Plaza

Ok so a slight detour here to PLAZA the shop in the King’s Road London, owned, designed and clothes made by Antony Price who was an all-round smart arse and frankly a genius. Considered an additional member of Roxy Music he clothed, photographed them and models and designed their record covers from day one to help create their image and ambience.

That combination of fashion and music was replicated by McLaren & Westwood, but whereas Roxy Music accepted it was an image, members of the Sex Pistols actually lived the spirit of the clothes.

A couple of other random links – lots of early punks were Roxy Music fans not least Severin and Siouxsie who met at one such gig and surely both the design of the store and clothes sold were influenced by Seditionaries further down the King’s Road.

Sadly the store started in 1977, and only lasted around a couple of years before closing. In early 1978 the NME produced a free Guide To Rock & Roll London. The fashion section was done by loveable funsters Burchill & Parsons who spent a third of the feature on Plaza.

Plaza is owned by Anthony Price who designed the clothes of the girls gracing all the Roxy Music album sleeves, plus all Brian Ferry’s threads. From the street, man, this place looks forbidding — thick blue slate glass windows and a hidden door — but once inside, instead of the usual mountains of squished rags, Plaza’s innovatory approach to the exhibition of their clothes consists of one sample of each design pinned to a whiteboard with a collection of fabric swatches of the other colours available plus price, rank (male or female), and serial number.

Trousers and skirts go up in one-inch sizes to obtain a custom-made perfect fit.

Plaza styles ‘for studs and starlets” include a rumba pencil skirt for £30, zipped straight-legged/drainpipe strides for £15, T-shirts with zips for every conceivable curve of the anatomy for £6 and ties for £4,

Nobody pounces on you in Plaza. They just call out through their peep-hole that if you want to try anything on, just let them know. Plaza is the only modern clothes shop in London, which means in the world. NME Guide To Rock & Roll London 1978 – Burchill & Parsons

I remember going in there… They had 1 dress in the window and about 8 garments in the shop. Ricci Eastman, Facebook

The below is all about Plaza in a piece by Alexander Fury for System Magazine – The Legendary Anthony Price

At Plaza, the cinematically named shop on the King’s Road, Price did everything. He made dresses, sure, and suits that cost as much as a second-hand car. ‘They weren’t that expensive,’ he gripes, contrarily, even if his nickname on the 1980s London club circuit was ‘Fantasy Prices’. Yet he also did the shop-fit, designed the logo, drew the advertising (with the strapline: ‘Clothes for studs and starlets’). He even nailed garments to boards, as in a strange retail conceit, the clothes at Plaza were ordered through a hatch, dispatched by a square-jawed, devastatingly handsome henchman, who was Price’s equally intimidating counterpart to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Jordan, who was selling shredded mohairs and anarchy-emblazoned muslins at Seditionaries, just down the road.

Can we talk more about the shops? Because they really were a thing. It was Stirling Cooper first, right, then Che Guevara?

Stirling Cooper was my first shop design – and by design, I mean everything. I’m talking about what the clothes were hung on, the carpet, which was specially made, the lampshades. Everything was done specially and so I was a dab hand, and still am, at putting together quite serious architecture. I’ve never been asked to do it by anyone else; I’m never asked to do anything by anyone else. Surprisingly enough. I suppose I don’t push myself. The Stirling Cooper one was fantastic, it really was. A real feat. It was completely Japanese and all the clothes were on huge black pagodas. The hangers were brilliant. Everything about it was brilliant. The second shop was Che Guevara, this huge 1930s thing to rival Biba. It was a feast of deco, of black and green carpets in degraded stripes, with fountains and palms and god knows what else in it. Then I did the Plaza shop, with the blue Optrex window.

Was that yours? The first one you owned?

Yes, the first was Plaza. We took it over, Rick [Cunningham, Price’s long-time friend and former business partner] and I. That was in 1979. The window of Plaza was a cinema screen – it used to cause traffic jams because it faced north and the sun was behind it. It was very, very difficult in those days, the technology to do that; lighting a screen in daylight, which is now common place at the Olympic Games, say, was a nightmare then. Basically, it was a great shop in the wrong place because we didn’t have enough money to put it in the right place. We sold two suits a week, but when a shop took them up to the West End and sold eight in a week, we realized we were in the wrong place. There was nothing you could do about that.

I suppose it was more counterculture on the King’s Road, with Seditionaries, then World’s End.

No one was going to back it, though; it was too early for all that. London fashion hadn’t happened then, I was out on my own, too early. Again. We closed the shop in 1980. There was a show the same year that cost so much we had to jack the shop in, because it wasn’t making enough. We needed to move somewhere else and it took us some time to get it together to move to the one in South Molton Street, which happened in the mid-1980s. The Plaza clothes were quite brilliant, and the interior was something of a revolution as well. The inside of it… the clothes were nailed. I hated the look of clothes hanging on rails from the side. I thought it looked like a dreadful wardrobe, and I thought it should look like a museum. We had these boards and you turned them sideways and half a stuffed garment was on it, nailed up. Like one leg stuffed with a body inside it. They were all three-dimensional, which looked rather beautiful. Half a jacket with a tie and tits in it and everything. Also, they couldn’t be nicked. Then customers came in and ordered it through this hole. The assistant would then assess the size and then bring one up and you would then go into the mirrored changing room and try it on.

It sounds intimidating.

It wasn’t intimidating. We had great looking staff and the customers couldn’t wait to get in that mirror box with them, thank you very much! They used to come back with any excuse to get in there! Alexander Fury, System Magazine – The Legendary Anthony Price

---

---