It was decided very early on that British fashion was dead – the make-do war years saw an end to domestic style and it was only with the gradual revival of the garment factories in the South and the importation of cheap American goods that a young Brit could even begin to accessorize. Fashion, as an outward symbol, came to define the Mods. While it became harder and harder for Britons to find comfort in a national mission of imperial glory, the sudden access to disposable income following the cash-short period between the Depression and war years allowed a new generation of young Britons to find outlets in the consumer lifestyle, and by extension, the world of self-expression through fashion.
The rousing imperial myths of earlier generations were simply in a post-Empire Britain. They were the inheritors of a crumbling empire that had just won the largest conflict in human history only to be regarded as irrelevant by the new world powers.
#Imperial glory mod mod#
It can, however, be agreed that the Mod was birthed in Southern England, and specifically around London amongst the young, disaffected working class. But for the purpose of this analysis, we have to look at the “original” Mod – the Mod of affect and rebellion before the commercialized gloss.Įven so, describing Mod fashion would be extremely difficult given the group’s continual reinvention (as fashion is wont to do). Popular conceptions of the Mod lifestyle have been indelibly colored by (much later) cultural depictions, from Phil Daniels in Quadrophenia, to a Mod-esque Babyshambles in Fuck Forever, and to the Mod-Foxes of The Mighty Boosh (and yes, I do count that as a relevant “cultural depiction”).
#Imperial glory mod mods#
This also meant that the Mods as a lifestyle-fashion could have only existed at that place and at that time. But that was the Mod of the camera and nostalgic reminiscence – the early Mods and the fashion they created was a rebellious cultural response to the despondency of society, a failure of Britain to live up to the promised myths that had sustained the nation, and a sudden and deliberate inversion of the social values of modern Britain through lifestyle, affect, and most importantly, fashion. Image: one says ‘Mod’, one imagines the fashion-obsessed young Londoner on her Vespa or Lambretta, indulging in speed and dancing the night away.
Being “Mod” captured what, retrospectively, Swinging London desperately wanted itself to be – to be young and look great being young.
Back in the near mythical days of “Swinging London”, the grand old city that Len Deighton proposed as “where the action really is” in his London Dossier of 1967, there was the unquestioned belief that the Mods, and being Mod, were the definitive way to dress, act, and be.
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