Christine Fisher-Lathwell – Miss Pack window models
Christine: Everyboy went to Miss Pack on Saturdays.
Simon: Can you talk a little bit about Miss Pack then? I remember you touching on it before, and saying it was a popular hangout.
Christine: Yeah, it was fun really. The one thing we always tried to persuade Mrs Connett to do is to have a Coffee Bar upstairs but she wasn’t allowed to do anything. But she did become ill if I remember rightly. And we didn’t see her for a while, so it could be that Miss Pack perhaps didn’t have the lifeblood that it needed, and possibly that’s when they decided to close it, but I thought it was still open when Elizabeth Pack opened. But Miss Pack was great because I think the windows were changed every Friday so that on Saturday the people that … the girls would come in with their wages. I can’t remember whether they started selling some boy’s clothes upstairs, teenage boys clothes. And the shop itself I think the layout is probably still the same. But the layout had a full-length window. If this is the High Street, it had a full-length window along there and a window that went … that joined onto it without a dividing line that went round the corner as if it was going into the car park. And every week I would undress all of the models and of course they were all different types. We had Veruschka who I mentioned before, we had Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s girlfriend, you might not have heard of her …
Simon: I don’t know her.
Christine: … but she was a very famous model, and Twiggy and there was one more and I can’t … very tall, was it Naomi Campbell? I think it was Naomi Campbell.
Simon: Oh really, that early?
Christine: Yes, I’m pretty certain she was a black model. And they would all be taken out of the window with a wrap put round them because you weren’t allowed to look in the window with a naked model …
Simon: Even in Miss Pack being the sort of edgy version.
Christine: Even in Miss Pack. Yes, it was the times. And they were taken out because I needed to change the way they looked, so because you had Veruschka doing this and Twiggy doing this kind of thing, there had to be a change in the shape of the window in my eyes, so Veruschka might go in the slightly separate window, and you’d have maybe two models like a black and a white model and eventually I think they bought Adele Rootstein models, children’s models and they bought quite a lot and so they put some of them up in … we’d put them up in the Miss Pack window wearing teen clothes because we had teenagers as well as children, which was great because there really wasn’t anywhere in Ryde except for Marder’s down Union Street that sold teenage clothes.
