ABSTRACT
In 1956, Elvis fan and future textile designer Natalie Gibson enrolled at Chelsea School of Art. She recalls the department store Woollands selling conservatively fashionable clothing and furniture. Italian food had begun to assert itself in 1959 when two Italian waiters, Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla, formerly of the luxurious French restaurant Mirabelle, opened La Trattoria Terrazza in Soho, offering Southern Italian food in informal surroundings. Their interior designer was Enzo Apicella, a Neapolitan polymath freelance designer and cartoonist who came to Britain in 1954 and worked in graphics and television set design. The designers, Garnett Cloughley Blakemore, were also responsible for a significant number of the better boutiques along the road, among them Just Looking, and Stop The Shop, in which a circular window display platform revolved slowly. It used technology GCB had evolved for the revolving restaurant on top of the Post Office Tower, but the practice was equally adept at creating fantasy.
