​A Transcript of  Donald Smith's responses when I interviewed him on 11 February 2012

                             Exhibition: Lloyd Johnson The Modern Outfitter at The Chelsea Space, Chelsea College Of Art and Design

Donald Smith is Director of The Chelea Space 



​Background

​I knew about Llloyd and Johnson’s as have worked for Chelsea for 20 years so on the Kings Road myself. I got to know him through Billy Murphy who had a shop on similar part of Kings Road called The Emperor of Wyoming.

Billy used to bring things in like second hand Levis that had been worn out by people like the Amish used to bring that sort of work wear, real American work wear worn by real Americans. He knew Lloyd since the sixties and he was the guy who got Lloyd to look at the shop. Billy was the first person I connected to Lloyd through.

Had a mutual contact called Paul Gorman who wrote ‘The Look, Adventures in Rock and Fashion’ `and I’d done a show here and invited Paul with Barney Bubbles who’d worked for Stiff records and so we started this conversation with Lloyd about this thing as and it was clear that he had things but there were gaps so through his Face book page Lloyd started asking around who had this and that from his oeuvre and his career. So Lloyd started getting stuff in but had never done anything like an exhibition. He had never been the subject of an exhibition and had always been someone who had done retailing and pushing stuff out and having ideas then other people liking them but had never been someone who’d stooped to think what his role was and how important he was to other people. He didn’t have that sense of himself ‘cause his thing is about selling the stuff he was designing so it was a kind of gratification through retail. He put lots and lots of effort into   making his shops look interesting to be and fun places to be he’s fascinated by detail. He told me a story of one guy he knew in retail who’d said to him “remember most of the people who are going to buy your stuff are going to be coming up from the suburbs and they want the kind of glamour of London” and this particular guy used to have red carpets and chandeliers and so Lloyd always took that message very seriously and wanted people to feel that they were entering into a world that they were not normally part of and that they could take a part of that world away with them so it was very much about the suburban dream of glamour celebrity and rock’n’roll. For someone like Lloyd he comes in the late 50’s early 60’s and the Mod thing, the Modernist thing was very sharp in a way, well tailored that’s very much his thing he’s interested in that kind of American Ivy League kind of look, sort of preppy thing which perhaps somehow crosses over with the Mod/Rocker thing because in a way its quite 50’s American, sort of Mods with quiffs. He was interested in all of those, the pre Beatles instrumental guitar music, The Shadows all of that type of sound was very interesting to him they were very much ‘suited and booted’ uniformed sort of people weren’t leather jacketed or leopard skin jacketed types it was much sharper and formal.

 

​Exhibition
If you look around the exhibition you’ll see the influence of cinema and the influence of rock’n’roll, the influence of America is throughout the whole thing, whether it’s the cowboy aesthetic or the biker aesthetic even the Japanese stuff obviously its Japanese but its also you know B52 bomber aesthetic. Interestingly enough I don’t know whether Americans thought about it as much as we did, people who have come here have said to me “we saved

American culture”, this is where is was gestating and being formulated into new design and that Americans themselves weren’t necessarily thinking about their own thing positively at the time when it was taken on by people like Lloyd.

Donald own clothes/music
The first thing I bought without my mum was a pair of monkey boots, so I guess in the late 60’s the sort of skinhead thing was around and Teds as well and obviously there was a resurgence of the Teddy boy thing just as skinhead thing in the early 70’s and then on top of that came the glam rock but I’m of the generation I’m now 50 I’m that generation at the beginning of the 70’s it was glam and by the end of the or mid 70’s it had gone into punk so I straddled those things and took part in both of those things wide eyed, I wasn’t old enough to be a real punk cognoscenti.

I first saw The Clash in 1978 for example in Portsmouth bands like that and also the reggae thing was very important to all of that. I didn’t meet Don Letts until years afterwards, the kind of influence he had bringing together the punk thing and the reggae thing and the skinhead thing was involved with that as well.
We didn’t have any money to actually buy stuff you’d have to save up and some things you’d just have to dream about, like a Crombie coat.
There’s a Tonic suit up there on the wall that I would equally love to have and I think particularly as ones get older I think the suit thing is a great way of getting round a lot of things and it can cover a multitude of sins and the decrepit body the adult male!

 

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Other bands/performances/image
When we did that show about Rock against Racism and you look at what people were actually wearing they were just customizing stuff themselves so you’d write on the shirt or you’d rip the collar off it or wear a tie not round the shirt collar but just round your neck and people were just making that up there wasn’t necessarily a shop where you went and bought your look. Bit later ’78,79’ there was a shop appeared in Portsmouth called Bondage, something like that cant remember what it was called now, it was an equivalent of Sex or any of those, Paradise Garage of Johnson’s type shops but that was later really. Yesterday Phillip Diggle was in; Phil Diggle was in yesterday he is the brother of Steve Diggle guitarist with the Buzzcocks. Phil’s a performance painter and they’d do a gig John Cooper Clarke would start the thing off the Phil would make a painting live in front of the audience and then the Buzzcocks would come on and he was one of those people that was at the Sex Pistols gig and The Buzzcocks and all those other bands Joy Division all those other people were there, the small crowd that saw the Sex Pistols in Manchester and he was sort of saying well, “ they might have looked quite cool but we were all wearing flares and blazers, and we were still in 1971 or 1972. I come from Portsmouth and had that same sort of sense, you’d come up to London to Daddy Cool and to Dean Street to buy some dub record, reggae record buy Horace Andy and the Rockers All- stars or something that you weren’t going to be able to get in Portsmouth. People are into vinyl   (now)

​Subcultural look-now
It hard to know where the subculture is (now) because you can buy so much of anything subculture gets absorbed into Top Shop quite quickly and is consumed by everybody, bricolage, mix and match sort of thing and people move on to the next thing so if you’re cool and you are wearing something and you suddenly find that someone quite mainstream has caught on to it, because Top Shop have ‘ripped it off’ so therefore as a ‘cool’ person or as someone who is trying to define themselves as different, very quickly  you’ve  been rubbed out by the consumer society, its become mainstream very quickly  whereas it was easier in earlier defining times as  a teenager and young adult, to invent your own look or attach yourself to certain tribal stuff without it suddenly becoming what everyone was wearing.
The young people that come here, obviously were are on the campus of an art school so we do get a barometer of what’s going on, and there’s a sort of a lament from the youngsters about the fact that really there isn’t anything quite like this for them, right now and they’re saying “how cool is this?’ I can’t think of anything that would wow me like this no shops that I could go to where I could get this kind of buzz.”
I suppose that same sense of loss is felt by people of my generation who bought their stuff in Johnson’s and who are coming in here now and saying that nothing has replaced it in their lives, and I’m getting that all the time so there’s a similar sense of loss there’s the younger people who are seeing this for the first time are sad that they feel that their culture doesn’t offer them this, well in some ways they are being inspired by it and perhaps its making them think, “God I’ve got to try a bit harder to be a bit different” but they’re saying there’s no such shop that would  have this feel to it. It reminded me of Warhol when Warhol died there were all these people who were attached to the factory who otherwise wouldn’t have had a place to go or be part of and they were all walking around, lost, after he died and I had that similar sense about these lost souls that have come to see this show that they have never been able to replace it.