Just another Beatlemaniac

The Strawberry Fields Jacket

Our very first project was the DIY Jacket kits. We made screens of the laid-out patterns for American style Bomber jackets with printed images on the sleeves with the main image on the back sections. We started the Cut'n'Sew kits in '68 - it was a huge project with over 100 silk-screens that ran for 4 years. The first Cut'n'Sew designs were Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield, Baked Beans and The Strawberry. Our Painless Tattoo Collection had taken over the production of the Cut'N'Sew Kits and slowed up progress. The Silver Surfer was the last of the kits - by then we were probably into 1971 and working with that amazing store at 430 Kings Road called Paradise Garage. The Strawberry Jacket idea was our 5th jacket piece. It was in January 1970 - a cold winter's day when we caught the bus to Mayfair. Fortnum & Mason was the only store in the UK with fresh Strawberries - from South Africa - very expensive. They were a luscious red, huge with splendid pips. We decided to run straight over to John Claridge's studio at London Wall to have them photographed while they were still fresh. John Claridge and I had worked together on many projects so he was always ready to help us with the photography. A brilliant photographer in his own right, he produced some amazing dark close-ups which could have taken us in a completely different direction - but we stuck with the first idea. John made a few terrific B/ W close-ups on a white ground of a single strawberry - the best of the bunch. We would superficially create the Red, Yellow and Blue colour screens by making some line and half-tone positives merged together. So in 1972, we plumbed for the Granny Takes A Trip offer to sell the Jackets in satin. All three Granny's outlets stocked the jackets and so did Colette Neville Pret-a-porter, Paris, and Vibrations, Los Angeles. Later in In 1973, Paul McCartney ordered 6 Strawberry Jackets for his first USA tour since Shea Stadium and wore the Jacket on Top of The Pops in the UK. The Strawberry Jacket soon became known as The Strawberry Fields Jacket - a tribute to the Beatles song "Strawberry Fields". Paul McCartney became a collector of our T-shirts.

John and Paul during the Beatles' Time Magazine photoshoot, Hyde Park, 1967

We all know about John's Sword Swallower and featured-on-a-gay-magazine "Down With Pants" pins of 1967, but the eagle-eyed @gobnaits recently spotted another interesting one! The picture above is from a photoshoot the band did for Time Magazine on 18 May 1967 (Full picture here). John is wearing a pin on his scarf and there is writing on it, but I'd never looked closely at it until @gobnaits noticed a comment by Lizzie Bravo on the (now defunct) Beatle Photo Blog website. Lizzie Bravo was one of the superfans who used to keep vigil outside Cavendish, and she also kept a journal where she wrote about her Beatle sightings. She consulted the journal and noted in her comment what John and Paul were wearing that day:

With that information, when you look closely at John's badge, you can just about make out the words "Camp Here":

"Camp Here" isn't among the slogans on the badges featured on the cover of the December 1966 issue of Tangents magazine (where we find "Down With Pants"), but the use of the word "camp", especially in the 60s, is VERY suggestive. (Obviously the phrase can have a very literal meaning, as in "signposting a place where you can pitch your tent", but many of the Tangents badges play with everyday phrases to put a queer slant on them, and with the existing double meaning of "camp" I think it's safe to assume the badge is not meant literally 😅)

Tangents LGBT magazine, December 1966

In the 1960s, "Camp" could have a similar meaning to what it has now, but it was also used as a synoymn for "gay". A report published in 1960 called A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain (quoted in Some Men in London vol. 2 by Peter Parker) said:

Camp is an example of a word in which the change of usage has amounted to a change of meaning. The word is said to come from the Italian campeggiare meaning ‘to stand out from a background’, and so it came to mean in turn, ‘theatrical’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘effeminate’, and now sometimes it is used as a synonym for ‘homosexual’.

In Some Men in London, several of the interview subjects refer to themselves or other gay men as "camp". And of course, John would later get into mild trouble with Melody Maker when, in his angry letter to Paul Linda, he responded to Paul's wish to meet without their wives by saying "I know you're camp! But let's not go too far!" When Melody Maker excised that part from the letter before publication, John made a note on the text asking "What was libel about saying Paul was camp?"💀

Combined with "Sword Swallower" and "Down with Pants", I for one am fairly confident adding "Camp Here" to the Gay-Themed Pins John was Wearing in 1967 List.

“After a late lunch, Linda launched into a long paean to the joys of living in England. When she was finished, she turned to John and said “Don’t you miss England?”

“Frankly”, John replied, “I miss Paris.”

John Lennon & Paul McCartney photographed taking Martha for a walk in London, April 13, 1967.

OR: a more in-depth version of this post.

JOHN: Hey! Did you dream about me last night?

PAUL: [long pause] I can’t remember.

JOHN: Very strong dream. We both dreamt about it. It was amazing! Different dreams, you know, but I thought you must’ve been there. [inaudible] I was touching you. [inaudible]

PAUL: Nothing to worry about, though?