Feature by ALISTAIR McGOWN
The early 1970s was the craziest, most colourful time for British fashion, with the newly arrived colour TV acting as a shop window for this psychedelic explosion. It seemed as if Doctor Who’s designers were attempting to justify the colour licence fee on their own; eye-popping costumes brought vivid reds and purples, silks and dandified frills. And that was just the Doctor. The companions, meanwhile, wore vibrant hues that by the 1990s would sorely test colour-tape restoration engineers.
Cambridge University boffin Dr Liz Shaw (Caroline John) debuted in Spearhead from Space (1970) in an out. t that screamed ‘scientist’. A rust-coloured, zip-fronted wool coat, worn over a matching short-sleeved dress, sported four front panels of moulded blobs in shiny PVC, suggesting polymer chains or advanced compounds developed by lab-coated eggheads. The story started filming in September 1969, and this outfit looked back to the modernist mid-decade, a pre-Flower Power age of geometric design, clean lines and bold blocks of colour.