For roughly a hundred and fifty years, from the opening of the House of Worth in 1858 to the first King's Road collections of the middle 1960s, one city decided what women wore. Paris designed; New York, London, Milan, Buenos Aires, and Sydney translated. When the French houses showed a silhouette in February, the rest of the world stocked it for autumn.

Mod ended that. Not immediately, not completely, but permanently — in a way that Paris has never quite recovered from. The agent of the ending was a population of British teenagers, who in the years 1960 through 1966 developed a coherent wardrobe, a music, a scooter, a drug habit, and a retail strip of their own in London's Soho; and whose buying power, amplified by a British post-war economic boom and a media apparatus unusually willing to pay attention to them, pulled the centre of fashion gravity north-west across the Channel.

The silhouette they produced — the mini, the geometric shift, the high boot, the short sharp bob — was adopted within five years by Paris, New York, and every department store on earth. It is the single clearest instance in twentieth-century fashion of the street dictating to the atelier, rather than the reverse.

Origins

The word mod is short for modernist. In its original early-1960s usage it referred not to a fashion but to a musical taste: the small London subculture of teenagers who listened to American modern jazz — Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, the Blue Note catalogue — rather than the trad jazz or skiffle their older brothers preferred. By 1962 the term had migrated to describe not only the music but the wardrobe that went with it: Italian-cut suits bought at Burton's, narrow trousers, cuban-heeled boots, short haircuts, a clean shave, a Vespa or Lambretta scooter.

These were working-class boys from the London suburbs — clerks, draughtsmen's apprentices, shop assistants — whose post-war disposable income, for the first time in British history, exceeded what their fathers had earned at the same age. The economic historian Dominic Sandbrook has pointed out that the average British teenager in 1959 had roughly five times the real disposable income of the average teenager in 1939. That was the material basis of the subculture. The cultural basis was a refusal of the grey, rationed, class-bound Britain that their parents had inhabited.

The first mod womenswear shop was Mary Quant's Bazaar on the King's Road, opened in November 1955 — seven years before the word mod existed in the press. Quant's contribution was not the miniskirt itself (that came later, around 1964); it was the shop. Bazaar sold clothes designed for a specific kind of young woman, priced for her weekly wage, displayed with an irreverence that the department stores did not attempt. It was the first boutique in the modern sense.

The Style

Mod womenswear codified between 1964 and 1966 around six elements.

The miniskirt, raised progressively above the knee through 1964 and 1965 until, by late 1966, it sat eight inches above the knee — the height at which it has, broadly, remained. The historical honour of invention is contested between Quant and André Courrèges in Paris, both of whom arrived at the shape in 1964 by different routes. Quant claimed it was the street that invented it and she only sold it.

The geometric shift dress, usually sleeveless, cut straight from shoulder to hem, printed with colour-blocked squares, circles, or Op-art patterns. Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian dress of autumn 1965 was the couture answer; Quant's jersey shifts in Mary Quant's own daisy print were the high-street version.

The boot: knee-high, flat-heeled, in white, black, or patent vinyl. Courrèges's white go-go boot of 1964 is the originating artefact; by 1966 it was on every high street.

PVC and patent leather. The 1960s were the first decade in which plastic, plastic-coated cotton, and PVC became respectable fashion materials rather than waterproofing. Quant produced an entire rainwear line in clear PVC.

The Vidal Sassoon cut. Sassoon's five-point cut of 1963 and asymmetric bob of 1964 gave mod its head. Before Sassoon, British women's hair was weekly-set; after him, it was cut, to lie by geometry rather than by styling.

Flat sandals or T-bar shoes for day, patent-leather stilettos for evening. The heel was notably lower than in the New Look era — the mod silhouette walked.

The makeup was equally codified: a white lower-lid (achieved with a pale pencil applied directly on the waterline), a heavy Cleopatra black upper-line, false lashes top and bottom, pale matte lipstick. Twiggy — Lesley Hornby, a sixteen-year-old from Neasden who was photographed by Barry Lategan in 1966 — made this face, and the stick-thin body beneath it, the international reference point within six months. By 1967 she was the most photographed woman in the world.

Cultural Context

Three enabling conditions made Mod possible, and all three were British.

The first was economic. Post-war Britain, after a decade of rationing and austerity, entered a consumer boom in the late 1950s that continued through the middle 1960s. Average weekly wages for unmarried working people aged 15–25 rose sharply, and — because National Service had been abolished in 1960 — teenagers for the first time had three uninterrupted years of adolescent disposable income before adult responsibilities. This is the simplest material explanation for why the buying power, and the street visibility, existed.

The second was geographical. Carnaby Street, a single narrow lane in Soho, became between 1957 and 1965 the most densely-packed street of youth-oriented boutiques anywhere in the world. John Stephen, a twenty-three-year-old Glaswegian menswear retailer, opened his first shop there in 1957 and, by 1965, operated fifteen. The concentration produced its own gravitational effect: American tourists, then European tourists, began arriving on specifically Carnaby-oriented itineraries.

The third was musical. The Who (originally The High Numbers, a name invented by the band's mod manager Pete Meaden to signal their subcultural audience) crystallised the scene in 1965 with their first three singles. The Small Faces followed. The Beatles, by the time of Revolver in 1966, were dressing mod. When American music magazines began covering the London scene — Time magazine's April 1966 cover story, "London: The Swinging City," was the definitive moment — the circuit was complete: British teenagers were manufacturing a culture that American teenagers now wanted to consume.

The Paris couture houses, through 1964 and 1965, were slow to respond. Balenciaga remained resolutely hour-glass. Dior under Marc Bohan was cautious. The first Parisian response came from Courrèges, whose 1964 collection abandoned the waist, raised the hem, and introduced the white boot. Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian dress of 1965 followed. By 1966 Paris had capitulated.

Legacy

Mod's direct phase ended around 1967, when the subculture bifurcated: one half (the "smooth" mods) shaded toward hippie bohemianism; the other (the "hard" mods, working-class and chauvinist) mutated by 1969 into the skinhead subculture. Neither was recognisably Mod by 1970.

But the silhouette it produced — the mini, the shift, the high boot, the bob — has not left the vocabulary in the six decades since. It re-appears, in clean and citational form, in Courrèges revival collections, in Versace's autumn 2004, in Prada's spring 2018, in every designer's graduate-thesis shift dress.

The structural legacy is larger. Mod established, as a permanent industry reality, the boutique — a small shop with a tight point of view, selling a single designer's vision at a price a young professional could afford. Every independent retailer from the 1970s onward — Biba, Granny Takes a Trip, Fiorucci in Milan, Agnès b. in Paris — is a Mod-era descendant.

It established, too, the teenager as the central commercial target of the fashion industry. Before 1960 the international couture and high-street systems dressed, primarily, women between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. After 1966 they dressed, primarily, women between fifteen and thirty, with the rest of the market a derivative. That reorientation is permanent, and it is Mod's doing.

Related Reading

• Mary Quant — the boutique, the mini, the retail revolution.
• André Courrèges — the Paris answer.
• Pierre Cardin — the couture futurism that ran parallel.
• Yves Saint Laurent — the Mondrian dress and the couture response.

Sources & Further Reading

• Paolo Hewitt, The Soul Stylists: Six Decades of Modernism (Mainstream, 2000).
• Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool (Doubleday, 2002).
• Mary Quant, Quant by Quant (Cassell, 1966).
• Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Little, Brown, 2006).
• Victoria and Albert Museum, Mary Quant exhibition catalogue (V&A Publishing, 2019).