Subject: mod
Culture: English
Setting: youth scene, England 1960s
Evolution:
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
* Valentine 1995 p170
"The Mods were affluent, stylishly dressed youngsters that dominated the British rock-and-roll scene" ....
* Polhemus 1994 p51
"Within the broad spectrum of MacInnes's Absolute Beginners a key group were those who called themselves 'Modernists'. We have already seen how this styletribe emerged with the Cool School jazz musicians of New York in the early fifties as a reaction against the 'hot jazz' and gaudy style of the forties. We have also seen how by the mid-fifties the pavoneggiarsi of Italy extended this tendency into a total design aesthetic. But it was in Britain, at the end of the decade, that a small but fanatically dedicated band of Modernists transformed this style into a religion.
"In Absolute Beginners the Modernists are most precisely represented by the character known as the Dean, who has
college boy smooth cropped hair with burned-in parting, neat white Italian, rounded-collared shirt, short Roman jacket very tailored (two little vents, three buttons" no-turn-up narrow trousers with 17-inch bottoms absolute maximum, pointed-toe shoes, and a white mac lying folded by his side. [...]
"International in outlook, deliberately blurring traditional gender boundaries, and decidedly street-smart, these kids are ready for a brave new world.
"It is generally agreed that this new generation of British Modernists tended to come from lower-middle-class, often Jewish backgrounds. However, it is unlikely that individuals in question would have concerned themselves with such classifications -- for them (unlike Teddy Boys who explicitly saw themselves as working class), what mattered was not where you had come from but where you were going to.
"But while class was being downgraded as an issue, spending power (as in North America) was increasingly important. Unlike, for example, the Beats, these Absolute Beginners celebrated the new Consumer Age. Most people did, of course -- young and old -- in the second half of the 1950s. But for the Modernists, a desire to demonstrate affluence was always secondary to a desire to demonstrate good taste -- better to have one perfect suit than a dozen with the wrong number of buttons."
Costume
* Manchester Art Gallery > Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men's Fashion
"[....] From the 1950s the mod subculture and a new wave of tailors reinterpreted the traditions of English tailoring. The longevity of the suit is manifested in its popularity with contemporary fashion designers who reinvent traditional tailoring and play with concepts of masculinity." ...
* Cole/Lambert eds. 2021 p133 (Shaun Cole, "Casual subversion" p125-138)
"The first mods of the late 1950s and early 60s drew on continental European men's style, American Ivy League staples, such as button-down shirts, and an aspirational adoption of local tailors' skills. Chenoune notes that, by the mid-1960s, mods were 'exploit[ing] the "casual" end' of acceptable dress choices, including polo shirts and cardigans, being unable to afford the hand-made, or even off-the-peg, suits. Following a mass adoption and commercialisation of 'mod', many of the early originators, or 'faces', moved away from mod to adopt androgynous hippie or psychedelic styles, or returned to mod's more lower-class origins, becoming 'hard mods': they subsequently spawned the skinhead subculture."
* Miller 2011 p98-99a
"As [Dom] Phillips describes, 'Mod is about well-styled, working -class aspiration with an obsessive attention to detail: the right shoes, records, shirts, everything ... A wink of mod style works well for men in their thirties and forties'.
"Stanley Cohen has clearly established how mod style was one of the most commercially appealing subcultural looks in the 1960s, and it came to dominate both the subcultural landscape and subsequently mainstream dressing. Here, 'the rockers were left out of the race; they were unfashionable and unglamorous just because they appeared to be more class bound ... the Mods on the other hand made all the running and although the idiom they emerged from was real enough, it was commercial exploitation which made them completely dominant. This was the Mod era'.
"The commercial appeal of mod style was part of what Dick Hebdige identifies as a process by which 'each subculture moves through a cycle of resistance and diffusion ... Subcultural deviance is simultaneously rendered 'explicable' and meaningless in the classrooms, courts and media at the same time as the 'secret' objects of subcultural style are put on display in every high street record shop and chain store boutique. Stripped of its unwholesome connotations, the style becomes fit for public consumption'. As such, what was once outlawed becomes mainstream through its assimilation into consumer culture. Through this process, confrontational symbiosis begin to lose their potency.
"This move of subcultural style to mainstream fashion is part of what Ted Polhemus terms 'bubble up', an explanation for the cyclical nature of fashion change. While this was read as the sad but inevitable fate of subcultural style -- the emptying of politicized meaning from the looks and a watering down of its spectacular potential -- the move of mod style to the mainstream has clearly offered a model for the successful, stylish fashioning of the ageing male body. The Web site modculture.com dubs those who return to subcultural style later in life 'third-age mods'. For many of those who populated the pure subculture, style was the main remaining vestige of their participation, as Christ Hardy (age fifty-nine) says on the site: 'I'm a bit too old to be called a Mod now but I still like to dress nicely'.
"Thus, what was once a youth style actually offers a model for the successful, stylish fashioning of the ageing male body for many men: both for those who were part of the original subculture and equally for those who were not. The look works for these older men because, at its core, it centres not only on many of the traditional staples of the menswear wardrobe, but also on ways of fashioning the male body that hark back to the traditions of the dandy .... This is because the spectacular potential of mod style lies in its focus on quality, attention to detail and a certain nontraditional styling of traditional menswear garments: shirts, slim-cut trousers and sharp-cut suits." [references omitted]
