ners, spotting and promoting talent from the Royal College of Art in London. The new breed of designer was part of textile and part-fashion designer, with the ability to switch between preparing a silk-screen and sewing reverse. Bill Gibb's creations were wearable works of art, complete one-off that was beyond a seasonal timescale. Gibb worked with a team of knitters, weavers, painters and embroideries. 'They've added tassels and ribbons, enameled buttons, reptile bands, Russian braid, painted, printed and embroidered patterns and pictures, made every design a collector's item,' observed Vogue. From 1971 onwards Zandra Rhodes, who studied textiles at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, started to produce her own unmistakably flamboyant clothes, which took pattern as a starting point.
The fusion between fashion and rock music, which started in the 1960s, was cemented in the 1970s. Ossie Clark was making jumpsuits foe Mick Jagger. Anthony Price, who made his Vogue debut in October 1971 as 'an ex-RCA [Royal College of Art] revolutionary, a designer of quite some force', became responsible for styling and designing clothes for Roxy Music and dressed Gayla Mitchell for the back view of Lou Reed's 1972 album, Transformer. Vogue photographed David Bowie and Twiggy together - a shot which ended up on the cover of Bowie's Pin Ups album in 1973. Orientalism was the new preoccupation. Kansai Yamamoto showed his first London collection in 1971, with Vogue raving about his theatrical powers. Commercialism didn't come into it: 'Kansai Yamamoto's extraordinary evening clothes, pure theatre. Kabuki theatre. The face knitted into the playsuit and emblazoned over miles of cape.' Yoko Ono, avant-garde artist and wife of John Lennon, arrived in England in 1966 with a performance, Cut Price, where she
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