From The Issue: Steven Philip, Fashion’s The Hunter-Gatherer

PhilipSteven Philip is perhaps best known for Rellik, his west London vintage emporium that sits at the foot of Golborne Road’s Trellick Tower. But he is no mere shopkeeper. He’s also fashion’s hunter-gatherer, and the spoils are to be found in his personal archive, an accumulation of the most magnificent clothes of the past four decades. We asked him to tell us about his top 10 pieces.

You will find most of those spoils in a storage facility in Shoreham on the West Sussex coast, close to Brighton, where Philip now lives. In there, an eye-popping collection of garments and fashion paraphernalia, stretching from almost every John Galliano piece from his early own-name collections (he’s still after one jacket from his graduate show – “That’s the fucking head that’s missing, the eyeball that’s missing, but I’ll get it,” he says) to ultra-rare Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen and the early work of Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto.

For Philip, who we meet in the mezzanine office of the shop, it’s this personal archive that is most important. “If you buy and sell fucking second-hand cars, you still have got to have your own collection of beautiful vintage cars, you know?” he says. “You’ve got to have Elvis’s Cadillac, Ringo Starr’s ’77 Mercedes – that would tell me you really love what you do, because you’re passionate and it’s a hobby as well, and if you can combine the two, you’re home and dry. And that’s everybody’s ticket to being really fucking happy.”

Philip speaks in glorious, unfiltered monologue, his voice still thick with a Dundee accent, the Scottish city where he hails from. Sadie Clayton, one of the young people who work in the shop (“My backing singers! I’m the Harry Styles!”) and a designer herself, thinks that he’s one of the main reasons people keep returning, to hear his stories from his first years in London in the 1980s to now.

“When the careers officer said to me, ‘What do you want to do with yourself?’ I said, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ Do you know what I mean? ‘Get the fuck out of Dundee, love, I ain’t got time for all this.’ And I worked in shops, I worked in a factory, I went through the thing, but still the… lure of London won.”

And so, some years later, Rellik began, not in the bricks-and-mortar space that it is now, but as a stall at London’s Portobello Market. Part of it was to make money – he likes the idea of being a Dundee boy made good – but the other was to bring the drama of designers such as Vivienne Westwood to the 1990s, an era that had become saturated with cool, pared-back minimalism.

“It was all a bit black and kind of grey – the world had gone minimal, we’d gone Calvin. You’d walk up Oxford Street and you’d just see a whole sea of grey, everybody’s in grey and black and I thought, ‘God, what’s happened to all the wonderful colours and the fun and the brightness and the fairy stories that Vivienne Westwood created?!’” he says.

And that magic wasn’t just in the clothes, but also in the paraphernalia that surrounds these legendary designers. He’s just received a box of rare Galliano photographs and invites. “You used to go and he [Galliano] used to send you a flute and recording paper. Everything was thought out, with the flute and the tune, so dance to the tune of Galliano! I mean, how wonderful, who wouldn’t want to go? Now you get pinged a fucking email three minutes before the show!”

London of the 1980s and 1990s set Philip up with networks – a world of swapped and shared clothes, of connections in nightclubs, a time where “if you had a look, you had a look” and you wore it out seven nights a week. It’s how Rellik grew – these social networks of clothes-obsessed men and women. But you had to work for it. If you wanted a pair of vintage Vivienne Westwood boots, you had to seek them out. You couldn’t just Google them or post a Facebook status.

It’s part of the reason Philip says he “couldn’t give a flying fuck” about social media. Now, the simple art of talking to one another – of making friends in clubs and bars and in the corridors of apartment buildings – has been lost. “It’s all who’s happy, who’s not,” he says. “Who’s got what, my house is bigger than your house, my son’s hotter than your son, I’m on holiday eight times a year, you’re not, you sad fuck. Do you know what I mean?”

But he has, reluctantly, started using Instagram as a kind of catalogue of his collection, those rarer pieces that make up his private archive. At the time of writing he had just posted the front and back of the Blanche DuBois jacket from John Galliano’s SS88 collection. Ultimately, Philip thought it a shame that they were locked away, out of sight. He talks of his pieces ending up in museums and exhibitions – where young kids can look at them, where they can inspire future great collections. A new book on Galliano, coming out this year, gives him hope that an exhibition will follow.

“I believe that once you’ve finished the jigsaw and got the last bit in, somebody’s leg, done complete, you’ve got to rip it up and start again,” he says. It’s not just about hoarding these pieces away for himself – the thrill is always in the chase.

And that is how he wants to be portrayed – “The hunter, the gatherer, the collector, whatever, that’s the way I see myself – the man who’s got enthusiasm, the man who likes his story, the man who likes to value something. Not value in monetary terms – value as in the story behind it. I want to let the next generation see it’s not all about pinging onto the next fucking thing.”

Text Jack Moss
Photographer Andrew Nuding

Taken from the latest issue of 10 Men issue 47, SHIFT, POWER, NEW, on newsstands now…

relliklondon.co.uk

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