Nottingham Topic (September 1968)
This image may only be an advert in the sense that it was selling the magazine whose cover it adorned, but I think you’ll agree that the consummate style displayed exactly 47 years ago by the two ladies seen here, easily earns its place in any record of Nottingham’s printed past. I’ve no idea who these women are, or what they’re doing in what looks suspiciously like a brewery. But there they are, bang in the middle of a year of global revolutions, channelling the young Diana Dors with nods to Hammer Studios vampire flicks and Jacqueline Susann’s schlock 1966 bestseller, Valley of the Dolls.
Still, whether it’s the world’s first ever superhero outfit – put together somewhere in Sherwood Forest by a bloke who decided a bow and arrow was the perfect accessory for a pair of Lincoln green tights and a jaunty feathered cap – or the way the characters in Shane Meadows films rock their primary-coloured tracksuits in Sneinton pubs, if Nottingham has anything, it’s a style that’s all its own.
From Byron’s Mansfield ‘tache and Albanian headgear in the famous 1814 painting by Thomas Phillips to Su Pollard’s big plastic specs. From Arthur Seaton’s way with a Player’s fag and a pint-pot to Frank Robinson’s inimitable woolly hat and multi-coloured Fisher-Price metal xylophone, it’s obvious we’re a city with an unconventional approach to personal style that polarises the fashion police. Put bluntly, we either get noticed and imitated or we get taken in for questioning.
Present-day Nottingham, with its rising tide of generic tattoos, off-the-peg beards and vintage frocks doesn’t always, sadly, live up to the sartorial standards set by this illustrious history. If it wasn’t for the occasional glimpse of Owl Man around Market Square, you might sometimes imagine you’d taken a wrong turn out of Sneinton and ended up in Shoreditch by mistake. Say what you like about the brassy look of the Topic’s 1968 cover girls, but they’re indisputably Nottingham and ought to inspire the rest of us to raise our game a bit.
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