A gym crowd and a Glasgow shop assistant turned Carnaby Street into a fashion icon
In the early 1950s Carnaby Street was a drab run of sweatshops, locksmiths and an electricity depot. Its reinvention began around the corner, where a physique photographer opened a menswear shop aimed at bodybuilders from the local baths and hired a young Glaswegian named John Stephen, who would become known as the King of Carnaby Street.
The street was laid out in the 1680s and named after Karnaby House, built nearby in 1683 for reasons nobody now knows. Small houses lined it by 1690, and a market followed in the 1820s. Just off it stood the Broad Street pump, which the physician John Snow tied to the cholera outbreak of 1854; locking the pump brought cases down quickly. In 1934 Amy Ashwood Garvey and Sam Manning opened a jazz club at number 50 that became a meeting place for Pan-Africanists.
Bill Green, known as Vince, set up his boutique in Newburgh Street in 1954, with a little-known Sean Connery among his catalogue models. Stephen, one of his sales assistants, opened His Clothes in 1957 after his earlier shop in Beak Street burned down. Mary Quant later said he invented an exuberant look for young men. Tie-maker James Gardiner recalled pink shirts and tight white trousers designed for gay customers that soon crossed into the mainstream. Menswear rivals such as Gear and Mates followed, and in 1966 Lady Jane became the first women's boutique, stopping traffic by having models change clothes in the window.
By the mid-sixties mods and hippies shopped there, and the Who, the Small Faces and the Rolling Stones worked and drank nearby. A Time cover story on 15 April 1966 introduced American readers to the street, and the Kinks mocked its devotees as the Carnabetian Army in a hit that year. The first Cranks vegetarian restaurant had opened at number 22 in 1961.
The Greater London Council closed the street to most traffic in October 1973, after which pedestrian numbers rose about 30 percent. Stephen shut his last business in 1975 and died in 2004, and souvenir shops for tourists gradually moved in, though independent boutiques remain. A green plaque at number 1 honours him.
Source: Carnaby Street
