PX Helen Robinson, co-founder of PX, spoke to The Chap about how the shop was founded in the 1970s. There was a group of us in Leicester who dressed in a rather odd way. I met a guy called Steph Raynor, who sold and collected old tin plate toys and robots. We went around the country buying old stock from weird, forgotten shops that hadn’t changed since the fifties. Steph met John Kreivene, who sold fifties juke boxes from a stall in Antiquarius in the King’s Road. They started selling clothing from a stall in the basement of Antiquarius, then Don Letts became a sales assistant and it became Acme Attractions. I was running the workshop at Acme Surplus in Portobello Road, making new clothing out of vintage fabrics. We had the shoes made in Rushton in Northamptonshire. John wanted to open up a shop on the King’s Road, where Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood had their shop SEX. So they opened BOY on the King’s Road. John and Steph parted company and John kept BOY, and Steph and I went on to start PX a year later. Andrew Jaworski offered us a shop in James Street in Covent Garden, which was a wasteland then; there was nothing there. The central market building was boarded up, everything was owned and run by the GLC. There was only a pub and a greasy spoon café and the tube station didn’t open at weekends. The name for our shop came something Steph had heard about – Post Exchange on US army bases, the places you went to get things from back home that you couldn’t get abroad. We fitted out the shop with discarded stuff we
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found outside the old MI5 building in Curzon Street, when it closed and moved to the new building on the Thames – all this tubing and ducting and wire cages and an old clock, which was perfect because we wanted PX to look like a boiler room in a ship, a sort of Cold War chic. I met Steve Strange in a queue at the Embassy Club and he said, “Are you looking for a sales assistant?” He looked pretty bonkers, in Day-Glo orange with a gold headband. So he and Princess Julia came to work at the shop. Steve started wearing clothes from the shop; he was a good model and got everything for free. Steve came to me after he’d started Billy’s and said he couldn’t do his club there anymore. I knew this place on Queen Street called Blitz and I knew the guy who ran it, so I put Steve in touch with him. When the Blitz club started taking off, we’d moved to new premises on Endell Street and we were mobbed every day; we had to operate a one-in, one-out policy, as it was quite a small shop. There were other shops like Demob that people went to, but we didn’t talk to them. Everyone else was the enemy. The Blitz thing grew and grew, but we got a bit more detached from it and started doing our own look. We had a factory and machinists; everything was made in the UK. Then in the 90s I independently opened a new shop in Hoxton Square, before it was hip. When I closed that shop in the late 90s, people said to me, ‘How can you hang up your shears?’ and I said, ‘Just watch me.’ This industry sucks you dry, it’s bloodthirsty. Being part of that club scene, it’s really hungry and greedy. It’s like a capricious child that always needs to be fed. If you’re not giving it what it wants, they just say, ‘Oh, we don’t shop there any more.’ Helen now runs a lifestyle store in East Sussex SHOP 32-34 Norman Road Saint Leonards on Sea, East Sussex TN38 0EJ