Psychedelia
(in England). Cultural, existential and spontaneous fashion movement. If we wanted to set a date to commemorate the rift between English and American psychedelia, April 1967 would be suitable, when Paul McCartney was returning to England after a visit to Haight Ashbury. Sgt Pepper had been finished on the 3rd of that month. After that Paul left and gave a brilliant technicolor account of his trip to San Francisco, talking of a free community living in perfect harmony. George Harrison went there in August and it was more or less like escaping from a nightmare. Even if the Beatles neither invented psychedelia or brought it to Great Britain, they certainly guaranteed its diffusion, particularly in visual terms. It’s useful to remember that if in America psychedelia had above all folk, beatnik, and bohemian origins, in England it derived directly from Mod and Pop Art. In any case English psychedelia had more stylistic links with the New York scene where Pop Art reigned supreme; Warhol can be defined as psychedelic but only in an alternative, negative, and lunar sense, and fashion designers like Tiger Morse and Betsey Johnson were the equivalent of John Bates and Mary Quant in terms of modernism. It’s simply that suddenly psychedelia and psychedelic seemed the right terms to define what was going on in Swinging London in 1966 and 1967. The New Renaissance was signalled by events like the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream (at Alexander Palace, the venue for the best music of the time), and the opening of clubs like UFO in Tottenham Court Road, a sounding board and home to experimental bands like the Third Ear Band, Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd. The opening of boutiques like Granny Takes a Trip, Mr. Freedom and Biba in London, and Betsey Johnson’s Paraphernalia in New York was very important, in as much as they were autonomous bastions of taste reflecting or predicting the mood coming from the street. The Beatles too opened their own proto-mega-psychedelic store called Apple, with its own associated record label. Jimi Hendrix was the icon for all, if there ever was one. Underground magazines were set up, like International Times and the Australian Richard Neville’s OZ with its brilliant graphics by John Goodchild. 1966 heralded the end of Flashy Pop and Mod Art, after which there was a retroactive trend stylistically speaking, as if Pop Art had been bewitched by Art Deco, then Art Nouveau and finally Victoriana. In terms of their style, psychedelic clothes were the expression of what John Bates designed for the TV series The Avengers (iridescent space-age fabrics, modernist lines, cut-aways), the colors were the acidic tones of screen prints, and access to second-hand and vintage clothes paved the way to the concept of pastiche uniforms, grandad spectacles, Victorian walking boots and much more, all in a sea of crushed velvet, the material that best connoted the new Chelsea dandies from 1966 to 1969.