Here’s the uncut version of my interview with Paul Gorman for the September issue of Code magazine. The best part of my job is getting to talk to the most inspired fashion drivers in the world. The worst part is that there’s never enough text space in magazines.
Cover of The Look, an absolute must-read if you love your all time favorite rocker’s styles and want to know all about it. There was never a more complete account…
British journalist and author Paul Gorman wrote the most exhaustive celebration of rock and pop fashion spanning five monumental post war decades. First published in 2001, followed by an update in 2006 and another one in progress, The Look, Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion is not just another must read style bible to top your night table stack. With his The Look-blog, a London club night and fashion label The Look Presents, all born in the wake of his applauded book, Paul Gorman is on a mission to safeguard the holy grail of flamboyance. “When great music meets great style, that’s when things really start to pop.”
The Look had been on my professional literature wish list ever since raving reviews of the 2006 re-release started popping up in all my fashion feeds. Code’s gutsy timed Rock Star theme literally made me jump to the occasion of digging into this beefy, juicy and bloody fabulous chunk of fashion history, starting in the spring of 1952 with a seventeen year old Elvis pressing his pretty face against the Lansky Bros menswear store window on 126, Beale Street in Memphis, and closing with Hedi -“I was born with a David Bowie album in my hand”- Slimane’s triumph at Dior Homme, crediting rock and roll buddies ranging from Pete Doherty to Mick Jagger. The Look’s threefold foreword, by Paul Gorman, Paul Smith and Malcolm McLaren, had cast a bit of a blues-y ‘those were the good old days’-shadow ahead, but this is the first thing the rock-and-fashion-jive-talking author wishes to set straight in our interview. “The collective conclusion is that the potency that occurs when fashion and music combust has been all but lost as celebrity culture goes into overdrive and big business dictates like never before in this Starbucked age.” states Gorman’s introduction while Paul Smith concludes his with the observation that today “everything is over-considered”, in contrast to the ‘blank sheet’ his generation started out with after the war. Malcolm Mc Laren, who unchained quite the fashion movement together with Vivienne Westwood at the dawn of the 70’s, is most grim about the loss, noting that fashion no longer drives subcultures but has become an industry merely producing product to supply our global mall-culture.
Paul Gorman: “I think it’s just become very fragmented. It’s still out there, but in different ways, like the rest of culture.” ‘It’ referring to that certain X-rated good stuff that The Look is all about; unpredictable, sexy, dangerous style, fearlessly served up by likewise musical talents and their tailors. “There was always boring and predictable stuff around. You gotta keep your eyes open and I guess that’s what we always did, didn’t we?”