Part 2: Wonder Workshop’s wonderful breasts
“Ideas evolve and the artwork develops as you draw more from life,” says John Dove, who, with his wife and Wonder Workshop partner Molly White, was tuning into the zeitgeist at exactly the same time as the Gottwalds across the Atlantic.
//Photomontage of late Victorian pin-ups for shirt print, John Dove and Molly White, 1967//
“In 1966 I’d made some drawings of Brigitte Bardot wearing a topless dress, and the following year we’d produced photomontage shirts of early 20th century pin-ups,” explains John. “And in 1968, prior to making the breasts screen-print, I’d drawn and montaged about 20 breasts images for a poster printed as part of OZ magazine no.12 with Barney Bubbles and a host of other artists.”
//Brigitte Bardot in topless dress 1966/Front cover Marshmallow Pie, Graham Lord, 1970. Both John Dove//
In 1969 John and Molly came up with the notion of Painless Tattoos; a series of prints on garments manufactured from sheer material.
“When I was delivering drawings to Nova I often talked to the fashion editor Caroline Baker about the tattoos, which she loved,” says John.
//Existence Is Unhappiness, OZ 12/Detail of breasts drawn by John Dove, May 1968//
“Honey magazine published a small piece of reportage in December 1969 and photographer James Wedge was in the Nova office with his portfolio one week around that time; he showed some interest in stocking the tattoo clothes for the shop he owned with his girlfriend Pat Booth, Countdown in the King’s Road.”
//Painless Tattoo photospread, Nova, April 1970//
Booth was one of the key movers and shakers of the 60s and beyond, escaping a tough East End childhood to first become a successful model and then boutique owner before carving an international reputation as an author. Sadly she succumbed to cancer just a couple of months ago.
Nova showcased the Painless Tattoo collection in it’s April 1970 issue with photographs of Booth by Wedge. Around this time Wedge also photographed Booth’s torso for a new idea of John and Molly’s; the breasts shirt.
//Pat Booth’s torso by James Wedge, 1970//
“It was a natural progression on the trompe de l’oeil effect of the tattoos,” says John. “We printed it on an ecru jersey T-shirt, using the underwear manufacturer Morley, which made cotton and silk shirts made for the armed forces.”We also printed some sleeveless versions on vests by Invicta. The breasts were printed with a basic mono black and a fine blue tint and there were some sepia versions too. At the same time we did a short edition of prints on paper which Peter Bird purchased the prints for an Arts Council exhibition.”
Soon Countdown was stocking the breasts shirt and John and Molly also supplied a couple of stores in New York and continental Europe, though it likely that a maximum of 40 were ever made.
“In 1971 we produced the T-shirt with a black back but we couldn’t persuade Trevor Myles to stock it at Paradise Garage,” says John.
More interest was shown a couple of years later by Myles’ successors at 430 King’s Road, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, who visited John and Molly’s studio in Villiers Road, Willesden, north-west London in 1974 as they prepared the transition of the shop from Too Young To Live Too Fast To Die to SEX by researching the underground sex and fetish clothes market.
//Trevor Myles receives a ticket outside Paradise Garage 1971. Pic: David Parkinson//
“This was a little after Malcolm had returned from Paris, hanging out on the New York Dolls‘ European tour,” says John. “Malcolm looked a different kind of rocker from before: the Teddy Boy drape had given way to a blousey jacket and scarf, the Cockney accent had gone and he was wearing cuban high-heeled shoes. By then the Teddy Boy scene had backfired.
“We talked about sex clothing and the overlapping images of pornography and art. Vivienne said how they had found all these people making fabulous clothes for fetishists – an entire industry out there running under the surface which they wanted to bring into the open.
“Up until the late 60s, sex fetish clothing was still taboo but the ice was now wearing thin.”
John says that Westwood liked the Wonder Workshop Lips and Leopardskin Pin-up T-shirts.”But we couldn’t agree on a shape, a pattern or a label,” he adds. “We insisted that we could only supply T-shirts with our own labels. Then Malcolm noticed the breasts print on the wall and asked when we did it so we told him the Countdown story. Malcolm liked it and declared he was gonna do it.”
The quartet also discussed another T-shirt John had seen in Portobello Road earlier that year “like the one that Charlie Watts had worn on the cover of The Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!“.
//Molly in the Kitsch-22 breasts & tattoos tee 1977/From BOY Blackmail catalogue 1981//
In the event SEX did not carry the Wonder Workshop designs and John and Molly relaunched the breasts shirt with their shop Kitsch-22 in 1977, combining it with an overprint of their eagle & snake tattoo (which was reissued last year as part of their range for The Look Presents).
This was also included in BOY’s mail order range Blackmail in the early 80s.
//From BOY Blackmail catalogue 1981//
“When M&V visited us in the autumn of 1974, it wasn’t purely a social visit – it was business,” stresses John. “I’m certain they hadn’t seen a tits t-shirt before that and even if they had, they hadn’t considered producing one.
“Whatever the historical facts, all the novelty genre tits t-shirts in the world may have gone completely unnoticed had Malcolm and Vivienne not made that souvenir t-shirt their own. Lets face it – its a work of art! End of story!”
But the story doesn’t end there – in the next and final chapter Malcolm McLaren explains for the first time the exact circumstances of his discovery of the print and we look at how it remains as a high-end fashion item/art statement to this day.
