We detailed 1960s Swinging London in a previous post and we wanted to write next about what came to the streets of London at the end of the 60s and exploded in the early to mid 1970s- Bohemian chic! Here are 6 names that helped to define the era. 

For articles on Biba and Zandra Rhodes, see our other blogs!

Thea Porter

To start, we have the queen herself- Thea Porter. Dorothea Porter was born in Jerusalem in 1927. She was raised in Damascus and then studied Old English in London before being expelled. She then worked for the British embassy in Beirut, where she met her husband. They travelled the Middle East and Europe together. She studied painting and went clubbing every night, becoming known for her wardrobe. She had her first painting exhibition in Beirut in 1961.
She separated from her husband and moved to London in 1964. She worked in interior design and opened her first shop, an imported interiors boutique in 1966, awash with middle eastern textiles. She soon started making her own cushion covers from antique trimmings and mixed fabrics- 1930s French voiles, Ottoman velvets, Swiss chiffons, Indian handprints, Islamic embroidery and the lavish brocades of Damascus.
The shop was frequented by the Beatles as they kitted out their Apple store in her wares.

She was soon making clothing inspired by kaftans, the chazara jacket and the sirwal skirt, the cloak-like abaya, the long Berber djellaba and the shorter African dashiki. Moroccan djellaba robes, Iraqi Samawa carpets and 17th-century Persian paintings were all inspirations. A shirtdress made from the Damascus tablecloth fabric, aghabani, became a bestseller. The bohemian look started to catch on and Thea’s feminine flowing robes and rich textures put her in the same bracket as Ossie Clark and Bill Gibb- But having grown up in the Middle East, Thea had an edge they didn’t. She understood the materials and the traditional decorations. Pink Floyd wore her embroidered jackets and vibrant shirts on the cover of their appropriately trippy debut album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967.

Her products were soon selling at department stores in New York. 
Although not as famous as Mary Quant or Laura Ashley, her influence on the fashion of 1970s London is just as potent. She was the queen of boho-chic. 
In 1971, she opened her own store in New York but it unfortunately closed after only six months. However, she still sold very successfully in boutiques. 
In 1972, Porter was named designer of the year by the Clothing Institute.
She opened another store, this time in Paris, in 1977, which lasted two years. She went into receivership after 1981 and worked solely for ateliers after that. 

She was a regular in the pages of British Vogue where luminaries including Lauren Hutton, Penelope Tree and Rudolf Nureyev modelled her clothes. The likes of Barbra Streisand and Faye Dunaway were clients in her London store and Elsa Peretti modelled in her shows. While Thea’s name faded into obscurity in the 1980s and 90s, it’s since become a cult favourite on the vintage scene, with original pieces fetching into the thousands online.

Ossie Clark

Raymond "Ossie" Clark was born in England in 1942. He became a major figure in the London fashion industry of the 1960s and was one of the most influential designers of the period.
He was nicknamed Ossie after the town he was born in- Oswaldtwistle.
He was making clothes for nieces, nephews and neighbourhood girls from an early age. He started studying architecture in school at 13, which he later said was invaluable to him in his fashion career.
He attended art school in Manchester at 16 and because of the long commute, his mother gave him pills to help him stay awake, which was the start of his lifelong drugs problem. 
He began dating designer Celia Birtwell at this time. 

Clark obtained a first class honours degree from the Royal College of Art in 1965, where his degree show was a huge success and his style was defined by Hollywood glamour and pop art. The final line-up featured a dress with flashing lightbulbs down the front which was shown in every major newspaper and fashion publication the following day. He appeared in British Vogue that year and began selling his clothing at Woodlands 21 and Alice Pollock’s Quorum, where he designed for her label. 
Celia Birtwell then started designing the textiles for his clothing- one of fashion’s most famous collaborations. 

He began taking hard drugs with Alice and his personality reportedly started to change.  
The first full Ossie Clark collection was bought by the Henri Bendel department store in New York. His simple, elegant dresses were widely copied by the designers on Seventh Avenue.
He was dubbed “The King of King’s Road”. 
He favoured free-flowing, "sexy" clothing that didn’t restrict movement. This type of clothing became very popular in the 70s. Clark’s greatest skill was his freehand scissorwork and ability to cut into fabric with masterful ease. Anyone who was anyone had an Ossie. 

While they proved great at drawing in the rich and famous, Alice and Ossie were less successful at managing business. They sold Quorum to UK fashion house Radley and the ‘Ossie Clark for Radley” collection was born and sold around the world.

Clark presented his first fashion show in 1967. His shows became legendary for their theatrics and he was the first British designer to use black models. 
He and Celia married in 1969 and they came to define the bohemian quarter of west London that was home to a generation of bright young things.
He and Celia are featured in David Hockney's 1970 painting "Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy", one of the most visited painting’s in Britain at the Tate. 

He made costumes for famous clientele like Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Marianne Faithfull and Liza Minnelli.
Clark defined the spirit of London during the period between Mary Quant’s go-go mini-skirt and Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood’s subversive punk movement, from 1965 to 1974.

He and Celia divorced in 1974, as a result of his affairs. This started a downward spiral for the designer and his creative output was impacted greatly. 
A few years later, he had a revival after going into business with Tony Calder and Peter Lee. 
Once the 80s set in, Ossie’s dresses were no longer in fashion. He went into bankruptcy and stopped working commercially. 
He briefly went back into business again with Radley in the mid 80s but was fired soon after. 
By the early 90s, he was living in a council flat, surviving off of social welfare payments.
He had been in a relationship with a man named Balaban from ’78 to ’83 but Clark’s erratic behaviour brought an end to that relationship too. He sank into deep depression and only when Balaban passed away from AIDS in 1994 did Clark let go of the past. He joined buddhism and started working with the Ghost label, marvelling at their computerized pattern cutter. 
Ossie was tragically stabbed to death in his London flat in 1996 by a former lover. He was 54 years old. A sad end to a brilliant talent. 
Original Ossie Clark pieces are considered collector's items today.

Bill Gibb

Wiliam Elphinstone Gibb was born in Scotland in 1943. He studied at Saint Martin's School of Art and set up a boutique with his friends in 1967. Between 1969 and 1972, Gibb designed for the London store Baccarat, and won a Dress of the Year award for one of his designs in 1970. He eventually formed the Bill Gibb Fashion Group in 1972, and his first own name shop opened in 1975. Harrod's also opened the "Bill Gibb Room" that year and Twiggy asked him to design a number of historically inspired dresses for her, which he did.

His designs epitomized the romantic eclecticism that was popular in British fashion at that time, as well as demonstrating how traditional handcrafts were acceptable for mainstream fashion (not just hippies). He co-designed extraordinary knitwear with his partner Kaffe Hassett. Like other bohemian designers, he was inspired by historical dress, eastern cultures, pre-raphaelite paintings, and folk costume. There was a major retrospective of his work at the Royal Albert Hall in 1977.  

Despite his design prowess and critical acclaim, he was not a good businessman and his business had collapsed by the 80s. He continued to design for private clients and also licensed his name out. He unfortunately died of cancer in 1988. He continues to be a huge influence on many designers today. 

Rumak & Sample 

Founded by Terry Rumak, this was a London couture boutique label in the 1970s that emulated the aesthetic popularized by Thea Porter, producing flowing printed chiffon dresses with ribbon work, embroidery, trims and applique. You can find examples of her one of a kind dresses online today with a high price tag as they are highly collectible and showcase the best of 1970s bohemian style. Terry stated that her influences were the pre-Raphaelites, the 1940s and abstract art. 

Sujon

Another boutique label that was active in the 60s and 70s. They had all the hallmarks of bohemian style- flowing maxi dresses in printed cottons and silks, with folk influenced embellishments and details. The label continued at least into the 80s. I could not find any information on the founders or designers, but it is definitely a name to be aware of if interested in the boho look. 

Frank Usher

While widely known as an evening wear brand founded in the 1940s, Frank Usher produced many affordable bohemian style designs in the 1970s in order to give the average person a chance at coveting the look. 

The label was founded by husband and wife team Max and Anne Bruh in 1946 with the explicit intent of bringing runway-inspired fashion to the masses at a moderate price point. They fled Germany at the start of the WWII. Max had previously worked at the German fashion house Friedlander & Zaduk before this. They wanted to set up their own business in London and bought the rights to an existing defunct brand called Frank Usher.
They emulated Ossie Clark in the 70s and sold in department stores around the world, as well as being regularly featured in Vogue. They utilized ethnic prints in free flowing silhouettes and collaborated with various designers. We see a lot of 80s-era Frank Usher which was heavily beaded and sequinned for the evening, but the 60s and 70s bohemian stuff is a lot rarer. So, while it is not a quintessentially bohemian brand, it is definitely worth keeping an eye out for their deigns of this era.
After Max and Anne died in the early 2000s, the company was sold and today operates very differently, a shadow of its former self.