out.

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“There is a tradition of women doing pin-up art like this. Back in the 50s you had people like Zoe Mozert and Joyce Ballantyne who shared studio space with the men and they were able to make a decent living doing this.” Stephenson, a former comic illustrator, believes her pictures hark back to a less cynical time. “The images of the women I do are almost like cartoons, they’re quite playful and they tie in with the developing sexuality of women at that time.

“These days it feels like things have gone too far and we’ve crossed a line and my pictures are really quite innocent, especially compared with today’s standards.”

Her work fits in well with the themes featured in the touring exhibition, one that Sinclair hopes will attract visitors from across Yorkshire and beyond. “I think it’s important that things like this come to Barnsley and that people in the north get to see these kind of innovative exhibitions.

“There are a lot of exciting cultural things going on in Yorkshire at the moment which is great and I don’t 
see why people shouldn’t 
be travelling from London to see our exhibitions, rather than always the other way round.”

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Pop! – Design – Culture – Fashion and Pin-Up Art, Barnsley Civic, to June 7.

From flower power to punk

Mary Quant opened Bazaar, a boutique on the King’s Road, in 1955 at a time when “fashion wasn’t designed for young people.”

She became a fashion icon during the 60s and is one of the designers credited with creating the miniskirt and hotpants.

Pop design in the late 60s featured everything from colourful paper furniture to Union Jack clothing and the American vogue for paper dresses.

Designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran a provocative boutique called Sex in London during the mid-70s which defined the look of the Punk movement.

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