that look more rockabilly
that are swing dancing, and then there’s a couple of other people dressed in their forties suits.”
Wearing retro clothes, however, also became a form of rebellion for the group, no matter how oxymoronic the concept seems.
As the edges of modern fashion swung ever more extreme—to multiple piercings and tattoos—wearing a swing-era outfit was a
way of being surprisingly different. And the more the Club Deluxe crowd learned about the old clothes, the more they fell
in love with their style, their quality, and their timelessness. Aficionados soon became experts, knowing, for instance, to
look for “Union Made” labels and figuring out what distinguishes a 1942 suit from a 1947 piece. “It started off as a culture
that was based around this concept of America,” says
Swing Time
publisher Michael Moss. “A lot of people were gathering together and sharing these Americana discoveries, be it music or
salt and pepper shakers from the thirties or old cars or movies or books or old clothes. It formed this retro community that
wasn’t defined. It was just as much a forties thing as a fifties rockabilly thing as a sixties lounge thing. All these different
subcultures were forming around the Deluxe around 1991.”
Into this retro crowd stumbled the Royal Crown Revue. “It was surprising. Here was this bunch of people who were into the
music and had all the clothes, who were living it real hard-core, and yet they didn’t have a band in the scene,” remembers
RCR’s Achor. The band’s first shows in San Francisco galvanized, electrified, and inspired the Deluxe crowd. “Seeing the Royal
Crown was definitely my most memorable night. They really had everything down, from the music to the suits to the matching
guitars. They were just awesome,” recalls Okin. Adds Johnny Boyd, lead singer of the hugely popular band Indigo Swing, “The whole thing started for me when I saw them at the Deluxe.”
“That was the moment when it started to be a swing culture,” says
Swing Time’s
Moss. “Suddenly there was a band that fit the scene perfectly.” Overnight, San Francisco became the epicenter of the swing
revival, eventually becoming the city with the best vintage stores, the home of
Swing Time,
and the place where the first book on swing, V. Vale’s jam-packed
Swing! The New Retro Renaissance,
was published. All the pieces of the revival were in place, except one: the dancing.
BEGINNING THE BEGUINE — AGAIN
In the early eighties the original spirit of the Savoy was a distant memory. The dance that had swept the country in the thirties
with its originality and exuberance had by the fifties become a white-bread mishmash of Lindy moves known only as the jitterbug.
“The Lindy Hop was an extinct word. Nobody said that word,” says Erin Stevens of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association.
And by the latter part of the century, that American Bandstand-style swing had been diluted even further, the dance taught
in the majority of ballrooms a pale shadow of the original Lindy Hop. “There was no kind of understanding that black people
had any involvement in it,” says Ryan Francois, a champion dancer and teacher who began Lindy Hopping in London in the early
eighties. “Media culture had taught me that all this stuff happened in the fifties with white bobby-soxers and in the forties
with the GIs.” A black man himself, Francois, like many who rediscovered the Lindy, first glimpsed the dance’s African-American
origins watching old movies like
Hellzapoppiri’
and
A Day at the Races,
which had scenes of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in action. “I remember thinking not only did black people do this stuff, I had
never seen it done that well,” he adds. Another now-world-famous teacher, Jonathan Bixby, remembers staying up late on the
phone with his partner Sylvia Sykes to watch the movie
Buck Privates,
an Abbott and Costello movie with one dance sequence
that are swing dancing, and then there’s a couple of other people dressed in their forties suits.”
Wearing retro clothes, however, also became a form of rebellion for the group, no matter how oxymoronic the concept seems.
As the edges of modern fashion swung ever more extreme—to multiple piercings and tattoos—wearing a swing-era outfit was a
way of being surprisingly different. And the more the Club Deluxe crowd learned about the old clothes, the more they fell
in love with their style, their quality, and their timelessness. Aficionados soon became experts, knowing, for instance, to
look for “Union Made” labels and figuring out what distinguishes a 1942 suit from a 1947 piece. “It started off as a culture
that was based around this concept of America,” says
Swing Time
publisher Michael Moss. “A lot of people were gathering together and sharing these Americana discoveries, be it music or
salt and pepper shakers from the thirties or old cars or movies or books or old clothes. It formed this retro community that
wasn’t defined. It was just as much a forties thing as a fifties rockabilly thing as a sixties lounge thing. All these different
subcultures were forming around the Deluxe around 1991.”
Into this retro crowd stumbled the Royal Crown Revue. “It was surprising. Here was this bunch of people who were into the
music and had all the clothes, who were living it real hard-core, and yet they didn’t have a band in the scene,” remembers
RCR’s Achor. The band’s first shows in San Francisco galvanized, electrified, and inspired the Deluxe crowd. “Seeing the Royal
Crown was definitely my most memorable night. They really had everything down, from the music to the suits to the matching
guitars. They were just awesome,” recalls Okin. Adds Johnny Boyd, lead singer of the hugely popular band Indigo Swing, “The whole thing started for me when I saw them at the Deluxe.”
“That was the moment when it started to be a swing culture,” says
Swing Time’s
Moss. “Suddenly there was a band that fit the scene perfectly.” Overnight, San Francisco became the epicenter of the swing
revival, eventually becoming the city with the best vintage stores, the home of
Swing Time,
and the place where the first book on swing, V. Vale’s jam-packed
Swing! The New Retro Renaissance,
was published. All the pieces of the revival were in place, except one: the dancing.
BEGINNING THE BEGUINE — AGAIN
In the early eighties the original spirit of the Savoy was a distant memory. The dance that had swept the country in the thirties
with its originality and exuberance had by the fifties become a white-bread mishmash of Lindy moves known only as the jitterbug.
“The Lindy Hop was an extinct word. Nobody said that word,” says Erin Stevens of the Pasadena Ballroom Dance Association.
And by the latter part of the century, that American Bandstand-style swing had been diluted even further, the dance taught
in the majority of ballrooms a pale shadow of the original Lindy Hop. “There was no kind of understanding that black people
had any involvement in it,” says Ryan Francois, a champion dancer and teacher who began Lindy Hopping in London in the early
eighties. “Media culture had taught me that all this stuff happened in the fifties with white bobby-soxers and in the forties
with the GIs.” A black man himself, Francois, like many who rediscovered the Lindy, first glimpsed the dance’s African-American
origins watching old movies like
Hellzapoppiri’
and
A Day at the Races,
which had scenes of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in action. “I remember thinking not only did black people do this stuff, I had
never seen it done that well,” he adds. Another now-world-famous teacher, Jonathan Bixby, remembers staying up late on the
phone with his partner Sylvia Sykes to watch the movie
Buck Privates,
an Abbott and Costello movie with one dance sequence
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