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The Fool a designer women’s hippie fashion company started in 1973 with a little bit of magic. The Fool caught the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time.
Why The Fool? The World is a strange and foolish place.
The Fool does not take the world too seriously.
The Fool knows that what is seen as wise at one time
can be seen as foolish at another.
The Fool does not take the world too seriously.
The Fool knows that what is seen as wise at one time
can be seen as foolish at another.
Can we ever convey a time that is other than the one we live in? We barely register the changes from year to year, as like a wave rippling on to a shore the currents change imperceptibly. Our yardstick of what we think of as good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable change. Trying to express it, however, allows us to see where we are today and where we have come from, without judgment but simply to pay attention to how our thinking and worldview has changed without us noticing it.
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The Fool designed manufactured and sold colourful, flowing, lacy hippie style women’s clothes around The Portobello Road area at a time of great change. From Aden, Manchester, Eritrea, Cheetham Hill, Scotland, Clydebank, Dvinsk, Russia, Ruti, Myrna and Aury set up The Fool.
They viewed it as an asset and made use of their huge cultural differences, different life experiences and different expectations to make the project of The Fool work. This hotchpotch combination made the magic happen brought the spark alive and created a successful entrepreneurial business. |
They set up from a back street run down shop with an incredibly low rent in Westbourne Park, West London from where the 3 of them all lived with their children.
They had so little money that they couldn't afford to buy expensive fabrics to make the clothes. Having a eureka moment they found that if they bought cheap cotton printed fabric in any colour they could then over dye the garments by hand which blended the patterns and colours in a new beautiful way. The resulting colour ranges became a trademark of The Fool style. |
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The way they lived and worked was different from others of their generation. Many of their peers had a conventional life style, a job, a family, a house and a weeks UK holiday a year. Myrna Ruti and Aury broke away from the expected behaviour from their family background. This allowed them to be open to different ways of seeing and doing things,
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As they couldn’t afford to pay for a train or bus, Myrna and Ruti hitchhiked round the country carrying a bag of samples. They went to the shops that they thought likely to sell their hippie style clothes and without fail the shop keepers ordered. The clothes were so popular that they flew off the rails and re orders came in rapidly.
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There were different smells during that time. In the 1960s and even into the 1970s and 1980s smoking was permitted nearly everywhere: smokers could light up at work, in hospitals, in school buildings, in pubs, in restaurants, in cinemas, theatres, on television, and even on buses, trains and planes. Smoking was integral to every day life. Un-emptied ashtrays were all over the place at The Fool. Many of the workers as well as Aury smoked heavily. Myrna as one of the non smokers had no choice but to put up with it. Smoking was the norm.
