Boutiques

The term ‘boutique’ was derived from the French and has been used to mean ‘small shop’ for over 200 years. In the 1950s boutiques—small shops that sold couturier-designed ready-to-wear clothing for a fashionable, affluent clientele—were often found in larger department stores but, by the 1960s, were generally free-standing retail outlets that sold trendy, stylish clothing and accessories to the young. They were closely associated with the Pop movement and often seen as the retail backbone of the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s. Notable examples of this genre included ‘Quorum’, established in London in 1964 by Ossie Clark and Alice Pollock, the often nostalgically tinged Biba, and the individualistic eclecticism of ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ in the King's Road, London.