{art nouveau} – Page 33 – { feuilleton }

The Look presents Nigel Waymouth

This delightful piece of Art Nouveau-inflected grooviness is one of the new T-shirts designed by Nigel Waymouth for The Look via Topman. Waymouth, as some readers here may know, was part of Hapshash & the Coloured Coat in the late Sixties, London’s leading group of psychedelic poster artists. In addition to design, Waymouth and Sheila Cohen opened the legendary Kings Road boutique Granny Takes A Trip (named after its stock of antique clothes) in 1966. That shop’s fame inspired a one-off single by Stockport group The Purple Gang in 1967 which the BBC banned for alleged drug references, although the trip in question concerns an elderly woman journeying each year to Hollywood. Waymouth’s flyer for the single, of which the shirt design is a variant, can be seen below.

The Look Presents Nigel Waymouth – in-store and online at Topman from Friday August 8

“Sepia tints and flouro tones…darkly psychedelic graphics for the 21st Century…”

Nigel Waymouth is a legend of British rock fashion and design.

Not only did he found the wild 60s Kings Road boutique Granny Takes A Trip (whose ever-changing shop design attracted the likes fo the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Anita Pallenberg, Brigitte Bardot and Marianne Faithfull), but his graphic design company Hapshash produced eye-popping designs, posters and record sleeves for the The Who and Jimi Hendrix.

Original Hapshash artwork is highly prized in collector circles and Granny’s clothes are seriously sought-after on the vintage market. Now Nigel Waymouth makes his re-entry into fashion via The Look Presents – http://thelookpresents.com – with a contemporary t-shirt range reflecting the original Granny’s aesthetic by delving into decadent psychedelia replete with sepia tints and flouro tones.

The first five t-shirts are available in-store and online at Topman from August 8, with the launch party on August 14 at the George and Dragon in Shoreditch.

The Look Presents Nigel Waymouth is the second collection from the creative hub formed by author Paul Gorman and Soho boutique owner Max Karie. Our first, a collaboration with rock & roll brand Wonder Workshop, proved a great success earlier this summer and this autumn we launch The Look Presents Priceless, a menswear capsule collection with couturier to rock royalty Antony Price.

The shirts are priced £20 each. I rarely wear T-shirts on their own but I’ll probably have to get one of these, for the associations if nothing else.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The New Love Poetry
• Dutch psychedelia
• Family Dog postcards
• The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream revisited

Decorative car mascots

The Hood Ornament Flickr pool features an impressive range of antique car mascots from the age when motor vehicles were emblazoned with mythological motifs and pedestrian safety was an afterthought. Most of them tend to be Art Deco-styled but a few display the florid elegance of Art Nouveau, a design trend that was being eclipsed as car ownership became more popular. I have one of these sphinx mascots, the trademark of Armstrong Siddeley motors for several decades. I always thought the similarity to London’s Embankment sphinxes was a coincidence but it appears not.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Feminine Sphinx
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• The Decorative Age
• Frémiet’s Lizard

Rene Beauclair

Bijoux modernes (c. 1900) from a series of Art Nouveau designs by Rene Beauclair. As usual the peacock caught my attention on this page. There’s more by Beauclair at the NYPL Digital Gallery

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga
• The Divine Sarah
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard

Elizabetes Iela 10b, Riga

Paris and Brussels are well-known centres of Art Nouveau architecture, less well-known but equally valuable is the Latvian capital of Riga whose historic centre is now a World Heritage Site. The highly distinctive building at Elizabetes Iela 10b is one of a number of buildings there designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of film director Sergei Eisenstein. The giant decorative heads are quite unique, and I also like the peacock and other mascarons. One can’t help but think that this façade—in a street full of equally detailed façades—would have sustained a lot more attention had it been built in a European capital.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Atelier Elvira
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• The Maison Lavirotte
• The House with Chimaeras

Atelier Elvira

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).

Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.

The ironwork street entrance.

Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.

Continue reading “Atelier Elvira”