Granny Takes a Trip: High Fashion and High Times at the Wildest Rock 'n' Roll Boutique | Paul Gorman

The story of the King's Road boutique that sparked psychedelic London to day-glo life!

Granny Takes A Trip was more than just a fashion brand; the stores in the US and UK were the original rock 'n' roll boutiques, the template for all that followed. What started as an odd retail venture/art installation in a depressed part of London known as World's End became an international byword for glam decadence in Manhattan and Hollywood. Combining flamboyant style and all manner of countercultural activity, it attracted everyone from Pattie Boyd, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg to Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, The Beatles and Lou Reed.

Unfolding over a decade and a half, this tumultuous story invokes a cast of often unique, sometimes entitled, usually talented and occasionally troubled individuals on a collective mission to shake up austere, repressed, class-ridden Britain and white-bread America. Some achieved this at great personal cost, as darkness, addiction and tragedy. stalked those behind the extraordinary shop façades.

Much mythologised but never told, this cautionary tale has now found its definitive chronicler in celebrated cultural historian Paul Gorman, who has had access to first-hand accounts from all the major figures, as well as notes for a memoir and a much-treasured scrapbook compiled by Freddie Hornik, the tailoring entrepreneur who survived the death marches of central Europe after the Second World War to acquire Granny Takes A Trip in the late 196os and transformed it into an unparalleled pop cultural force.

Beautifully illustrated with archival images of the shop, principal players and the clothes themselves, this book concludes with a never-seen-before 48-page tour through the Rolling Stones' wild wardrobe tailored and sold in Granny's and the other leading sartorial operators of the period.

Size: 269 X 204 X 35mm (hardback)

Pages: 304 (illustrated throughout)

Publisher: White Rabbit