Paul McCartney buys Strawberry jackets from Wonder Workshop

In 1973 Paul McCartney contacted us for some Strawberry jackets for his first US Wings tour. ‘Sounds’, the leading music paper of the time printed its centre pages as a wall poster of Paul wearing the jacket. At the same time, all the music press photographed him in every which way possible and along with Paul the jackets popularity soured popularity soured – it soon became known as ‘The Strawberry Fields Jacket’. Now the number of jackets we could sell seemed to be limited only by how many we could produce. Paul ordered six jackets and he became a collector of our work. Since then, there’s been quite a few tributes to the Strawberry Jacket image but the most memorable was by Paul’s daughter Stella McCartney when she produced her Strawberry T-shirts for Chloe’ – she told us she loved the jacket and as a child she would sneak into Dad’s wardrobe and wear it. […]

The ‘Strawberry Fields Jacket’ was with Paul throughout the American tour and remained with him for his appearance on Top of the Pops the same year.

Molly led our Wonder Workshop Jacket making team with Carol Walsh and Pam Keats – Pam was a hopeless fan of Paul McCartney so when she was chosen to deliver Paul’s Tour Jackets we knew it would be more than a casual meeting. Pam was gone for days – she came back to applique some ‘Macca’ signatures on the fronts of the Jackets then never returned. She became Paul & Linda’s eternal Personal Assistant – designing and making their costumes and looking after their personal needs. Pam was a wonderfully stylish and generous woman who had just lost her very shortsighted boyfriend, so it was the perfect time for her to step into a new world where she would find complete appreciation of her talents and meet a new man – Wings guitarist Jimmy McCulloch.

From WONDER WORKSHOP: The Strawberry Jacket

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