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Seventies Glam and Beyond:
Taken from the autobiographical piece "A Dandy in the Land of Blue Denim":

...I persisted with my relentless pursuit of louche glamour, in the shape of the musical stars of Glam Rock, but also increasingly as the seventies went on, flamboyant artists from earlier stages of the Modern Age...poets, playwrights, novelists etc.
Once '73 had turned into '74, I became dissatisfied with seventies Glam which started to seem corny and old hat to me, and turned my attentions instead to what I saw as the more elegant glamour of previous eras, particularly the '20s and '30s, embracing a frenzied nostalgia which persisted throughout '74 and '75, and to a lesser extent thereafter. At some point in '74, I started using hair cream, combing my hair back 1920s style, and sometimes parting it in the middle; and building up a dandiacal new wardrobe. Throughout '74 and '75, some of the sartorial fruits of my new weltanschauung included a Gatsby style tab collared shirt often worn with black and white college-style striped tie, several cravats and neck scarves including a long white one, almost certainly silk, a navy blue Meakers blazer, a fair isle short-sleeved sweater, grey flannel trousers from Simpsons of Piccadilly, white trousers, white shoes, brown and white "correspondant" shoes, fawn raincoat etc. But sometimes, I dressed more casually, for example in tight V neck sweater worn without a shirt, set off by knotted silk scarf, worn at a jaunty angle.

These years were also marked by the birth on my part of a fascinated preoccupation with the continental Europe of recent times, and specifically its leading cities as beacons of revolutionary art, and of style, luxury and dissolution. And certain eras associated with these cities came to hold me increasingly spellbound throughout '74 and '75 and beyond, such as 1890s London, the so-called Yellow Decade, Belle Epoque Paris, '20s New York and London, Berlin in the 1930s, and the artists associated with these epochs.
There were those cutting edge Rock artists who appeared to share my Europhilia, particularly Bryan Ferry whose work with his band Roxy Music was haunted by the languid cafe and cabaret music of Europe's immediate past, and certain of Roxy's followers affected the kind of nostalgic apparel favoured by Ferry himself, but they were rare creatures in mid-seventies London. I wore my bizarre anachronous costumes in defiance of the ubiquity of long hair and hippie-style clothing. By the spring of '74, I'd constructed a defiantly sneering persona to match, although I could still be exceptionally gracious and eager to please to the point of self-effacement.

Learn more about this author, Carl Halling.
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