Mark Armstrong - Swinging Britain: Fashion in the 1960s

The 1960s brought colour, vitality and a sense of freedom to British fashion and youth culture. Here the iconic Routemaster bus is used as a mobile boutique by Birds Paradise.

T HE EMPHASIS THAT British culture placed on youth, pleasure and consumption in the 1960s would leave an indelible mark on social mores and popular taste, and it stands as the most visually exciting decade in the history of twentieth-century Britain. The art, design, music and fashion of the period continue to elicit a potent nostalgia, not least for the new social and cultural freedoms they embodied. But the 1960s are also the most mythologised of decades; the Swinging Sixties were certainly not experienced by everyone even the definition of youth was highly variable according to class, gender and geography and, in attempting a neat classification of social and cultural history by decades, the 1960s cannot be entirely isolated but have to be understood as a significant crossroads for a post-war society still in search of a better future.

The greater affluence of the 1960s was determined by the economic turnaround of the latter years of the 1950s, after more than a decade of austerity, while its radical politics, particularly feminism, did not leave any real impression until the 1970s. But fashion in 1960s Britain was representative of just how accelerated cultural change could be; it symbolised the optimism and entrepreneurship of the baby-boomer generation as it came of age, its colourful inventiveness in vibrant relief against those earlier privations; and the British fashion industry and many of the creative industries with which it was now implicated, particularly music found a new international attention and eminence.

Young mods with a scooter, the symbol of their sense of freedom.

The initial tremors of what would become the youthquake of the 1960s came with the emergence of the teenager in the previous decade. Incarnate in Britain first as the Teddy boy, the teenager was a symbol of the growing distinction between the generations, and with increased economic means, in a time of almost full employment, teenagers were identifiable as a lucrative consumer market. But it was their peers who gave young people what they wanted, and a new breed of designers and retailers was soon at the helm of British fashion. When twenty-one-year-old Mary Quant opened her first boutique, Bazaar, in 1955, in the Kings Road, London, she established something of a template for other young designers, however quixotic. Quant had much of the stock made up overnight in her Chelsea bedsit, ready for the next day, and bought fabric by the yard from Harrods. Such youthful enterprise would later pulsate through Carnaby Street and its independent boutiques, and the most remembered face of British fashion in the decade, Twiggy, began her modelling career when she was only sixteen.

Twiggy, with her own range of mini-dresses.

The pace and experimentation that were now driving fashion echoed the desire of young people for change; for many, their lives would be very different from those of their parents, and in 1960s Britain fashion would reflect social and cultural change in an unprecedented way. While comparisons with the 1920s can sometimes be made between the young Flapper freed from restrictive dress, wearing makeup and bobbed hair, and the young urbane independent woman in her Quant mini-skirt the 1960s were singular in the opportunities and choices they provided young people. While there were certainly ambiguities for instance, in regard to the permissive 1960s, marriage was not as instantly unfashionable among young people as is often thought this was, most particularly, a decade in which the extraordinary changes in fashion and style, and in attitudes towards the body, expressed shifting concepts of individuality and identity in a newly consumerist culture.

Images of young people shopping in Kings Road boutiques were plentiful in the media.

T HE 1960s were ushered in with much media reflection on the affluence that was now apparent in Britain. In September 1959 the society magazine Queen ran a feature entitled Boom, in which the journalist asked, When did you last hear the word austerity? and suggested there was more money in Britain than ever before. The country was said to have launched into an age of unparalleled lavish living. It came unobtrusively. But now, you are living in a new world. Citing a comprehensive set of economic facts and figures, the article claimed that Britain was the worlds largest importer of champagne, that advertising was growing more than ever, and that no other retail trade had expanded quite so massively as hairdressing. Britain was, it seemed, becoming a nation of consumers; self-indulgence and the pleasures of spending were paramount, as the exigencies of post-war austerity and the spirit of patriotism it had elicited seemed now to be fading.

Absent from Queens article, however, was any mention of the fashion industry. Indeed, at the start of the 1960s, British fashion showed little sign of the international ascendancy it would soon gain, to become the arbiter of youthful innovation and taste. While Mary Quant had first set up shop in 1955, her name was not yet the global industry that it would become, and Carnaby Street was far from swinging. But the belief in this new affluence whatever the realities of wealth and poverty in a country still much stratified, socially, economically and geographically would dominate the culture and politics of late-1950s Britain. Prime Minister Harold Macmillans memorable claim, in 1957, that most of our people have never had it so good seemed a suitable measure of Britains increasingly affluent society and would become the banner of the Conservatives successful 1959 election campaign.

Though Britains economy had not grown as fast as those of its economic rivals, particularly Germany and Japan, it was now more than ever part of a global economy, having turned from austerity to growth with the boost of Marshall Plan aid in the post-war years. With almost full employment, the increasing availability of consumer goods, and the security of the new welfare state, the division between rich and poor certainly seemed diminished, and the cultural renaissance of 1960s Britain, in which the youthful pleasures of fashion and music were central, helped forge a new national identity. Britain was in transition between an industrial and a post-industrial economy.

Incomes had not only risen significantly through the 1950s they had almost doubled by the end of the decade but taxes had fallen. For the baby-boomer generation, born during or just after the war, the austerity of the 1950s gave way, just as it came of age, to an amplified world of consumerist pleasures. Through consumption, class mobility now seemed possible, something that the image of the working-class Teddy boys had first hinted at, in their fine Edwardian-style tailoring. The very idea of good taste would be challenged not only by the colourful and confrontational fashion design of the 1960s, but by the democratisation it embodied and the emboldened social behaviours, particularly of young women, that it further encouraged.