The vapid fashion brouhaha surrounding the London Olympic Games with their opening and closing ceremonies mainly focused on the best and worst British products of mainstream music, fashion and culture, made me sit down and ponder why specific subcultures that had a great impact on the London scene never appeared in the ceremonies.
I wondered for example while there was no trace of the Blitz Kids who influenced fashion, such as rebel designer Melissa Caplan (in some cases her surname was spelt as Kaplan).
Caplan was - together with Willie Brown, Fiona Dealey, Valentine Morby, Simon Withers, Wayne Tracy, Paul Winters and Chris Sullivan - the co-founder of the Axiom cooperative (the brain behind it was Jon Baker) and store in King's Road.
Here shoppers could find creations by young graduates or students who had dropped out of college because they were told their designs weren't good enough fashion-wise or wouldn't sell.
One of the original Blitz Kids, Caplan did together with the other Axiom members a collective fashion show in 1981 at London's Club for Heroes, and she also presented her Pallium clothing line in the States.
Caplan opted in her designs for a geometric approach and a construction characterised by exaggerated forms.
Favouring layering and poppers, in the '80s she became popular for her study on jodhpurs, coming up with a pair of jodhpurs that could be deconstructed and transformed into a skirt.
Her designs ended up having a strong connection with music as they were donned by the likes of Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet and Toyah Willcox.
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