Me, Andy Warhol and the Baader Meinhof Phenomenon

"Everyone must have a fantasy..."

-Andy Warhol

I have a fantasy. A fantasy of having a blog that I update weekly. It seems I have gone tri annual...?

But I've been busy! I've been busy missing New York. I  tried to enjoy London but couldn't shift the feeling that I was meant to be there and not here. I resisted calling Autumn 'Fall',  I tried to ignore the fact that the city lights were winking at me from across the ocean, I could hear the wild promise of mystery and beauty calling me back to my spiritual home. But I've put my fingers in my ears and poured myself another cup of tea.

It all began with a documentary which I watched from my bed on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The arts correspondent from Newsnight took it upon himself to live a day in the life of Andy Warhol. Hanging out with all his surviving cronies and visiting his old haunts.  I was completely gripped. When the credits rolled I lamented my geography and berated the fact that I was tucked up in bed in such bucolic surroundings, gazing at my iPad, not arriving on a white horse at Studio 54 in a red dress, under a glitter-ball. I watched it five and a half times more. How I longed to have lived in 60s New York...The Chelsea Girls, Bianca Jagger, Frank O'Hara poems, Betsey Johnson, Campbell's Soup, International Velvet, Edie Sedgwick lying around in her underwear and earrings, Candy Darling, Brillo Pads, Baby Jane Holzer, The Velvet Underground..the dancing, the parties, the very questionable films of people asleep. Without actually wanting to BE Andy Warhol (I think that would be a bit creepy) - I slightly envied the life he led...lying in bed until 5 in the afternoon, (although I have actually been known to do this on more that one occasion) then going to The Factory to hang out and make Art, followed by an evening at Serendipity with all his team to eat Frozen Hot Chocolate...on to another party, another dance, another scene.

 So I called my friend in New York and discussed how I could sell all my worldly possessions (not my clothes) and up sticks to the States to create my own pocket of 60s Manhattan in 2015. For the early adopters of my blog you may recall my musings on my love for NYC. For those of you late to the party( that never quite gets going) you can reminisce with me here. 

In the post a matter of days later, a parcel with a transatlantic stamp tied with brown string arrived. Unwrapped to reveal a rather heavy tome called Polaroids. 'Saw this and thought of you' scrawled the missive from my dear friend 'Until you can get here - possibly by time travel, I'm sending Warhol's Manhattan to you. Create your own!'

With that advice in mind I picked up my Polaroid camera and set about documenting my life, for my lesser spotted blog.***

Then something strange started to happen.I don't know if it was the turning leaves and changing seasons...winds in the East and a mist coming in, but London suddenly had a distinctly Warholian feeling. Everything was bright, colourful and graphic and took on a glamour that I hadn't witnessed before this side of the ocean. All of a sudden my London life started to make strange (let's face it, mainly sartorial) parallels with Andy's Manhattan.  You might ask, how much do I have in common with Mr Andrew Warhola Junior from Pittsburgh? 

It turns out, not a lot. But...EVERYWHERE I went, every snap I took, Andy was there or his paintings or his prints. He just kept popping up in my path! Now this could be something to do with the fact that clothes from that era have come back in to fashion which intrinsically made everything feel a little 60s and 70s as I gravitated towards the prints and colours and style. Or it simply could have been my mindset. Had I possibly cosmically ordered my life into a day, a week, a month in the life of old Soup Cans himself? Was my life turning into a Newsnight special? Or as my friend pointed out when I relayed the weird coincidences - whether it was merely The Baader Meinhof Phenomenon - that thing when you hear a new word and then you see it wherever you go.

This is the book! Andy Warhol Polaroids from Taschen. 

Pull up to the bumper baby! Pictures of  the other Grace, Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, 

Audrey Hepburn, Lee Radizwill

and lots and lots of willies.

  

Now I could have read all the signs and taken them as an indicator to get on the first plane to JFK and say Ciao Manhattan! under the insistence that the Universe wanted me be there. But instead I thought rather than wishing I existed in another time, another place and resided in another city I realised everything I needed was right here, for now. No need to hop on a plane or a white horse at all.

Another wise friend sent me a quote from the abstract artist Agnes Martin (who incidentally once said 'I liked Andy Warhol, but was scared of his friends')

"The measure of your life is the amount of beauty and happiness of which you are aware"

- and I like that. In an Andy kind of way - it's about finding the beauty in the now, the everyday, the mundane and the weird - the soup tins, the Brillo pads, it's right there in front of you but in life it's all a matter of perspective, like art, it's completely down to how you choose to look it at or indeed, how you arrange it.

POP UP!

I was walking down the Portobello Road and who should I see staring back at me? So I popped in to Lime Green Bow and bought this 60s tasselled gold brocade coat which is my new favourite thing. The emerald green ring I'm wearing is by the jeweller Kenneth Jay Lane (most of Edie Sedgwick's HUGE earrings came from him). Lane was one of the subjects of Warhol's screen tests and a Factory favourite.

CARS!

I wore the coat to a wedding at Farm Street. Andy was a devout Catholic and had an enduring fascination with cars as a products of the consumer American society. I too am Catholic and have an enduring fascination with beautiful cars....can you see the undeniable parallels emerging?!

I wore this Alice McCall Wonder of Life silkscreen print dress under the jacket with my glittery Christian Louboutin Pigalles Follie 100 which to me, are a piece of art in themselves, but the most uncomfortable things known to humanity.

SILVER BALLOONS!

An abundance of birthday balloons - the perfect accessory to this vintage D&G slip dress and static hair. Silver was Andy's favourite colour - he thought it was the colour of the future.

Andy and his Silver Flotations

Watch the video here

FLOWER SERIES!

The Seventies called. They want their curtains back. I wore my Topshop two piece to Spuntino in Soho to their book launch. It's a Manhattan style diner where they serve up amazing Mac n Cheese. The recipe book is a love letter to NYC and I frequent the diner when I need a Big Apple fix.

I think this is also known as Man Repelling?

Rose Print Dress from ASOS

Back of a cab in Zara Cropped Trousers and striped flats from Bionda Castana

1970s Apron Dress sourced in New York by Lime Green Bow

MIRRORS!

I visited the quite sceney Casa Cruz in Notting Hill Gate.
Mirrors everywhere and lots of posers (including me)
 Andy would have loved it. 

"People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror what is there to see?"

Mirror mirror on the Warhol.  Favourite Coat from Ainea.

STUDIO 54! CAMPBELL'S SOUP! THE COLOUR RED!

Found this 1960s dress by Jean Varon on eBay. I would have worn this to Studio 54.

Bianca Jagger at Studio 54

Went to buy the Sunday papers and came across these. Coincidence?

Zara cable knit dress and Renaud Pellegrino 1970s graphic handbag. Heaven.

EYES!

Frequency Illusion? Not one but two Poppy Lissiman clutch bags. 

Zara dress and Evil Eye ring from Eyeland 
Nails in Big Apple Red by OPI

EDIE SEDGWICK FASHION MOMENTS!

Edie was Andy's Poor Little Rich Girl muse and a favourite fashion icon who I became intrigued by after my small stint of staying at the Chelsea Hotel where she had once taken up residence in the 60s. She actually managed to burn it down in 1965 claiming her oven had exploded while she was cooking a sweet potato. I have always been fascinated by the way she put clothes together. Her friends said "her apartment was chaos, piles of clothes on every piece of furniture"...I can relate to this.

Vintage Spaceship Dress and Miu Miu Shoes found on eBay

Magic Ombre Sequin Party Dress from ASOS

Very serious. Edie style eye make up, vintage feathery dress
and ear cuff from Topshop

CATSsssss!

To call Andy Warhol a cat person would be an understatement. He had a cat called Hester who was lonely. So he acquired another cat called Sam. They had kittens. Andy and his mother ended up living with 25 cats all called Sam in their Lexington Avenue apartment. He then wrote a book called 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. Course he did.

I feel bad for putting this scarf in the Cats section as it's definitely not made of cats but it's similarly soft and fluffy. If Andy Warhol created scarves - I think they would look like this:

Rainbow Twist from Charlotte Simone

BEAUTY!

"If people want to spend their whole lives creaming and tweezing and brushing and tilting and gluing, that's really okay too, because it gives them something to do"

All recent art related beauty products that I love: Nails Inc Paint Can spray on nail varnish! NIOD Photography Fluid designed purely for selfie taking! Nars Lip Pencil in Roman Holiday! Tata Harper Love Potion! All tried and tested and absolutely amazing - turning my desk into a dressing table.

POLAROIDS!

And to round it all off - a polaroid taken of me by my favourite Chelsea Girl that came out strangely like a Warhol silkscreen...

***Where a Polaroid camera wasn't available (they're slightly cumbersome and most definitely ruin the line of a jacket)  I used my iPhone (I think Andy would have loved the iPhone! Can you imagine his Instagram account?)...so excuse the liberties I have taken where artistic license is concerned. However as Andy said - Art is what you can get away with'...which has given me rather a lot of leeway. He also said "I believe in low lights and trick mirrors - always omit the blemishes - they're not the part of the good picture you want." My kinda guy! And most handy for slightly tenuous blog posts....

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The lives of our clothes - past, present and future

A Russell Flint*

I could not speak for amazement at your beauty

As you came, down the Garrick stair,

Grey-green eyes like the turbulent Atlantic

And floppy schoolgirl hair.

I could see you in a Sussex teashop,

Dressed in green peasant weave and brogues,

Turning over, as firelight shone on brassware,

Last year's tea-stained Vogues.

- Sir John Betjeman

PAST

As an overly romantic teenager for whom adulthood could not come quick enough, somewhere between my Bloomsbury Group obsession and Mitford sister stage, I found time for a bit of a crush on John Betjeman (who was no watercolour but a superb wordsmith) and in particular, I fixated on his poem A Russell Flint. She was my heroine, this girl with the grey-green eyes and the schoolgirl hair. I imagined that one day, if I could get my hands on my great grandmothers sea-green woven tweed coat (and the charm bracelet and the ball gowns) , I too could sit in a teashop, being a bright young thing, flicking through tea-stained Vogue magazines and my life would be complete. I willed myself to grow up quickly alongside making complicated plans to run away from home - with the coat. At the age of 13 - I was the exact opposite of A Russell Flint muse.

You see, to me, the green coat was a very great thing.

The sea-green tweed coat which was made for my great grandmother,
then passed to my grandmother, my mother
and now me!

My great grandfather returned badly injured from the war to find that his mother had died, the family home had gone. The only person he knew was his mothers tailor. So under his tutorship, he learnt to make clothes, acquired a tweed mill or two and a wool factory in Edinburgh called Munrospun and proceed to design couture under his label called Country Life. There was a coat not dissimilar to this one which was kept in his office in his factory to remind himself to maintain the same standard of quality in every single garment which left the building.

The old Munrospun Factory in Edinburgh

PRESENT

During my recent house move I was forced to choose what I kept for my day to day living and what would be boxed up and put into storage. I brutally disposed of a lot of tat, most of my clothes came with me and ones which I wouldn't immediately wear were sent on a little holiday up the motorway.  I waved TTFN to a van of nearly all my worldly possessions which were then chauffeured up the A40 by two nice Polish gentlemen and deposited into a teeny tiny cupboard.

I thought everything was tucked up safe as mouses, but then I received a RODENT ALERT email so had to go and check for signs of life. Now I don't really mind the mice nibbling on my sofa or my caffetiere but I really do mind them tucking into my great grandmothers beautiful green coat and the ball gowns she bequeathed me! 

Off I went to rescue them! Stuck in traffic on my return journey with my precious cargo I felt terrible that I had ever considered it acceptable to put the green coat and gowns away. They had always been used to a much more glamorous life - hanging in lovely wardrobes around the world in a golden age when everything was...better? But as we know, the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there, however it is our responsibility to look after the items passed down through the generations and take them into modern times rather than (and more prevalently) keep churning out sweatshop tat and creating landfill. I have realised that beautifully made, quality clothes will always be in vogue and, if looked after properly, will never go out of fashion - they have a place in the modern wardrobe. As long as we win the war on moths! But what also appeals strongly to my (often crippling) sense of nostalgia is that these items are our heritage and always tell a story - the places, the parties, the people. When I wear the sea-green coat I know I am the fourth generation of my family to do so and I love that. We always say what if the walls could talk, but what if the clothes could?

The coat. 

Granny's first ball gown in silk Chrysanthemum Liberty print.
As a child I used to think it was horrid because it wasn't pink.
I love it now.

Once consigned to our childhood dressing up box. Now in my dressing up box.

FUTURE

On the way to a wedding at the end of last year, on route to my car I took a wrong turn and accidentally found myself in Portobello market! I felt a cosmic pull towards a green tartan tasselled coat and was delighted to find that it was made from an old Munrospun blanket - a genius way of up-cycling I thought! The ultimate in sustainable fashion! I wondered where it had been all this time and what journey it had taken in the time between. From leaving the factory in Edinburgh in the middle of the last century under the watchful eye of my grandfather and then finding it's way back to me. I feel so happy that I am able to look after it for the next bit.

The Munrospun label with the Lion Rampant of the Scottish Royal Standard.

Me, sadly not on the Garrick stair but actually in the ladies at the Savile Club in my Munrospun tartan blanket coat.

...and so to tie up this musing...

The said wedding I went to was in Sussex! The day afterwards, I found myself in a teashop, wearing my green Munrospun blanket coat and reading the Sunday papers (still definitely not looking like a Russell Flint muse, due to the excesses of the night before) but I thought to myself.......finally..........in a round about way........all these years later.....mission accomplished. 

*It gets even better at the end - I always strive to be as calm as a rock pool - not always succeeding. You can actually hear John Betjeman reading it in full to rather rousing music here. Swoon. 

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