The Apple Boutique was a Beatles project that quickly went bust. But impractical 1960s clothes from its collection emerged this summer at an “Antiques Roadshow” taping in Chicago and are headed for display and sale in Manhattan.
Susan Brink, an artist in Greenwood, Ind., bought the clothes from the Beatles’ store when she was a young Anglophile visiting London in 1968. The boutique’s clothing and accessories in psychedelic patterns and shimmering textures attracted droves of shoplifters that the management could not control, and the Beatles closed the shop after a few months.
Paul McCartney’s news release at the time said that the musicians’ business was “concerned with fun, not frocks.” The boutique’s fashions, designed by an artist collective called the Fool, did not suit Ms. Brink’s small-town life. She almost never wore them; when she did once walk around in her turquoise-and-lavender pantsuit from London, she said in an interview, “everybody stared at me.” She showed the trove to some friends curious about her past tastes, and she maintained it even as threads here and there failed over the years. “I did try to retrieve every button that fell off in my closet,”she said. “It’s been such a pleasure to have them, even just tucked away. “They will offer the Brink collection of half a dozen outfits in New York on Nov. 12. Estimates are a few thousand dollars each for flounced and scalloped pantsuits and dresses made of velveteen, satin, silk and synthetics in shades of teal, lime green and fluorescent orange. Ms. Brink had brought the clothes to the “Roadshow” taping, where Karen Augusta, the company’s owner, was appraising fashion and textiles. When Ms. Brink opened her suitcase, Ms. Augusta said in an interview, “my jaw just dropped.” Marijke Koger-Dunham, a former member of the Fool who is now a painter in Shadow Hills, Calif., wrote in an email that the collective’s textiles came from Liberty Department Stores and “a lot of different and odd places.”
Store mannequins had varied skin tones to represent different ethnicities. The Beatles and their wives and entourages wore the clothes at performances and on movie sets. Despite steady sales and a stream of curiosity seekers, the mismanaged store failed. A last chaotic wave of shoppers was allowed to take home the remaining stock free. “I like the idea that it was all given away in the end,” Ms. Koger-Dunham wrote. The Fool’s Apple products rarely appear on the market.
In 2004, at Christie’s in London, a batch of the collective’s Beatles memorabilia, including bed linens and men’s clothing and underwear, sold for $3,000. On Dec. 9, Kerry Taylor Auctions in London will offer a burgundy satin men’s jacket with bell sleeves and rose motifs from the boutique (estimated at $640 to $980). An Australian dentist has amassed a collection of some 300 antique radios and detailed many of them in a new book, “Deco Radio: The Most Beautiful Radios Ever Made” (Schiffer Publishing).
During a visit to Manhattan to promote the book, the dentist, Peter Sheridan, explained how the portable radios succeeded a generation of bulky models meant for living-room gatherings, giving wives and children a way to sneak off and listen to their favorite programs in private, for example. He also pointed out design and technological similarities in radios from European, American and Australian manufacturers who were copying one another. A few of Dr. Sheridan’s 1940s German radios came from companies under Nazi control. On a Russian radio, made in 1954, a Communist red star crowns the striated caramel case, and dials are labeled so listeners could easily find broadcasts from various Communist capitals. Dr. Sheridan has spent two decades acquiring the radios, which date to the 1920s, along with related advertisements, catalogs and instruction booklets. The round, amoeboid and heptagonal forms were the brainchildren of celebrated designers including Isamu Noguchi, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, and Charles and Ray Eames.
The radios typically cost a few thousand dollars each. Dr. Sheridan has tracked them down through friends, dealers and auction houses including Christie’s, Bonhams and Leonard Joel in Melbourne, Australia. He will accept some wear and tear and replaced knobs, if the shapes and colors are irresistible. “Rarity triumphs perfection,” he said, pointing to minor rim scratches on a 1938 blue-glass heptagon designed by Teague. Functional wiring is not crucial for him. When one of his 1935 Radio-Glo models in colored glass is plugged in, he said, “the light inside may come on and nothing else.” He researched, wrote and designed the book himself and took the photographs, mostly of his own holdings. He keeps buying; half a dozen purchases arrived while he was away on his American book tour in September. He is adding discoveries to his website,
decoradio.com, and the public is welcome to submit news to the site’s addenda section. Although his book covers inventions from 15 countries, he said, “I might have missed something.” Advertising banners for traveling circuses rarely survive unscathed, since they were mostly draped across the troupes’ tents and posted on town walls. Howard Tibbals, a circus artifact collector in Florida, has spent an undisclosed sum in recent years on four particularly huge and deteriorated banners as gifts for the Ringling museum in Sarasota, Fla.
The early 1900s cloth banners, which will go on view Nov.7, measure over nine feet tall. Mr. Tibbals had acquired them in 1989 along with a collection of circus books. When the crumbling images of acrobats and clowns were first unfurled before him, he said in an interview, “it wasn’t a pleasant sight.” The sheets, by Frans De Vos, an obscure Belgian artist who was also the director of a traveling circus, had been haphazardly rolled, glued, patched and stitched over the years. They required years of work by Artex Conservation Laboratory in Landover, Md. Artex’s team, led by Barbara A. Ramsay, who is now the chief conservator at the Ringling, removed grime and old repairs, smoothed creases and bulges and reinforced the backing. The restorers did not, however, make the surfaces look pristine again. “We did leave signs of age and wear and use,” Ms. Ramsay said. An auction house that frequently handles circus and sideshow ads, Mosby
Company Auctions in Frederick, Md., will be dispersing a banner collection in the next few months with estimates of $600 to $4,500 each. There are minor wrinkles and stains on advertisements for attractions like Harold Smith, who played music by rubbing drinking glasses, and the Monkey Speedway, a racetrack where monkeys competed and collided in gas-powered cars. Source link