The designs of Aykut Ozen are anchored to the past, and rising up from his collection of intricate men's leather jackets comes a smorgasbord of blurry images: singers (banshee-voiced, dewy), hair (undone, tumbling down), blouses (gauzy, falling off), and mustaches (flecked with the crumbs of whatever drugs had been taken that day). "I don't like fashion that much. People keep changing it. There's all these seasons and stuff like that. That honestly actually grosses me out," he says. Drawing from flower-children happenings, Aykut pieces some of his jackets with swirls and trailing-vine shapes, or trippy forest scenes of birds, snakes, and mushrooms. His others move toward glam wear—they're embedded with ritzy metallic studs, or artfully blobbing seashell forms, or layered in gold and cream "like an old palace."

The jackets are made of rigid leathers and old Indian-trading-style blankets, with velvet linings and hand-dyed elk-horn buttons. To build the first, he dismembered his favorite slim-fitting Western shirt and harvested its pattern shapes, then hand-stitched a denim prototype. "It was kind of like a painful process," he says, though he continued anyway, and looked to the stock of legendary boutiques for inspiration, such as San Francisco's East West Musical Instruments Co. and the psychedelic Granny Takes a Trip. The latter has spin-offs in California, but the original London version had a full-size automobile emerging from its front display window. In the summer of 1967, Salman Rushdie lived just upstairs and described the scene in a New Yorker article: "Inside Granny's, it was pitch dark. You went in through a heavy beaded curtain and were instantly blinded... After a time, you became aware of a low purple glow, in which you could make out a few motionless shapes. These were probably clothes, probably for sale."

Back then, all the male rock stars feminized themselves, because it was sexy as fuck. They wore tawdry denims, for instance: high-waist, trumpet-hemmed, skintight. (To shrink them right, wearers of brand-new jeans soaked in saltwater baths.) Jimi Hendrix carried a purse. It's displayed at the Hard Rock Cafe downtown—an understated number with braided straps and a swingy tassel. Members of Led Zeppelin draped themselves in jewelry, "the biggest, most grotesque and gaudy pieces they could find—huge silver necklaces with gigantic rocks of turquoise," said celebrity groupie Pamela Des Barres (in Stephen Davis's Hammer of the Gods). But it was Mick Jagger who really went for it and performed in a flouncy mid-thigh man-dress with plump bishop sleeves, described by an observer as "a little girl's white party frock," wrote Christopher Ward in the Daily Mirror. recommended

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