D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A photographs by Mark Shaw of a woman named Joan Morse, who had a shop on the Upper East Side in the 1970s called À La Carte. Morse was known as “Tiger Morse” in those days, a kind of Andy Warhol–related character: the “in” crowd of hipsters with chesterfield collars and Levi’s 501s. I only knew of Morse back then because my friend Blair Sabol wrote a weekly column in the 1970s in the Village Voice called “Outside Fashion.” She wrote an especially memorable one called: “How To Get Waited on At Bloomingdale’s.” In those days, Bloomingdale’s was the center of retail shopping in New York. It was, in a word, a
Joan “Tiger” Morse, as photographed for LIFE by Mark Shaw
mecca for shoppers and those inclined, where thousands— men and women—visited frequently, even daily, just to see what was up and what was new. It was so busy that it was famously often difficult to find
someone to wait on you. In her piece, Blair wrote that Morse’s way of getting a salesperson’s attention was to dress up in a cowgirl suit (hat, skirt with fringe, holster and gun, and cowgirl boots) and
jump up on a counter and yell, “Where the fuck’s the manager?” Evidently it worked. That’s all I knew about Morse until this particular night when I stopped by to see the Mark Shaw photographs, which was a series of Morse during one of her buying trips to Thailand that he did for LIFE in 1962. Interestingly, there was no Dale Evans business about her in these photos. She was smartly dressed in the style of the day, and chic. She was game to take it all in. Morse, I learned, was really a woman of her time, or the moment known to those of us who were around as The Seventies. She’d been a deejay at
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