Why are penny lane coats called penny lane?
THE ORIGINS OF THE NAME
The name comes from the 2000 movie “Almost famous” where a main heroine – a young 70's hippieish girl named Penny Lane – has a a long overcoat with a lush shearling collar and cuffs. The movie's costume designer Betsy Heimann designed the legendary coat with having two fashion genetics in mind.
The Penny Lane Coat is the Ultimate Y2K Winter Staple
First invented in Afghanistan around the 1920s, it became known as the Afghan coat. By the late 1960s, the garment was a trademark of the hippie fashion scene in the west.
The coat was inspired by a classic, '20s opera coat, Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, and mostly the character that Cameron [Crowe] so beautifully wrote. We set up a workroom where certain people worked on the collar and certain people worked on the body of the coat.
"As Mayor of City let me be clear the name of Penny Lane is not being changed.
In the end, no streets were renamed; instead, plaques explaining the history of their names were installed. The International Slavery Museum, however, did include Penny Lane in an exhibit of streets named after slave traders.
These coats became a craze with extraordinary longevity. “Afghans”, as they were often called, were worn by many celebrities through the late 1960s. Then, for the best part of a decade, they became standard youth clothing — an archetypal hippie garment and emblem of the counterculture.
According to a 1975 edition of The Mariner's Mirror, the term "pea coat" originated from the Dutch or West Frisian word pijjekker or pijjakker, in which pij referred to the type of cloth used, a coarse kind of twilled blue cloth with a nap on one side. Jakker designates a man's short, heavy coat.
As its name would suggest, the chore coat was used for 'chores' like farming and laboring and worn by the working person, just like it was in France. The chore coats of America weren't made of the same rich blue as their french cousins, but the construction remained much the same.
Penny Lane was of course made famous by The Beatles song of that name, released in 1967. John Lennon and Paul McCartney used to meet at Penny Lane to catch a bus into town.
Near the close of Almost Famous, after Penny Lane has gone through a torrid affair with an up-and-coming guitar player, Russell Hammond (played by Billy Crudup), he breaks her heart, infamously trading her away in a poker game to Humble Pie for $50 and a case of Heineken.
Who owns Penny Lane?
As of 2009, Catherine Holmes à Court-Mather was still the copyright owner of “Penny Lane”, which is one of the few Lennon–McCartney songs not owned by Sony Music Publishing.