Serving the Teesside Business Community | 75
The Business Buzz
With award-winning
writer Harry Pearson
When ICI ruled
the fashion world
Swinging - ICI's Crimplene
and Terylene synthetic fabrics
were the height of fashion in
the Sixties.
L
ike all Teessiders,
my grandfather was
fiercely proud of the
region’s achievements.
Once, in a pub in the Lake
District during my childhood, a bloke from
South Yorkshire said to him, “We’ve a lot
in common, Middlesbrough and Sheffield.
Both great steel towns, aren’t we?”
“Aye,” my grandad replied, “’Cept we
build bridges with ours and you make
spoons.”
I thought that was quite a funny joke,
though when I repeated it 30 years later, at
a book event near Bramall Lane, Sheffield,
it didn’t get much of a laugh. You can’t figure
people out sometimes.
“The only thing they export from
Lancashire is tripe,” my grandad would say
whenever he was at our house for Sunday
dinner.
My father – his son-in-law – had had the
misfortune to be born in Manchester, only
moving to Teesside when he was a toddler.
Dad would shrug and roll his eyes. He didn’t
argue. Grandad came from Essex Street.
He could raise a lump on your head just by
looking at you. It never paid to answer back.
If tripe was Lancashire’s most famous
export, back then Teesside’s were steel
and steam freighters. But they weren’t
the only things by any means (and the
tradition continues with firms like Wilton
Engineering, as you can read elsewhere in
this issue).
Grandad worked for ICI in Billingham
and Wilton. The scientists and chemical
engineers in those giant plants had
developed all kinds of stuff that made his
heart swell with pride: antifreeze, Perspex,
fertiliser, insecticide, a method of extracting
car fuel from coal.
Though he never made much mention
of it, a personal favourite amongst the
Teesside exports of that era would be the
synthetic fabrics Terylene and its derivative
Crimplene. The latter was actually invented
in Macclesfield and named after the Crimple
Valley near ICI’s HQ in Harrogate, but it
was produced using the fibres made in vast
quantities at Wilton.
Back then, Teesside was not – I think
even my grandad would have been forced
to admit – the centre of world fashion, but
it’s fair to say that without Terylene and
Crimplene the Sixties would not have been
anywhere near so swinging.
Fashion icon Mary Quant used Terylene
to make the original miniskirts, while
actress Diana Rigg dazzled as Mrs Peel in
the TV series The Avengers wearing John
Bates-designed Crimplene cat-suits which
clung to her curves in a manner that made
many viewers wonder about the possibility
of being reincarnated as polyester. Terylene
was so hip and groovy that ICI even
managed to persuade supercool Ray Davies
from The Kinks to advertise it.
In 1964, that Parisian couturier Pierre
Cardin used Terylene-derived fabrics to
make his Space Age Cosmos collection
– a series of full-on sci-fi-style suits that
ended up being copied by the designers on
everything from Captain Scarlet to Star Trek
and The Six Million Dollar Man.
Admittedly, a bloke wouldn’t have got
away with wearing one of Cardin’s bright
orange unisex body-stocking-and-tunic-
outfits in Parliament Road on match day
(well, not unless he was inside a shark-
proof cage anyway), but the Frenchman and
the film and TV companies had given us
an idea of what the future would be like –
bright, sleek and stylish.
Tomorrow’s world, we imagined, would
see us all sitting in houses made of white
polymers, with electric sliding doors and
Moog music on the stereo, being served
food (probably made from Teesside’s other
great future export, Quorn) by robot butlers
that looked like the aliens in the Smash
adverts.
Exports from Teesside shaped the way
the world thought the 21st century would
look.
Sadly, it hasn’t turned out to be quite so
cool and clean as it was in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, but that was hardly
our fault, was it?