![[March 22, 1970] Fashion: The Mystical is Going Mainstream](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Mama-Cass-the-Fool-HAIR-party-1-672x372.png)
by Gwyn Conaway
It’s spring of 1970, and already I feel like the winds are fierce, pushing us apart along generational and political divides. In these uncertain times, I take comfort in one universal truth: the artists will always pave the way.
The Fool, Mama Cass, and the cast of HAIR at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles celebrating the completion of their exterior mural.
Future generations will look at this era and see not the stodgy powers in their twilight years, clinging to the rigamarole of a more conservative and unified time. This moment will be remembered by its photography, animation, filmmaking, and poets. The bright lights and psychedelic colors. The escapism and magical nostalgia. The music and camp.
There is no doubt that the great music-makers are the festival gods of the twentieth century. But what of the artists that made their image? Do we not remember Bacchus and Dionysus by the hands of the artists that sculpted and painted them?
The Aquarius Theatre boasted the world's largest mural in 1968, painted by Marijke Koger and other members of The Fool from Holland. The mural included painting rainbows on the parking arrows and curbs. Like the Art Nouveau and Rococo movements before it, I sometimes wonder if we're living in another total art movement and don't even realise.
As I listened to my records with their radical album sleeves in my Los Angeles home, I found myself reminiscing about the mural painted by The Fool on the Aquarius Theater on Broadway Street. The Fool was an art collective that broke up not long after their HAIR murals that year, but the impact they’ve had is astounding. The Chariot and The Apple are two boutiques, for example, that carry their showstopping mind trip aesthetic.
Marijke Koger, in particular, is prolific. She’s one of The Fool’s founding members and has remained in Los Angeles. Her work is primarily in painted objects such as Eric Clapton’s “The Fool” Gibson SG guitar, John Lennon’s piano, and George Harrison’s BMC Mini. She also designed numerous stage costumes and album covers.
The Fool designed the costumes and guitars for Eric Clapton's band called CREAM in 1967.
The Astrobeam collection was aimed at the whimsy of young girls and their imaginations. Marijke Koger insisted that the collection use her own rainbow scheme rather than something less expensive to mass produce.
Her color is a dizzying celebration of life and love that will follow young defiance into the seventies, no doubt. Her “Astrobeam” collection was in Macy’s and Nordstrom’s last year and appealed to young Angelinos with its rainbow sorbet color palette, a sort of happy retaliation to the cold lack of acceptance surrounding them. Koger's vibrant spirit comes through in every form of art she embarks on.
Interestingly, she crossed paths with psychedelic photographer, Karl Ferris when The Fool designed the costumes and lettering for the cover of The Hollies’s 1967 album Evolution, confirming the old adage that the world is smaller than it appears.
Ferris reimagined The Hollies' new sound in this album cover by having them push through a plastic sheet, giving it the feel of pushing through a psychedelic veil of the mind.
Karl Ferris is rightfully described as the inventor of psychedelic photography techniques, and the world has taken notice. His photography has graced the albums of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Hollies, and other gods of the music scene.
He has been particularly inspired by history. The Pre-Raphaelites of the Art Nouveau era and the Medieval periods both greatly inspired him as a boy. It’s especially obvious in his photography of Donovan and Jenny Boyd at Bodium Castle in 1967, which served as the album art for A Gift from a Flower to a Garden and its subsequent singles.
Wear Your Love Like Heaven is a single disc release from the A Gift from a Flower to a Garden album. The entire collection of photographs was first inspired by Ferris's youth cycling around the castles in the countryside.
Two other psychedelic shots in the collection play with the homemade aesthetic of the hippie movement when applied to the Medieval period and Medieval compositions of the divine triangle, catapulting musicians into the godly ranks.
This was of particular interest to me because of another rather influential artist, Sheilah Beckett. Beckett isn’t in the psychedelic scene, but her illustrations are full of imagination and allure. Specifically for children. She’s a children’s literature illustrator and the first woman artist at the Charles E. Cooper Studio when she was hired in 1942. Her work is playful and inspired by not only history but the current interests of the young and bold. The high contrast and frenetic aesthetic of the psychedelic movement lives in her work.
One of Sheilah Beckett's many masterful children's literature pieces. This is of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, which she painted in the 1954. Compare it to the psychedelic movement and you can see a strong through-line of imagination and color language associated with Medieval escapism, mysticism, and youthful rebellion.
The Fool's first album from 1968. Each of the members of the collective was represented by a tarot card they designed themselves. Note the medieval elements of their costumes, both above and in the album cover, bringing all three artists full-circle.
The music festival scene is less shocking than it was two or three years ago, but I don’t believe this is because its influence is fading away. To the contrary, I believe this rebellious movement is calcifying and going mainstream. The melted lettering, astrological themes, and cosmic palettes that were so defiant and niche will find their way onto wallpaper, teen magazines, and school supplies soon. Mark my words.
While some might find this to be a disappointing turn of events, I find it to be a victory. What better way to define the resistance to our horrors abroad and at home than with a brilliant explosion of life, color, and nostalgia? It will continue to reach impressionable minds and inspire their sense of rebellion for decades. Won’t that just tickle the conservative masses?
Maybe not, but it will sure tickle me.
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