I feel honoured to be reading with poets Jacqueline Saphra and Jill Abram on November 26th at this afternoon event at the Museum of London in Docklands. It is not an easy time to be celebrating our Jewish heritage, but it seems important to remember and to share what it means to us and to extend our humanity. The museum is currently holding an exhibition in celebration of the Jewish contribution to the Carnaby Street fashion industry in the 60s. https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museum-london-docklands/whats-on/fashion-city-poetry-and-music-museum?id=341608
This exhibition is also part of my own heritage. So many migrant Jews were involved in the rag trade. My grandma was a dressmaker and my father (like his father) was a ladies tailor and cutter. He trained in the thirties at one of the top London fashion houses Molyneux, where he made a suit for Marlene Deitrich. He moved to Southport in 1939, as tailor and cutter at Marshall & Snelgrove's department store. Later he had his own showroom and won medals for his work. He was a keen proponent of the New Look in the 50s and he passionately embraced 60s fashion. He particularly loved what were called Jackie Kennedy suits, with box jackets and bracelet length sleeves. I still have two suits he designed and made for my sister who sadly died relatively young. He also designed and made me a trouser suit based on the trendy Courrèges style. I remember it in the poem at the end.
His biggest potential achievement was to invent a way of making jackets to fit several sizes. He did lecture tours and used his own jacket to demonstrate how well it worked, a relatively slender man, he'd get large tall men to volunteer. It's potential value to the 'off the peg' fashion industry could have earned him millions and at one point he was in negotiation with a leading manufacturer. However, he never felt able to trust that his invention would remain his, so his secret died with him.
Here's a photo of him with my brother in law and sister, proudly modelling the suit he made for her.
The Only Suit He Made Me
Courrèges style jacket,
bell bottom trousers with stitched pleats,
lilac wool cloth and hand sewn buttons
three at each cuff
Posh showroom. Behind scenes,
paper patterns bunched on hooks
floor awash with pins, scraps.
Schhh of shears, slicing cloth,
pressing iron hiss, a wooden
klomper block, bashing out creases.
He made garments for mums
who holidayed in Majorca. We
went up the road to Blackpool. They
had big houses. Their hair-do'd girls
wore off the peg. I ironed my hair straight
under brown paper, to look like Cathy McGowan's.
It was my swinging sixties
I could strut my stuff on Lord Street,
walk into coffee bars without blushing.
I was with it, no longer without it,
thanks to my Daddio.
(from Girl Golem pamphlet)
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