1960's Mob Subculture Essay

1960’s Mod subculture
Mary Quant

The most important thing for one who works in fashion industry is to notice and observe social and cultural movements. Because fashion is a lifestyle that contains travel, communication, clothing, language, manners, food, our thinking and the way we look at various things. It reaches far beyond clothes and connects different cultures to give an opportunity to choose how to live our lives. For all the designers, marketers, retailers and anyone who works in fashion industry it is important to research different eras and generations. Therefore comes understanding how fashion will develop in near future as the only thing that affects it – is past.

Modernization and technological innovation strongly affected our
The power of television, commercials, magazines and ads is the strongest as it gives subliminal messages to our sub-conscious minds and people get obsessed with things that they never thought they will be. We look at celebrities as our role models, trying to copy their looks and even behavior. Keeping up with all the news about famous people, reading the latest fashion trends in the magazines and forgetting how to be different. We merge with environment that mass media is providing and become invisible, all the
74; p. 75) states in his book „Comparative Youth Culture“ that Mods were ‚originally called ‘modernists’ (a bebop phrase) they reflected the elegant dandyism found among young blacks in America. Tough, but reflecting the lower white-collar, upwardly mobile groups, their appearance was a polar opposite to their enemies, the class-bound, butch rockers. Both groups appeared in the early 1960s. The two images, as Nuttall (1969, p.333) states, are that ‘“Mod” meant effeminate, stuck up, emulating the middle classes, aspiring to be competitive, snobbish, phony, “Rocker” meant hopelessly naive, loutish, scruffy.’ The mods were suspect because they were too elegant, their dances too elaborate, their drug use—pills—too laid back. They were the pioneers of consumerism, inspiring Mary Quant and Carnaby Street. Their music was ska, West Indian popular music, although commercial spin-offs were the Who, and Rod (then the Mod) Stewart and the Faces. They were stratified into the art school, high camp version who reappeared in glamrock and new wave, wearing make-up and carrying purses; mainstream mods with suits, neat, narrow trousers and pointed shoes, accompanied by short-haired, dead-pan elegant girls; and scooter boys with their Italian motor scooters (a working-class sports car) covered in accessories and anoraks and wide