David Parkinson is the great forgotten figure of Seventies
street fashion photography.Â
By dint of a network of avant-garde associations and eclectic
interests, the clever and inventive Parkinson was uniquely placed
not just to cast his acute observational eye on the development of
London menswear but also to visually aid British fashion’s
propulsion through the dog days of glam to the tougher, fetishised
aesthetic of punk.Â
“David was hip. It’s as simple as that,” says Jack English, the
documentary and stills photographer who knew Parkinson in the early
Sixties when they were both provincial teenage visual-culture
obsessives.
David was chronicling the street’s answer to musical pop
culture
“We first met in the Town Hall Square, Leicester. As Bobby
Neuwirth says of his first encounter with Bob Dylan, he was wearing
the right leather jacket,” grins English. “In David’s case it was
black, with lapels and two or three buttons, like a suit jacket but
in leather – very cool. And that hipness of David’s came across in
his photography in the Seventies; he was a great stylist.”
Parkinson’s work – high concept, sexy, simultaneously gritty and
glamorous – -parallels that of such contemporaries as Guy Bourdin,
Helmut Newton and Harri Peccinotti, whose output regularly appeared
in the pages of Paris Vogue, Harpers Queen and
Nova.Â
But he was not to become as fêted as his peers. Why? Because
Parkinson was focused on the blossoming of an earthy strand of
boutique culture largely ignored by the rest of the fashion media.
Importantly, Parkinson’s career – tragically cut short by suicide
mid-decade – was confined to the despised soft-porn men’s magazines
which proliferated in newly permissive Britain in the wake of
liberalisation of the obscenity laws.
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At a time when there were no dedicated consumer menswear
magazines in these isles, a decade-and-a-half before the launch of
British GQ, Parkinson used the pages of such
mass-circulation outlets as Paul Raymond’s Club
International to detail the burst of creativity in clothing
and retail interiors pouring from a select band of game-changers
based in the grimier spots of the capital.
With the underground press in retreat, Club
International captured a new market for vanguard
art
Much of this activity was concentrated around the World’s End at
the fag-end of the King’s Road, in particular at the now-hallowed
number 430. Today, the site of Vivienne Westwood‘s World’s End boutique, in
the late Sixties the design entrepreneur Tommy Roberts launched his
pop-art boutique Mr Freedom there. Roberts’ partner Trevor Myles
succeeded him with the dust-bowl/South-Sea-islands used-denim
-emporium, Paradise Garage, and then the former art student Malcolm McLaren and his seamstress teacher
girlfriend Westwood used it as the base for their sociopolitical
youth-cult assaults under the successive banners of Let It Rock,
Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die and Sex.
Parkinson was in at every twist and turn, Nikon at the ready. He
also showcased outré garb from elsewhere on the King’s Road, such
as ornate Westernwear from Billy Murphy’s The Emperor Of Wyoming
and the curatorial retail constructs of Stephane Raynor, John
Krivine and Don Letts, the trio who made up Acme Attractions in the
basement of Chelsea’s Antiquarius market, from where they set a
high-water mark for vintage menswear.
In collaboration with his partners, first Sandra Cross,
subsequently Rose Kendall and then Valerie Allam, Parkinson
prefigured the digital age stylist-cum-photographer, driving around
town in his silver-blue Messerschmitt bubble car, picking out
strange props from rag markets, selecting nonprofessional models
and scouting street-level environments. Pastel-painted
post-Windrush terraces in Brixton, pre-Second World War Roman Road
barbershops, oil-spattered motorbike garages, unsettling Hackney
medical -suppliers, all were used as a means of bringing into
relief the distinctive garments he favoured.
“David had an extraordinarily creative and original mind,” says
Allam, head of art and design at London’s East Ham College Of
Technology during their relationship and later a director of
international branding combine Wolff Olins. (In the early
Seventies, Allam lived with Parkinson in Terry Farrell and Nicholas
Grimshaw’s architecturally groundbreaking and then-recently opened
Park Road Apartments in Marylebone, London.)
“He was intrigued by diverse sources, from music, style,
architecture, American cars and film,” adds Allam. “He was also an
avid collector, particularly of old magazines, tin toys, vintage
clothing, typography, art deco, furniture, jewellery and weird
objects. These all fed his visual vocabulary and inspired ideas for
photography. For example, he would see a factory sign where one of
the brand-name letters had disappeared and then incorporate that
letter into a fashion shoot, as if it had blown into the model’s
hands.”Â
 Parkinson compiled a huge collection of antique toy robots
and cars decades before these gewgaws became the staple quirky gift
item of such retailers as Paul Smith, while his connoisseurship was so
singular that when he saw a photograph of Bryan Ferry wearing a
Forties tie in the style of one he owned, Parkinson promptly sold
the dozens in his possession at the flea market in Petticoat Lane
rather than be identified with such populism.
“That’s his intensity coming through,” says Stephane Raynor,
who, like Jack English, came to know Parkinson through Leicester’s
town-centre youth scene in the Sixties. “The mere fact that someone
had cottoned on to an interest of his would set Dave ripping
-everything up and starting again.”
Single-minded to the last, Parkinson was not destined to join
his fellow mavericks in the pop-cult pantheon. McLaren and
Westwood’s achievements aside, Raynor and Krivine went on to
establish the Boy London streetwear label; Letts found fame first
as a member of Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite and latterly as a
filmmaker and DJ; William English and Sandra Cross opened the
Eighties Borough restaurant the Dining Room; and Jack English ran
the boutique PX with Raynor and Roger Burton and founded the
enduring Contemporary Wardrobe archive before becoming a
photographer.
Such adventures did not await Parkinson. Fogged by heavy
marijuana consumption (he latterly became an enthusiastic reggae
aficionado to the extent of dabbling with Rasta reasoning), he
took his own life within a few weeks of his 29th birthday in
December 1975.Â
The timing could not have been more off. At this very point -
less than two months after the launch on London’s live art-school
circuit of McLaren’s charges the Sex Pistols – the world was stirring to the
scene which had sprung out of the bohemian set of King’s Road
“Thems” that Parkinson had catalogued, ringing the alarms which
continue to clang through the wider culture today.
Parkinson’s enigma has grown over the intervening decades.
His story has never been told. Nor has his work been presented as
an oeuvre, free from its sticky-paged surroundings.Â
Until now.
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