Vintage Fashion promises more glamour than Glastonbury
Posted by Lucky on Feb 26, 2010
The celebrated English fashion designer Wayne Hemingway knows who won’t be interested in his new summer festival: the teenager “who’s out on the lash, who wants to escape their parents and get plastered and leaves a load of empty tins at their ripped tent”.
Instead it will be for people who want style and glamour, those who prefer restaurants to burger stalls, women who want to go dancing in high heels not wellies. Glastonbury, it ain’t.
At the launch today of Vintage at Goodwood, Hemingway said he hoped it would be an antidote to muddy fields and random music.
“It’s like bringing the Venice Biennale, London fashion week, the London design festival, a bit of the Edinburgh Fringe, a bit of Glastonbury and the Festival of Britain; and taking the best of all that and trying to create more of a whole with it,” he said.
Hemingway is bringing together music, fashion, design and arts for what he said would be a long overdue celebration of British creativity over five decades, from the 40s to the 80s. That will mean things such as a 1940s torch club, a soul nightclub replicating a mid-1970s Mecca ballroom, and a roller disco. And there will be music from artists including Heaven 17, The Noisettes, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Sandie Shaw, and .
Shaw will be one of the festival curators and will present a show with divas singing “songs sung by men that should have been sung by women”. The 60s star, who will be performing for the first time in more than 20 years, said: “When I started I was inspired by men like Roy Orbison because there weren’t any women doing what I wanted to do.”
One of the divas will be Allen, who will be there with her new vintage clothing shop. Unlike Shaw, she said, she had plenty of female role models, from Blondie to Kate Bush. But that did not mean all was fine for women artists.
“People in this day and age are still under the illusion that every woman who is successful must be being controlled by a man. And that’s something that really irritates me,” she said. “Whenever I do get drunk or fall out of a nightclub the subtext is Lily’s record company bosses are very angry with her. For a start they are not my bosses. I’m the boss.”
Allen said she was taking a break from music to concentrate on her new shop, her record label, her boyfriend and the house she has bought. “At the moment I’m concentrating on doing something different so I haven’t renegotiated my contract with EMI. I’m just not committing myself to going on the road for three years, which is what you have to do.”
Other curators at the festival, to be held at Goodwood, in West Sussex, on 13-15 August, include Mike Flowers, who will be the curator of 60s pop and easy listening, and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware, curating 80s pop and electro.
Hemingway, who is starting small with 20,000 tickets, said he wanted to emulate the concept of the 1951 Festival of Britain. “There hasn’t been a public celebration of British creativity since the Festival of Britain. Everything there is, such as London fashion week or London design week, seems to be industry closed events.”
Hemingway, who created his Red or Dead label in the 1990s before getting heavily involved in the design of new housing projects, accepts there are a lot of already, but said this one offered something different – including clean toilets and no litter.
“In 20 years of attending a myriad of festivals I’ve been consistently underwhelmed by the lack of glamour, by the locations, by the scattergun approach to booking and scheduling, and overall by the lack of attention to detail which has sadly not only become the standard but accepted as such.”
