March of the Mods

 

Sometimes you see an image which looks quite ordinary, but with a little background knowledge a fascinating story emerges. Take the chap on the cover of the knitting pattern below. He's clearly very pleased with his new knitted waistcoat, but check the other details: the small collar, the thin tie with bang up to date pattern and the neat, but stylish haircut. Our hero aspires to Mod style.

Similarly, check out the young man on the right. Banished are the chunky cable-knits, pipe and the general impatience for the arrival of middle age which were so often the hallmarks of the knitting pattern aimed at young men. Instead we see a close fit, a stylish  houndstooth check pattern and an air of youthful confidence and style. 

If you grew up in the seventies, as I did, there was always the feeling that the sixties was a huge party to which you weren’t invited. The music was better (sixties Soul and Jazz versus seventies Disco – no contest!), typography and graphics were crisp and sharp and Britain was the cultural epicentre of the world. The mens fashions, in particular, were wonderful: the sharp, fitted look a world away from the aircraft carrier lapels, massive collars and flared trousers which had looked good on John Lennon at the end of the sixties as a sort of ironic commentary on traditional tailoring, but on middle-aged men in the 70s looked ridiculous. 

Little wonder that by the end of the seventies popular culture scuttled back to the 1960s for its inspiration as quickly as was decently possible. 

The iconography of Mod was potentially even more excluding to outsiders than were the rest of the decade’s cultural touchstones. As well as the already insurmountable temporal challenges to those not equipped with a Tardis, geography also was a burly bouncer at the door. The centre of Mod culture had been Soho, where smart kids with disposable income and a sense of style and individuality were able to shop in the capital’s historic tailoring district. 

Mod’s inspiration came from the style of Modern Jazz artists such as Miles Davis(hence the term ‘Mod’) from Italian fashion styles, and also from the huge popularity of the James Bond novels. Mod was all about getting the fine details right, and a vital part of Ian Fleming’s literary style was to ground his increasingly outlandish plots with a mass of journalistic detail. This included everything that James Bond ate, drank, drove and wore. Finally Britain had a male icon to whom personal style was an important part of his personality, something dismissed with contempt by a previous generation of thriller writers as ‘effeminate’ and ‘foreign’.  Ian Fleming's snobbery and sartorial pecadillos such as bow ties and wearing short-sleeved Sea Island Cotton shirts with suits would be anathema to the Mods. His influence was, however, felt throughout the world.

Soho also had a strong gay scene, in an era when being found guilty of homosexual acts could easily result in a jail sentence and ruin. The early London Mods were smart enough to know that gay men were often very well turned-out and gravitated towards John Stephen, a young Glaswegian tailor who had emerged from the gay fashion scene, having worked for Vince Man Shop. Vince advertised pretty openly for a gay clientele, with adverts featuring well-built young men in nautical gear a generation before Jean-Paul Gaultier and Pierre et Gilles. Those models included in 1957 a young bodybuilder and aspiring actor by the name of Sean Connery.

Stephen and the Mods were a match made in heaven, and the proliferation of John Stephen boutiques in the area such as Domino Male, Mod Male and Male W1 established Carnaby Street as a world famous centre of street fashion, crystallising the move in fashion’s epicentre from the haute couture studios of Paris to vibrant, youthful, street fashions. The wealthy, for the first time, aspired to the hip styles of the working classes.

As the 1970s New Wave kids who turned to the sixties Mod scene for inspiration were rebelling against the styles of their parents and older siblings, so were the sixties kids rebelling against the wide trouser legs and padded shoulders of their dad’s double breasted suits, or the huge, impractical skirts and petticoats of big sister or mum. 

Of course, these were rebellions themselves in their day. Dads had been thoroughly sick of wearing tightly-fitted military uniforms, while Christian Dior’s introduction of voluptuous skirts paired with tailored jackets was met initially with scorn, then embraced by a generation of women as the style dominated high street fashions for years to come. 

One didn’t really have to live in London in the sixties to embrace Mod fashions. The look revolutionised high street fashion, and aspiring young men could shop at John Collier or Montague Burtons to get at least a facsimile of the Mod style. The march of the Mods led away from its London origins and towards suburban high streets and the catalogues of knitting pattern manufacturers. 

For an amusing example of this, click on the following link for a BBC documentary about the late seventies Mod revival. If you can get past the contemptuous attitude of the magnificently out of touch narrator, you will be treated to the sight of a group of South Yorkshire Mods, sneering in broad Yorkshire dialect their disapproval of these Johnny-come-lately London Mod revival types.

Nationwide Mod Revival