In the Face magazine, July 1984, Robert Elms wrote an article 'Good Times'. A follow up to his 1982 article 'Hard Times', it highlighted a shift in street fashion away from dressing down to dressing up and focused on shops in the Bermondsey/Tower Bridge Road in particular. Here's a few extracts:
'Down the Old Kent Road they're wearing Cerruti. Gucci and Armani, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on looking rich, and queueing up in front of anybody who can find new ways of separating them from their cash.
Amid the textbook urban decay of Tower Bridge Road there are three high-fashion, high-price clothiers, Le Pel, Platform 1 and Moda 3. In Moda 3 they sell menswear at prices that South Molton Strcet would think twice about and employ two bouncers on a Saturday afternoon to keep the kids out. That is serious business.
Hard times and suntans - the irony of recession Britain spending money like it's going out of fashion. Except that money has never been as thoroughly fashionable as it is right now. While governments tinker with redundant economics, so people, and in particular young people, have decided to buy themselves good times - whatever the price.
A Liverpool councillor said recently that despite the very real and appaling decay that his city has suffered, you'd be underestimating the resourcefulness of Liverpudlians if you thought they were bowing down and accepting Thatcher's recession - they find ways to get by. And a lot of people are getting by remarkably well. A self employed builder or plumber can earn a fair screw these days, but the standard profession in the Deep South seems to be "ducking and diving". Thatcher preaches self help. and there's plenty of helping yourself going on. There's a new euphemism for that kind of getting by: it's the one part of the economy that the Tories have been successful at boosting and it's now known as the informal sector. Considering what they're spending it on. perhaps casual might be a better word.
In Southwark there is the worst unemployment in London and among the worst housing. Yet amid the crumbling. Victorian red-brick blocks battered by the Blitz, there are half a dozen pubs on one estate alone which look like kitsch sci-fi spaceships that have landed in a barren, alien land.
These pubs are all dressed in pink and lime green with awnings that beckon like false eye-lashes and names like Gillies. EJ's. Sampsons and Southsides. Inside, the bars are stainless steel and the walls are covered in mirrors. They're a graphic. almost comic illustration of the mass desire to spend away the depression. Every night they're full of girls in cashmere sweaters downing drinks of many colours and boys in clothes with Milanese labels drinking every new overpriced bottled lager they can import. In Southsides these days the favourite tipple is champagne. In a tarted-up burger bar Dom Perignon costs £30 a throw; a bottle sent to the table is the polite precursor to an attempted pull. And outside they line up their Ford Escort XR3s with gold wheels and dream of the day it's a Porsche.
Tony Yusuff runs Le Pel, and two other equally exclusive and expensive clothes shops in the Old Kent Road and Lewisham. He makes regular trips to Italy to decide what hip South London is going to be wearing next season. He sells quality clothes to boys and girls in search of the Dolce Vita. In his new ladies shop he stocked a couple of jackets that retailed for £350 just to see how they went. They went very quickly indeed.. Money it seems is no object.
Next season he's going to move away from Italian classics into the more radical British designs of the likes of Bodymap. It's a risky move among conservative casuals, but he's sure that his increasingly sophisticated clientele will go with him. Le Pel has built up a reputation and a following by treating local kids with the kind of respect they rarely get from most of the snotty, effete shop assistants in South Molton Street.
"There's a kind of local pride. they even try to buy the bags. because like the clothes they're a status symbol".
[...] Fashion inevitably weaves in and out, reacting against itself and everything else in an always fascinating chase. But in its broader sweeps, it's one of the most accurate barometers of an age, and we're in an age when fashion has swept broader than ever before. In the Sixties fashion was a powerful force because of new-found affluence - in the Eighties it's perversely powerful because of unabated depression. The art is one of stealing good times from hard'.
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| Le Pel is shown briefly in the 1985 Arena documentary 'Old Kent Road' |
In his autobiography 'On a Plate' (2012), chef Gregg Wallace writes of this time: 'Bermondsey became alive with smart bars, like Sampson’s and Willows, two-floor affairs, with guys tapping their sovereign rings on their glasses of champagne in time to the music. Bus drivers pretended to be gangsters at the weekends, while dustmen with shirts from Moda 3 or Le Pel claimed they were going to have someone ‘blown away’.
[Le Pel was at 268 Old Kent Road, its Lewisham branch was in Lee High Road; I believe Moda 3 used to do a Bermondsey t-shirt; I think the Gillies he refers to was actually Gilly's piano bar in Wild Rents, SE1, off Long Lane; Samsons, sometimes known as Samsons Castle, was a pub in Grange Road SE1]
See also: South London Casuals: White Hall Clothiers, Camberwell Road 1983
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