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LONDON, United Kingdom — The take-home of successful stylists is the stuff of industry legend, but they're surely worth it when they pull the sort of rabbit out of a hat that Luke Day and Gary Armstrong managed at Topman this morning. Day grew up on the route to Glastonbury. He remembers the hordes of ragged rainbow ravers streaming past on their way to festival Nirvana. Those memories served him well as he and Armstrong styled the look and feel (Trevor Jackson provided the sounds) of baggy culture out of the mass of raw material Topman creative director Gordon Richardson gave them. A little vintage, a lot worn and frayed, some fabulous distressed knitwear decorated with tinkers' trinkets by jeweller Husam El-odeh, and all of it accented with fluoro and topped with a bucket hat.
You couldn't wish for a better wardrobe for a return to the Summer of Love, even if there was something slightly off about such an anti-fashion moment being recast as a fashion statement. But it's a cynical age in which we live, and that's how the anti-materialistic ideals of rave culture got a re-airing under the auspices of Topman tycoon Philip Green.
