Granny Takes a Trip with Gorman & Bracewell

Poster for the Granny Takes a Trip book event at Foyles (11 Feb 2026) 

Photo of Paul Gorman live on stage taken by Melpomeni 

 

 

I. In Anticipation ...

  

Much anticipating this evening's event at Foyles on the Charing Cross Road: Paul Gorman in conversation with Michael Bracewell; i.e., two of the UK's most celebrated pop culture writers [1] under one roof - and all for the price of a tenner (which includes a glass of wine). 

 

Essentially, they'll be discussing the look of music and the sound of fashion in relation to Granny Takes a Trip; the groovy London boutique that was opened sixty years ago this month on King's Road, Chelsea, by Nigel Waymouth, his girlfriend Sheila Cohen, and John Pearse.

 

Gorman recently published his illuminating study of the shop as well as the cultural scene from which it emerged [2], so obviously he'll be there in part to promote (and sign) copies of this book, but I'm sure he'll be willing to discuss also McLaren and Westwood's store which opened nearby a few years later and for which Granny paved the way and provided a model (like McLaren and Westwood's shop, Granny Takes a Trip became famous for its changing façade, interior, and styles of fashion).    

 

At least I hope so, as it's the punk store at 430 King's Road rather than the hippie haven at 488 that really excites my interest.    

II. On Reflection ... 

 

Well, that was fun!

 

Gorman is an engaging speaker and it helps when the interlocutor is deeply knowledgeable of the subject being discussed. The event was also nicely staged and managed by the staff at Foyles, so kudos to them. 

If I had a time machine and could only make one return trip, I'd still use it to visit SEX in 1976 rather than Granny's in 1966, but, to be fair, the latter was a more culturally vital space than I previously realised (even if listed on the wrong side of the bed).    

Members of a receptive and fairly large audience produced one or two interesting observations and although I didn't ask at the time, I came away wondering whether a store such as Granny Takes a Trip or SEX would still be possible today ... 

 

Sadly, I doubt it. 

 

Although whether that's because socio-cultural conditions have changed, or we have fundamentally changed as a people - become less imaginative and less daring and more desirous of safe spaces in which to self-identify, rather than zones of indiscernibility in which to dress up so as to mess up and become-other - I'm not sure.

Time was, in the 1960s and '70s, when any suburban teenager could go up to London, stroll along the King's Road or cruise round Soho, and (momentarily at least) leave their mundane life behind; could visit magical boutiques and try on an outfit like Mr Benn and be transported into a fantasy adventure.  

 

Now the young go to Primark or spend the day in Westfield and talk about the importance of diversity and being themselves whilst all looking (to my eyes at least) exactly the same in their casual street wear (baggy, low-rise jeans, oversized hoodies, trainers, etc.); a look that is heavily influenced by social media trends rather than the politics of style.  

 

Notes

 

[1] Paul Gorman (b. 1959) is a writer it would be easy to envy, but whom I prefer to love and admire; particularly for his 2020 biography of McLaren, but also for his work in a variety of other areas as a brilliant curator and, indeed, pop cultural map-maker.  

      Michael Bracewell (b. 1958) is a writer with whose life and work I am far less familiar, but whose two collections of essays - England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie (1997) and The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art (2012) - I plan on reading in the near future. 

 

[2] Paul Gorman, Granny Takes a Trip: High Fashion and High Times at the Wildest Rock 'n' Roll Boutique (White Rabbit Books, 2025). 

      The publisher's blurb reads: 

 "Granny Takes A Trip was more than just a shop and a fashion brand; it was the original rock and roll clothes boutique, the template for all that followed. What started as an odd retail venture/art installation in a depressed part of London known as World's End became an international byword for glam decadence in Manhattan and Hollywood, combining flamboyant style and all manner of countercultural activity ...

      Unfolding over a decade-and-a-half, this tumultuous story invokes a cast of often unique, sometimes entitled, unusually talented and troubled individuals on a collective mission to shake up austere, repressed, class-ridden Britain and white bread America." 

      The book can be ordered here.  

 

 

This post is for Paul and Charlie's dark-haired Angels: Maria, Meni, and Jennifer. 

 

 

Reflections on Alessandro Raho's New Portrait of Young Kim

Alessandro Raho: Young Kim (2022)

Oil on canavas (110 x 180 cm)

 alisonjacques.com

 

 

I.

 

Viewing Alessandro Raho's latest portrait of Young Kim at a recent event in London [1] and listening to what was said in a three-way conversation between the artist, the sitter, and the critic Michael Bracewell about the complex relationship between art, fashion, music and sex, one couldn't help but think of D. H. Lawrence's dismissive assessment of English painters; not so much devoid of genuine feeling for visual imagery, as full of fear of the body as a site of various forces, flows, and sicknesses. 

 

It is this fear, says Lawrence, which distorts their vision and suppresses their instinctive-intuitive consciousness.

 

Still, every cloud has a silver lining and this act of suppression did at least enable English artists of the 18th-century to become the best in the world at painting clothes. For painters such as Hogarth, Reynolds, and Gainsborough, it is clear that the coat matters more than the man. 

 

Lawrence writes:

"An old Reynolds colonel in a red uniform is much more a uniform than an individual, and as for Gainsborough, all one can say is: What a lovey dress and hat! What really expensive Italian silk! This painting of garments continued in vogue, till pictures like Sargent's seem to be nothing but yards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops, having some pretty head popped on at the top. The imagination is quite dead. The optical vision, a sort of flashy coloured photography of the eye, is rampant.

      In Titian, in Velasquez, in Rembrandt the people are there inside their clothes all right, and the clothes are imbued with the life of the individual, the gleam of the warm procreative body comes through all the time [...] But modern people are nothing inside their garments, and a head sticks out at the top and hands stick out of the sleeves, and it is a bore." [2]

 

 

II.

 

Alessandro Raho appears to follow in this tradition, as the above portrait of Young Kim illustrates. It is a beautiful rendition of a multicoloured mohair jumper by Kim Jones for the Louis Vuitton S/S 2017 menswear collection, but the woman inside the jumper seems to have simply faded away into the blank void of the background; just a head and neck sticking out of the top of the punk-style sweater and two tiny hands sticking out of the sleeves.     

 

But, having said that - and having seen the work up close and spoken with the artist - I can't help being impressed by it and by him. 

 

First of all, he didn't seem to me to be gripped with fear at all; nor simply following in the footsteps of those famous names who came before him and whom Lawrence dismissed. In fact, Raho seems to gently mock the laughably old-fashioned tradition of portraiture by refusing to dramatise or idealise the figures he paints [3] and by having them return our gaze with interest (so that we are objectified in the process of viewing). 

As for Lawrence's concerns about Kodak vision, well, it is true that Raho does work from photographs, but, interestingly, he employs his skill as a painter to somehow capture something that the camera lens cannot; something that might be termed (for want of another word) presence. 

 

Raho is not simply aiming for realism in his portraits, so much as longing nostalgically for the same thing Lawrence desired; i.e., to come into touch, even when he knows this is no longer an easy matter when we have all become digital images to one another within a virtual universe. 

 

Perhaps having intuitively reached a similar conclusion to Lawrence about portrait painting, Raho has decided to push the process that the latter describes to its limit. The picture of Young Kim is thus deceptively straightforward and innocuous; for it is, as Nietzsche would say, superficial out of profundity [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The event took place on Monday 28th November (7-11pm) at the bookstore-cum-library-cum arts venue Reference.Point (London, WC2). It was held to celebrate the launch of the trade edition of Young Kim's unique little red book A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell (2020). 

      A reading from the work was followed by a discussion with Michae Bracewell and Alessandro Raho in the presence of the latter's latest painting of Young Kim. There was also an informal screening of Malcolm McLaren's video project Shallow 1-21 (2009), although, sadly, no one seemed to pay much attention to this.   

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 193-94.

 

[3] This desire to make art which is both contemporary and commonplace is of course crucial to a realist aesthetic and, however else we might describe Raho's work, we can almost certainly say it's a form of realism - though what kind of realism is debatable.

 

[4] See section 4 of Nietzsche's 1886 Preface to The Gay Science, where he writes that in order to live in a Greek manner we must remain courageously at the surface of the skin, the fold of the dress; i.e., learn to adore appearance and trust in forms. 

      Cf. my interpretation of Raho's work with that of Michael Bracewell, who argues that the portraits are concerned with "emotional and psychological depth". See Bracewell's essay in The Art of Alessandro Raho (Lund Humphries, 2011).