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The Peculiar ’60s Designer Who Redefined Men’s Fashion
He went by the name of Mr. Fish. And today, his gender-bending look — silk blouses, swishy florals and all — is back.
If there’s one word to sum up the fellows on the runway this season, and the reassertion of masculine flamboyance in fashion, it’s ‘‘pretty.’’ They looked pretty in J. W. Anderson’s blousy shirting and ankle-strap ballerina flats; in Thom Browne’s geisha getups; in all that flowing, flowery stuff at Gucci. Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Gucci, has a penchant for brocade and ribbons in his men’s wear, for cap sleeves and pajama suits in bright silks and lots of pussy-bow blouses knotted around young men’s throats.
These new dogs are actually up to some fairly old tricks. Michele acknowledges it: His collections, for all their pontificating cant about notions of the contemporaneous, and philosophical quotes from Roland Barthes, are rooted in turn-of-the-’70s nostalgia. More precisely, in a small store, long forgotten, in Mayfair, London, whose shopping bags carried the slogan ‘‘Peculiar to Mr. Fish.’’ Because the clothing they contained was frequently peculiar — even in late 1960s London.
The designer was Michael Fish — a name he shares with a BBC meteorologist far more widely known, but whose impact on the dress of the everyday man is far less important. While designing for the distinguished 19th-century men’s outfitter Turnbull & Asser in 1965, Mr. Fish, as he liked to be called, originated the broad, brightly patterned neckwear that became known as the ‘‘kipper’’ tie. At least he’s credited as such. (Ties had already crept wider among the outer echelons of society, such as the postwar zoot suiters, whose fashion was a form of sartorial rebellion.) Turnbull & Asser’s ‘‘kipper’’ foulards occupied the acceptable side of psychedelic male attire, adopted by the everyman, and, indeed, were introduced stateside by Ralph Lauren a year later, when an order for 1,200 placed by Neiman Marcus would help him found a company called Polo.
But soon Fish would contribute to a seismic shift in men’s wear across gender gaps and income brackets. Like Michele and his Gucci reinvention, he had perfect timing. Men in the mid-’60s, amid the sexual revolution, feminism and the influence of musicians like Mick Jagger and the Beatles, began to embrace pageantry and explore new modes of dressing in a manner unseen since the late 18th century. When Fish, a 26-year-old working-class boy from Essex in a similar mold to David Bowie and John Lennon, opened his store in 1966, he became the movement’s leading architect. Many of the signature looks from the late ’60s — plush velours, heavily figured silks, foppishly high button collars, knotted cravats and suits in any (and every) shade other than gray, black or navy — can be traced back to pieces in his eponymous, hellfire-red emporium. He dressed music royalty as well as a steady clientele of ordinary, if deep-pocketed, men. The designer himself described his clothes as ‘‘pretty,’’ while the slightly more verbose Esquire columnist George Frazier dubbed the era’s fashion transformation the ‘‘Peacock Revolution.’’
A splashy historian at heart, Fish referenced the 18th century in rich brocades, embroidery and military braid, and in his dandy highwayman shirts, ruffled of sleeve and bowed at neck. His ‘‘dress for men,’’ sported by both Jagger and Bowie, had lines not dissimilar to the elongated shirts of the period; other Fish shirts were banded like Renaissance doublets. His mash-up of those references resulted in a stylistic bouillabaisse where history meets modernity: a 1940s-style trench coat rubbing shoulders with a maharajah’s Nehru-collar suit; a fur cape with a pastel-pink trouser-suit. Fabrics were consistently lush — silks, brocades, velvets — with his most basic suits costing around $120, or about $1,000 today.
That proved Fish’s downfall. In events that underscore the tribulations still plaguing today’s experimental designers, his original backer, John Barry Sainsbury, scion of the founders of the British supermarket chain, withdrew funding in the early ’70s. The loss left Fish floundering. He took on new investors and tried moving to a different location, but the economy had depressed, and tastes had shifted. It was difficult for a designer whose particular aesthetic defined the ’60s not to seem out of date a decade later. He later designed silk robes, among other things, for the New York label Sulka; in 1978, he was employed as a greeter at the Embassy Club, London’s hedonistic counterpart to Studio 54.
There’s an undeniable whiff of Fish in this season’s shows. It’s in the clothes but, almost more importantly, in the attitude: the exuberance, the unapologetic decoration, the notion of the other. And in an odd twist of fate, a London men’s wear entrepreneur, David Mason, recently purchased the rights to Fish’s name, with plans to relaunch the line soon. ‘‘You have to think differently before you can dress differently,’’ said Fish, an aphorism that could easily be ascribed to Michele or, indeed, to J. W. Anderson. Men were then, as now, suddenly thinking differently about their clothes, willing to experiment, to take risks. Fifty years ago, Fish was there, ready to help them slip into something a little less comfortable.
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