Roger Burton — stylist, curator and owner of one of the world’s biggest collections of street fashion — is showing me the one piece he would save were his premises to catch fire.
“Terry Hall’s suit,” he says, grabbing a pole hook and retrieving a bagged garment in a room stuffed to the rafters with triple-decker rails of clothing.
The suit, worn by The Specials frontman in the 1981 video for Ghost Town, is a beauty; hand-tailored in Chicago in the 1950s and bought by Burton when it somehow turned up in a Nottingham flea market in the 1970s.
It looks like a cartoon mobster costume: damson gabardine with chalk pinstripes, squared shoulders, crazily exaggerated lapels.
“Terry really loved it,” says Burton. “So much so, he also wore it on Top of the Pops. A few years later I styled The Kinks’ video for Come Dancing and I put Ray Davies in it.”
Did Davies love the suit as much as Hall? “Oh god, yes.”
Burton, 73, is one of pop culture’s great custodians. The Contemporary Wardrobe Collection, his vintage costume-hire company, is made up of 20,000 rare pieces of youth subculture style, from the mid-1940s to the present day.
It has taken him since the mid-1960s to assemble these racks of teddy boy drapes, mod suits, punk bondage gear and new romantic flounces (Burton started out trading in second-hand clothing before founding his hire venture). And the costumes of countless more genres and sub-genres that lie between.
His 45-year-old hire company acquires clothes from dealers, auctions and markets all over the world and lends garments to films, music videos, fashion houses, advertising agencies and photographers.
It started in 1978, when Burton, then running a second-hand clothes stall on Portobello Market, was asked to find gear for The Who’s mod revival film Quadrophenia. (“They had to buy all the suits because of the fight scenes where everyone jumped in the sea,” he recalls.)
Next came Jazzin’ For Blue Jean, Julien Temple’s 1984 short promotional film for David Bowie, then Temple’s 1986 feature film Absolute Beginners.
Burton’s venture has grown ever since. A week before our interview, Harry Styles’s team was here, hunting for retro stage gear.
“It’s the most thorough, comprehensive collection that reflects what young people really looked like,” says Temple, who has worked with Burton since the late 1970s. “A moving, living testament to all those wonderful eruptions of youth energy and culture; the attitude young people felt when they put those clothes on and carried them out into the world.”
But the immediate future of the collection is precarious. It is housed on the top floor of the Horse Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury, an 18th-century, Grade-II listed former station and hospital for working horses that is remarkably well preserved.
Burton has leased the building since the early 1990s, adding free exhibitions and low-cost events to the costume hire service. His longtime friend Vivienne Westwood, who died in December, held Vive Le Punk, her first retrospective exhibition, here in 1993, drawing heavily on Burton’s collection.
After years of what Burton describes as “tricky” relations with the building’s owners, his lease is set to expire in less than two years’ time and must be renegotiated quickly if he is to stay.
Like many of central London’s independent ventures, Burton fears an accompanying substantial rent rise: “I would need to find somewhere else, probably not in central London, and definitely give up the exhibitions.”
The loss of such a central resource to the film and fashion industries “would be a great shame”, says Temple. (In a statement, the building’s owners, Evannance Investment, says it hopes to reach an agreement with Burton on terms for a new lease before 2024.)
Burton is liberal with anecdotes from his time as a stylist in the 1980s, working on music videos. He went shopping with Bowie (“A mob of fans followed us down South Molton Street and we had to hide in a café”); Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones was reluctant to return a prized leather jacket. Debbie Harry fell for a leopard-print dress. Hall, who died last month, was a regular.
The rails reach to the ceiling of this vast room, where London’s work horses once rested: thousands of suits, hats, bags, ball gowns, towering boxes of shoes; drawers and drawers organised with a receding sea of labels: “DRAPE JACKETS”, “LATEX” and “CURRENT NOVELTY SUITS”.
There are shoes hanging everywhere: glam rock-era platform boots fringed with scarlet feathers; whimsical patent brogues with added angel wings from Mr Freedom, the decadent 1960s Chelsea boutique; hobnail boots worn by Angelina Jolie in Hackers, her breakthrough 1995 movie.
And inevitably, rows and rows of original punk gear by Westwood, some of it used as reference material in last year’s punk history TV series Pistol. A handmade 1980s Westwood bra made of bones, chains and studs is draped across a dummy near Burton’s desk.
The fashion industry and its students, too, draw on Burton’s collection for reference and study — often to evoke a certain era, or to study accurate period details. “For the last 10 years, that has been the mainstay of the business,” says Burton.
Marc Jacobs was among the first. “He’d send a team of creatives to root through, pick a couple of rails, ship it all out to New York, then ship it all back,” says Burton.
These days, fashion designers are his best clients. Brands including Margaret Howell use the collection to plug gaps in archives. Burberry dispatches creative teams to inspect vintage fabrics, zips and buttons for creative inspiration. The list goes on.
The Contemporary Wardrobe Collection is the only commercial costume archive in the world focused entirely on youth subcultures, as far as Burton knows. What made him so obsessed?
Burton grew up in Leicester, until the 1980s the centre of the UK’s textile industry, and as a young man was a dedicated mod. (“I really didn’t like the hippy vibe. I still don’t.”)
He still dresses like a mod, the 1960s UK youth subculture devoted to sharp, Italian style. Today he is wearing a slim, Italian-cut cardigan in fine, moss-green wool and neat, expensive-looking brogues.
Burton’s is one of the few remaining independent creative businesses from the punk era. He left school at 15 and started collecting clothes from the 1920s and 30s in the mid-1960s. One of his first moves was to raid his grandfather’s collection of Art Deco ties.
He started trading in second-hand clothes and found his way to London. By the mid-1970s he was selling gear out of a van on the King’s Road in Chelsea and trading with Japan. Various subsequent second-hand fashion ventures included shops in a then-deserted Covent Garden and the Portobello Market stall.
Inevitably, he met Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren, who admired Burton’s creativity and commissioned him to design and build the interiors of their shop at number 430 when they renamed it World’s End in 1979. Later, he kitted out Nostalgia of Mud, another Westwood-McLaren fashion retail venture on St Christopher’s Place in the West End. The interior was dressed to resemble an archeological dig. In the centre was a pool of bubbling liquid. It was shortlived, but somehow Burton had stumbled on the right connections. “I was just in the right place,” he says.
Burton has spent his life with clothes and his accumulated knowledge of fashion’s subcultures is astounding. He has served as a costume judge for Bafta. Whatever I point out, he rattles off details.
The Westwood bone bra is a 1980s remake of a 1970s original; a voluminous corduroy coat designed and worn by the avant-garde dancer Leigh Bowery in the 1980s is one of the rarest items in his collection.
The film, music and fashion industries he serves may still be obsessed with evoking the past. But do subcultures still exist?
“I’m not seeing much sign,” says Burton. He believes the 1980s style press, with its endless barometers of what was “in” and “out”, marked the beginning of the end. Later, he says, the internet allowed young people to be whatever they wanted to be without having to dress up.
“I sense young people have lost confidence in their instincts,” he says.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram
Stay connected with us on social media platform for instant update click here to join our Twitter, & Facebook
We are now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@TechiUpdate) and stay updated with the latest Technology headlines.
For all the latest Fashion News Click Here
