The Fool, The Beatles and the Psychedelic Sixties
Photo by Ronald Traeger, 1967
It is nearly impossible to reminisce about the swinging sixties without acknowledging the fashion that came out of that time. The birth of the mini dress, scalloped mini skirts, and long, flowy bell-sleeved garments. Perhaps one mainstay element that coursed through the fashion of the time was vibrant hues. One group of individuals that played an integral role in adding color to the world and blurring the lines between art and fashion was The Fool. Inspired by the happening hippie scene and the psychedelic music associated with the movement, The Fool was best known for their work with The Beatles, creating iconic album covers and stage designs for the legendary band — a trade that would establish their legacy as one of the leading art collectives of the era.
The Fool
Hailing from the Netherlands, The Fool was a Dutch art collective that contributed greatly to the psychedelic scene of the late 1960s. The group was formed in 1965 by a band of visionary young artists, consisting of Marijke Koger, Simon Posthuma, Yosha Leeger and Englishman Barry Finch (Leeger's fiancee). Koger was considered the 'leader' of the group, as her profound interest in graphic arts lead her to drop out of school at the age of 15 and open her own boutique, The Trend, by the age of 18. The space was offered to Koger by celebrity hairdresser Mario Wellman, who sought to bring the arts to the Prinsengracht canal, envisioning “a preparatory center for the appreciation of art forms.”
Together with schoolfriend friend Yosha Leeger, Koger would operate the Amsterdam shop that also included a gallery with artwork from Koger and Posthuma. “I launched a fashion line called ‘Flashing Fashion’ for the boutique, at that time influenced by Courreges’ spacesuits, Cardin and Op-Art textiles, also using our own unique eclectic mixture of colorful fabrics designs,” Koger writes. “Music by Bob Dylan, The Byrds and the Beach Boys blasting, the place was always crowded. Several of Mario’s wealthier clients had invested in the venture and things were off to a good start.”
Photos via Marijke Koger
In the summer of 1966, Koger and Posthuma made the move to Swinging London. After The Trend closed its doors, the pair made trips to Athens, Morocco, Madrid, and Ibiza, gaining inspiration for artwork and connecting with other high-profile creatives. One of Koger’s first works in Londontown was a psychedelic poster of Bob Dylan, commissioned by Barbara Hutton, who was a Dylan fanatic. “I also made the ‘Love Life’ and ‘Book a Trip’ images during that period, all in pen and India ink,” Koger shares. “At the time I was highly influenced by Aubrey Beardsley, Jan Toorop and most of all Alfonse Mucha. I love the flowing, elegant lines and style of ‘Art Nouveau’ that came easily to my own hand.”
Later in the year, Koger was inspired by the tarot card The Fool for its symbolic association of “the Cosmic Egg whence come all things into being and where all things return to. It is the supreme symbol of creative and cultural activities, as the analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung also maintained.” Soon, Koger’s artwork would catch the eye of Brian Epstein, who commissioned her to design programs for his rock concerts at the former Saville Theatre, the performers on the bill of which included burgeoning stars Jimi Hendrix and The Who.
“He loved the artwork I came up with that depicted Apollo & Athena attended by the nine muses: Clio-History, Euterpe-Music, Thalia-Comedy, Melpomene-Tragedy. Terpsichore-Dance, Erator-Love Poetry, Polymnia-Painting, Urania-Astronomy and Calliope-Epic Poetry. Thus it was printed for distribution at the concerts in a different color every week. Those Sunday concerts at the Saville continued with a long list of great bands and musicians until at last The Rolling Stones played there on December 21, 1969, after which it was sold!” Koger says. However, the fun that fate had in store for Koger and the rest of The Fool had only just begun.
Photos via Marijke Koger
The birth of rock’s most iconic guitar was also notably conceived during this time: The Fool SG. “By early 1967 we had befriended the charismatic Simon Hayes, owner of ‘Mayfair Public Relations,’ who represented among others Brian Epstein and Robert Stigwood, CREAM’s manager. Stigwood was looking to promote the power trio’s upcoming American tour in a bold and new way and had seen the poster I designed for Epstein’s Saville Theatre’s Sunday night rock concerts, which intrigued him and indirectly led to a commission.”
Koger discussed stage costumes and eye-catching graphic promotional material for the burgeoning English group. “When I suggested to Stigwood that it would be really cool to paint their instruments as well he was delighted and commissioned the lot on the spot.”
Altogether, The Fool had designed CREAM’s costumes, SG, Fender VI bass, drum head, and promotional booklet. “We used oil-based enamels, (now outlawed because of its lead content) which was a smooth-flowing paint medium,” Koger said. “I put the ‘CREAM’ logo I had designed in the center of Ginger’s bass drum, leaving the rest a heavenly cerulean blue color. Strangely, Jack’s painted Fender VI did not receive the same notoriety as the SG, I think partly because the sound Eric coaxed out of the SG was so unique by itself, what Eric called its ‘woman sound’ and of course, the lead guitar in any band is always center stage.”
Photos via Marijke Koger
The Beatles
After CREAM, came The Beatles. The Fool's connection with The Beatles began when Beatles assistant Mal Evans visited the collective after Paul McCartney and John Lennon expressed an interest in their “Saville Theatre” program cover artwork. Soon after, Ringo Starr and George Harrison would meet The Fool and strike up a creative friendship. “They invited us to the recording session party for ‘A Day in the Life’ at the EMI studio on Abbey Road on February 10, 1967, which was to be released as a single June 1st. I danced around with sparkles and blowing bubbles enjoying myself very much, it was great fun.”
The Fool's first notable collaboration with The Beatles was on the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, wherein they were commissioned to design the album cover. Though their sketch wouldn’t make the cover, and instead the inner sleeve, it still captures their signature psychedelic aesthetic.
Koger and Leega would later design clothes for Pattie and George to wear to the Monterey Pop Festival and the Fab Four’s outfits for their "‘Our World’ TV special, which they both featured in. Among the special items that the group commissioned them to paint were Lennon’s childhood piano and Harrison’s Kinfauns fireplace mural. “The mural portrayed George and Pattie as ‘Music Boy’ and ‘Flower Girl,’ as they lovingly called each other then, attended by a Yogi surrounded with an Aura of Light as the focal point to express their interest in Hinduism. We stayed at their lovely place about ten days to complete it,” Koger fondly shared.
When the Fab Four ventured into the hands-on creation of Apple Boutique, they were sure to include The Fool in their conversations of artistic plans for a reinvention of the three-story-high building’s bland curb appeal. “We met with the four of them and Brian Epstein in the upper floor offices and a general proposal was worked out that we would paint the building’s exterior and interior and design a manufactured ‘pret-a-porter’ boutique clothing line for ladies, men and children,'“ Koger writes. “Apple would also print some of our paintings as lithographs for sale at the venue.” Carnaby street culture proved to be a major source of influence on The Fool, incorporating vibrant colors that stood out.
When the boutique opened its doors on December 7, 1967, visitors were visually greeted by colors of the rainbow and a brightly beaming genie painted on the side of the building. “The Genie on the west wall of the Apple building came to me as a vision in a dream, representing a synthesis of the mythologies of different cultures and ethnicities, influenced by hallucinogens,” Koger stated. “I considered how to make everything happen in a timely manner so for the exterior I proposed to use the grid technique to transfer the design to the wall, the best choice for this design.” The exterior painting would be completed in one miraculous weekend by The Fool, with the assistance of local art students. Famously, the head-turning building would be the source of traffic jams.
“For the opening of the Apple Boutique by nightfall on December 7, 1967, we proceeded on foot from Montague Square with a parade of dressed up friends and their children playing drums, bells and flutes to Baker Street, not far away, to arrive at the Apple building which was bustling with famous and not so famous people drinking apple juice, music blaring, press cameras clicking away.”
Lithographs were offered to customers that displayed The Fool’s “A Is For Apple” piece, portraying a magician offering out an apple. Inside the shop, were free-handed murals done by Koger and Posthuma, while Koga and Leega would oversee all the clothing designs. Embracing inclusivity, the storefront windows displayed multi-ethnic mannequins — a strive that can also be seen in Apple’s photoshoots. “When the manufactured garments arrived we did some publicity photo shoots of the outfits with the photographers Ronald Traeger and Karl Ferris, modeled by Patti Boyd, Cynthia Lennon, Maureen Starsky, Jenny Boyd, Anke Ferris, Charlotte Martin and several other beautiful models.”
Apple had been designed with the intent of being a cultural hub for art shows, music nights, poetry readings, and the like. When a manager couldn’t be found and city council enforced a painting over of the exterior mural, Apple met its demise. Still, The Fool continued to work with The Beatles on their next project. The art collective was tapped to create costumes for the upcoming “Magical Mystery Tour” film.
“The movie was actually based on a real event that we experienced,” Koger reveals. “When we all drove in convoy to Brian Epstein’s party that summer we rode with John in the painted Phantom Rolls Royce, him playing Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” over and over. John decided to stop for a break when we were on top of a hill, the green rolling landscape around us pure Constable. There was no other traffic other than the Phantom, George’s Mini Cooper and two or three more sedate vehicles.
We were all having a drink, smoking and stretching our legs when suddenly out of nowhere a bus appeared over the horizon which came to a screeching halt and the Japanese tourists aboard started to climb out and descend on us screaming: The Beatles… the Beatles…we ran as fast as possible back to the vehicles and burnt rubber out of there… All in all, it was a blast!”
The Psychedelic Sixties
Despite the premature cessation of Apple, the sixties continued to swing and The Fool found themselves involved in yet another artistic venture. Film director Joe Massot had remembered his initial encounter with the artists in 1966, witnessing their painted Wonderwall armoire, and being taken aback by its striking combination of whimsy and psychedelia. He informed The Fool of his new film which was inspired largely by the armoire. The film would take its same name, with The Fool having a heavy hand in its set and costume designs. “[Massot] envisioned the movie as a psychedelic extravaganza of the London ‘60s scene and hired us for production designs, sets and costumes and to make an appearance in the film.”
Wonderwall would star Jane Birkin, Jack MacGowran, and Iain Quarrier. “Joe was keen to have George Harrison do the music score and it was at the opening of the Apple boutique on December 7, ’67, by our invitation, that they first met,” Koger wrote. “They talked together about George composing the music for Wonderwall and George was interested because it was an opportunity to have complete musical control and experiment with the Eastern musical influences he was studying and partial to.”
The Fool make their appearance during the film’s hazy party scene, with the group even recording a five-minute-long track with Harrison at Abbey Road studio. Of Jane Birkin’s reaction to the designed costumes, Koger says, “Beautiful sexy Jane was lovely and easy to work with, she liked the outfits and dresses Yosha and I created and wore them with panache.” An enlarged backdrop of The Fool’s romantic mural was spotlighted in the film as were several of their illustrated intermezzo cards that can be seen in-between certain scenes.
The Fool would continue to which became an iconic piece of art that perfectly captured the essence of the music and the era. In 1968, the group were hired to transform Hollywood’s Earl Carroll Theatre when it was renamed the Aquarius Theatre for the Los Angeles run of the musical Hair. They wrapped the exterior in a huge, day-glo mural—zodiac/Age-of-Aquarius imagery and mythic figures—that contemporary accounts called the largest mural in the world at the time. Elements included astrological symbols and even muses (e.g., “Urania”), done in the group’s signature rainbow palette.
“Since the Zeitgeist of ‘HAIR’ was synonymous with the ‘Age of Aquarius’ new age momentum it was all falling into place,” Koger reflected. “The marquee of the theater was ideal for a depiction of the astrological sign for Aquarius, the Waterman, surrounded by the signs of the Zodiac and its attending influences represented by the four ‘fixed’ zodiacal signs and the four elements: Taurus-Bull-Earth, Aquarius-Man-Air, Scorpio-Eagle-Water and Leo-Lion-Fire.”
“I proposed that the 70 foot high North wall, facing Sunset Boulevard, should have miscellaneous life size theatrical characters such as Acrobats, a Ballerina, a Juggler, Hamlet (with Michael’s face), Jimi Hendrix, a Fire-eater, Harlequin and a Belly dancer on varied background colors,” Koger said. “Everyone agreed so I drew the larger than life size so called ‘cartoons’ on paper to be transferred to the primed wall via the charcoal pounding method. Below the figures a continuum of the rainbow spectrum extended across the 100 foot long wall.”
Their monumental psychedelic mural in 1968 became more than stage décor — it was a signal flare for Los Angeles’ counterculture. At a time when Sunset Boulevard was already buzzing with rock clubs, posters, and boutiques, the radiant “Age of Aquarius” façade turned the theatre itself into a work of art. Its scale and cosmic imagery linked the city’s music, theater, and visual art scenes, blurring boundaries between performance space and cultural landmark.
For young artists and musicians in L.A., it showed how European psychedelic design could merge with the West Coast’s own experimental spirit. The Fool’s mural elevated commercial theater into a happening, and in doing so validated the idea that psychedelic art could be both public and monumental, not just confined to album covers or posters. The Aquarius became a touchstone where painters, set designers, and musicians crossed paths, feeding into a broader sense that art in Los Angeles could be immersive, collaborative, and socially transformative.
The Fool’s journey through the 1960s was as fleeting as it was dazzling, but their influence remains woven into the cultural fabric of the era. From painted guitars and boutique façades to sprawling murals and film sets, their work captured the essence of a generation in search of color, spirituality, and new forms of expression.
Much like the tarot card that inspired their name, The Fool embodied boundless creativity, risk-taking, and the leap into the unknown. In their art, fashion, and collaborations, they left behind more than psychedelic spectacle — they left a reminder that true innovation often comes from daring to step off the beaten path and embrace the magic of possibility.