Fashion at the Royal College of Art: Swinging London (1956-68)

Janey Ironside took over from Madge Garland in 1956, having served several years as her assistant at the RCA. Ironside had run her own designer-dressmaking business and was firmly in favour of the democratisation of fashion and the opportunities provided by mass production. She forged strong links with business, including Marks and Spencer, which snapped up some of her top students. Crucially, she built solid relationships with the press at a time when there was a growing public and media appetite for British design. Ironside supported street fashion in a way that Madge Garland and her finishing-school ethos had not; she demystified fashion but in a way that kept it metropolitan and London-centric. As Colin McDowell wrote in 2012: ‘Whereas Madge Garland’s background had been all about the Paris of avenue Montaigne and the quality of haute couture, Janey Ironside’s Paris was instinctively more the Left Bank of Juliette Greco, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.’ The tone of the press coverage moved from patronising and sceptical to engaged and supportive. College graduates were rarely out of the fashion pages. Janey harnessed and catalysed the students’ invention but could be as intimidating as her predecessor in tutorials. Alumni, however, would often link their confidence to secure top jobs on graduation with their ability to survive and learn from these challenging and invigorating encounters.

The eclectic student cohort, growing in number and reflecting wider demographic shifts, powered the Fashion School with a crackling energy. The complex social mix, including many grant-supported students from families who had never before pursued higher education, led to an outpouring of sharp, inventive designs, in richly saturated colour or angular monochrome. As Susannah Handley has written, it was this wave of students that bridged the gap between high street and couture, between clothing and bespoke.

The first half of Janey’s tenure as professor continued in the house in Ennismore Gardens, but in 1962 a monolithic, dark-brick tower block emerged on Kensington Gore, next door to the Royal Albert Hall. This was the new home for the Royal College of Art: the prosaically named ‘Workshop Block’, designed to unite all the design courses over eight floors and under one roof. This brutalist presence on the Kensington skyline won immediate acclaim from architecture critics and benefited from having been designed by a team at the College (H T Cadbury-Brown, Robert Goodden and Hugh Casson) who understood its needs better than anyone. The Fashion School was finally admitted to the heart of the College, taking its rightful place alongside Industrial Design, Furniture, Silversmithing and Ceramics, in spacious and well-fitted studios. It was a short-lived triumph. Before long, Fashion was pushed out to make room for the School of Stained Glass, becoming ghettoised again in one of the miscellaneous College properties on Cromwell Road.

In 1959, Mary Quant and Alexander Plunkett-Green started selling a new style of dress at Bazaar on the King’s Road, changing public expectations of, and access to, fashion with the arrival of the boutique shop. Although neither Quant nor Plunkett-Green was a graduate of the RCA, they profoundly influenced the students of the time there, who began opening vibrant shops on Carnaby Street or the Fulham Road. The growth of newspaper colour supplements in the 1960s fuelled public interest in the new approach to the high street. With the arrival of Pop, itself centred around the Painting students of the Royal College of Art, and the buzz of swinging London, colourful media coverage was guaranteed. Art and design movements reinforced one another, compounding press interest in the new generation of talent. The interdisciplinary nature of the College was electric and catalysing: graphic design and fine art played off against each other, and the angles and colours of posters and paintings fed into fashion and textile design. In 1964 a Menswear path was introduced in the School of Fashion Design, on the suggestion of Hardy Amies and with support from Hepworth’s, which had realised the need for new blood in the industry. The menswear course was emphatically commercial from its launch and remained backed up by the trade; effectively it was the first commercially sponsored element of the Fashion School.