The King of Carnaby Street, Jeremy Reed’s biography of fashion designer John Stephen, escapes many of the familiar tropes that biographies tend to fall into. The “life” of John Stephen, as indicated in the title, is really only his professional one, with little of the typical biographical exposition bookending each side. Reed begins his story with the Glaswegian’s arrival in London in 1952 at the age of 18. Six years later he opened the first boutique in Soho’s Carnaby Street and played a key role in transforming the neighbourhood into the a shopping and cultural hub.

Perhaps due to the fact that Stephen himself was a private man during his heyday, Reed has built his story around the major cultural events of the era when he was active. Though Stephen’s career is the focal point, the book equally functions as the story of London in the 1960s, of Carnaby Street and of the mod subculture. Other cultural figures like Mary Quant, Foale & Tuffin, the Beatles and the Who all make appearances, emphasizing the influence of different types of artists on each other. While forging a link between clothing and music is nothing new, Reed also manages to draw parallels between fashion and drug culture, as well as social ideologies popular amongst the young in trendy London. As he detailed the tendency of Mods to prioritize aesthetics and borrow from other cultural movements, I wondered how seamlessly they would fit in with today’s tumblr generation.

Reed’s choice to focus on Stephen’s contribution to fashion rather than dramatizing his personal life is a smart one, making the book read less like the novelization of a Lifetime movie and more like an intelligent deconstruction of an influential designer’s oeuvre. That said, this method does carry its own pitfalls – occasionally, the books lags sometimes when it goes into detailed accounts describing the techniques Stephen used to cut a suit or all the possible colour combinations of striped trousers he designed (though design aficionados – and I’m sure there are many among WORN’s readers – might appreciate these details). Other times it began to feel repetitive where Stephen’s dealings with other famous people are brought up – it seems every page carries at least a few references to the Kinks, Mick Jagger, or other stylish rockstars, to the point of excess.

For me, the most intriguing aspects of Stephen’s story were the ways he used his clothing to provoke the status quo. Stephen, a gay man, was forced to live most of his life in the closet, putting on airs of being an eligible bachelor for his young fan base. However, he used his clothing as a means of blurring the lines of gender presentation, often designing androgynous clothes for both men and women. Men’s clothing was his specialty, and many of his designs were much showier than what men had previously worn – jeans became tighter and shirts came in flamboyant colours like pink and aquamarine. Stephen turned shopping into a recreational activity for men by making his stores have a nightclub feel.

The King of Carnaby Street, while giving a general idea of who John Stephen was as a person, is more about the influence a provocative design aesthetic can have on a generation than a typical biography. True, Stephen was the driving force behind his line, his business philosophy, and his success, but it’s the clothes that are the stars of this story.

The King of Carnaby Street: The Life of John Stephen
By Jeremy Reed, Haus Publishing London
book review by Anna Fitzpatrick
photography by Hillary Predko

I’ve never been much for sneakers. I often visit my neighborhood and surrounding area shoe lockers just to yawn at the same design I saw occupying the shelf four years ago, but in a different colour or with some celebrity or athlete’s name on it. I began to see the error in my ways when I picked up Art & Sole, written and designed by Intercity.

Intercity’s “sneakers” are sports shoes originally intended for basketball, skateboarding or just strolling, elevated to their own subculture by the skateboarding and hip-hop style phenomena. This detailed and up-to-date sneaker art history features oodles of Nikes, as well as other famous labels including Vans, New Balance, and Onitsuka Tiger. Lesser-known labels like Madfoot!, JB Classics and The Quiet Life also make an appearance.

The book is divided into halves: Sneakers & Art looks at collaborations and projects, while Art & Sneakers is composed of sneaker art, publications, exhibitions and toys, all sneaker-themed. Among the toys featured were Swiss design collective +41’s mini chocolate kicks crafted to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Air Force 1 and Takara Tomy’s Nike Transformer dolls, oscillating between toy-shoes and toy-toys.

So by this point you can imagine that this book has a few more tricks to offer than your average sneaker stand. It showed me about 200 pages of shoes and shoe art I’d never seen before. Great. But, what the volume does meaningfully through its pages and pages of sculpture and obscure sneakers is bring out the artfulness in the sneakers themselves; even if, like me, you don’t really care very much about how limited your editions are or whether they are made of chocolate, this book will teach you about who makes these sneakers, and why these everyday masterpieces have become so collectible. And I don’t need to have a room full of runners in Plexiglas backlit cases to appreciate that.

For example, in a handy two-paragraph gloss, I learned about a sneaker I don’t think I’ll easily find in the suburbs, FEIYUE (pronounced stop-living-in-a-bedroom community-with-little-commercial-variety), a name as vague and hard to enunciate as an Ikea cabinet’s. These shoes were actually invented in the 1920s in Shanghai, and were favored by martial artists for their “flexibility and comfort.” French collective Seven Dice designs FEIYUEs, limiting them to only two styles, high and low top. Clearly, these shoes are kind of special.

And that’s the effect of this book. Sneakers with seemingly little material difference to the layman’s eye are given two pages of close-ups, and suddenly they hold their own unique place in a wonderful sneaker gallery. No longer are the shoes simply special or noticeable to those who collect or obsess over them, but even the kitten heel connoisseur is given some insight into why some people go so bonkers over sneakers (the people who do go bonkers over sneakers will probably relish this book for its obscure detail and inspiring objects). That seems to be the art of Intercity, exposing the story and creative value behind something we might never have looked at so closely. Apparently mundane, everyday objects become art. It happened to Greek vases. Why not kicks?

Art and Sole by Nathan Gale (Laurence King Publishers, 2008)
review by Stephanie Herold
photography by Ave Smith

I have been clogging around in my graceless size 11s since puberty, when my feet reached their decisive magnitude. These babies are too wide, long, flat, and plain ugly to fit into anything revealing, and so began my early distaste for provocative footwear.

Upon spying Bad Shoes and the Women who Love Them, I was hoping to undercover a juicy attack on the shoes that my feet can’t wear.

Leora Tanenbaum delivers an empathetic treatise on alluring footwear and its effects on the foundations of physical health. Don’t be fooled by the pretty, light-hearted book cover; in her evaluation of poor footwear, Tanenbaum delivers seven chapters of raw footage that does not miss a step.

“Beautiful shoes, ugly feet” attempts to ground the reader by pointing to the beautification-mortification paradox of footwear—essentially the act of wearing high fashion footwear to distract from the ugly foot, which in turn results in even greater disfiguration. Several women testify to their love affairs with shoes in “Love stories, horror stories.” Unfortunately, these affairs are not entirely romantic; these stories of deceit and abuse pose certain reevaluations after love’s gone bad.

Establishing the platform that footwear can be hazardous, Tanenbaum then delves into how. “What you should know from heel to toe” highlights common maladies of the foot. Perhaps save it for after dinner though, as reading about corns may not sit well with your corn on the cob. “Toetox: Cosmetic Surgery of the Foot” follows, as an evaluation of surgical solutions that sheds light upon health risks in extreme foot makeovers. Tanenbuam compiles research and interviews with podiatrists of varying surgical bents from across the United States to try to reveal a true cost-benefit analysis of cosmetic foot surgery.

For those of you who dig theory, a thorough analysis of shoe-love is saved for a little bit later in the book. Through written historical accounts and interviews, Tanenbaum explores the roots of the heeled shoe from antiquity and forward in “The History of High Heels.” For centuries, societies have cross-culturally denounced one another’s poor footwear over practical and ideological differences. What is revealed is a long history of hazardous footwear and ideological hypocrisy. In a chapter on “The Sex Life of Women’s Shoes,” Tanenbaum guides the reader through myriad proposed theories on the sexual symbolism of the foot and shoe. It is a careful navigation of varying biblical, folkloric, psychoanalytical, and sociological theorems regarding shoes. The bulk of the history is foot for thought, but it is undeniable that shoes have historically been and remain sexualized objects, and that sexing our feet is in turn vexing our health.

Bad Shoes does not leave the reader hanging with no one to save your sole. The final chapter entitled “Shoes Wisely,” evaluates footwear designs that best and worst fit the foot ergonomically, including lists of manufacturers with the most foot-friendly reputation.

Leora Tanenbaum has taken on a serious feat in crafting this concise evaluation of footwear, one that is both practical and theoretical in approach. Any woman, and even any man (despite its female-oriented marketing), can benefit from this vault of foot-‘n’-shoe information. The conclusive message is clear: when walking greater distances, be sure to wear styles of footwear that support the shape, size, and arch of your foot. Now, perhaps you have already been told this by a parental figure of sorts, but Bad Shoes outlines all of the cringe-worthy reasons to care, so don’t be so callous about it.

Bad Shoes and the Women who Love Them, by Leora Tanenbaum, Seven Stories Press, 2010
Reviewed by Jennifer Carroll

When I started reading Francesca Granata’s editor’s letter in Fashion Projects No. 3, something struck me as incredibly familiar. Then I re-read my own editor Serah-Marie’s interview with artist Iris Haussler in issue 10 of WORN, an article aptly titled “Second Hand Stories.” Both writers address and assess the connection between clothing and memory – the fact that garments themselves are important vessels of personal stories, and that they can in turn tell those stories or leave them behind. The third issue of NYC-based independent magazine Fashion Projects is titled “On Fashion and Memory,” and features a series of interviews with designers, museum curators, and photographers who explore memories’ ties to fashion with their creations.

The little magazine measures only 9.5 x 6.5 inches, and with heavy pages of book-like quality, the publication’s 52 pages pack a punch. The issue begins with an introduction explaining Granata’s interest in fashion and memory and the growth of her idea to dedicate an entire issue to the topic, which stemmed from a reading of Peter Stallybrass’s “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things,” in which the author remembers a late colleague through the garments he wore. Turning the pages brings the reader to three lengthy, insightfully conducted interviews, a photo essay about the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s Textiles Collection, a short piece on the recovery of 10,000 sweaters from the now-closed Ohio Knitting Mills, and two more interviews.

The images in the magazine are clearly numbered, and a list on almost every two-page spread concisely explains each one’s purpose and connection to the story. However, the magazine is small, and as a result, some of the images are miniscule and fill less than a quarter of a page. The images (for example, the sketches by Eugenia Yu on p. 17) would be much more effective viewed on a larger scale. Perhaps two larger images would provide more insight and detail than several smaller images that are more difficult to see.

My favourite interviews are those with Eugenia Yu, who creates sculptural fashion designs based on memories from her childhood and of her family, and Erica Weiner, a jewelry designer who explores mortality and memory with her designs, which often include old family photographs she buys by the bagful on eBay. What I appreciate about these interviews is that they, unlike many I’ve read in print and online, are quite obviously well researched and thought through. There are no “what are your favourite ___________” questions, no “tell us about your sources of inspiration.” Rather, the interviewers ask questions about specific, individual garments, the feelings behind them, and (fitting with the theme) the memories the artists wish to keep alive with their work.

The interviews in this issue of Fashion Projects tend to be quite long, and I found that my interest sometimes waned partway through an interview, especially when a little caption at the end of what seemed like a finished piece read, “continued on page 45.” That being said, the length of the interviews is not necessarily a hindrance – it allows readers a great amount of insight into the designers’ projects, which they have most likely never seen in real life. Fashion Projects does not talk down to its readers, but it informs them of things and people they ought to know. That is perhaps the most important quality of this little publication – though almost every interview is about a person many readers will never have heard of, this doesn’t make the reader feel lost or ignorant for not already knowing. I like that.

Fashion Projects Issue No. 3, 2010
Reviewed by Stephanie Fereiro