Making Time

MAKING TIME: THE RETRO-FORWARD LOGIC OF MOD STYLE

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Communication, Culture and Technology

By

Christine Jacqueline Feldman, B.A.

Washington, D.C. April 14, 2003

Copyright 2003 by Christine Jacqueline Feldman All Rights Reserved

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This dedication is threefold:

First, thanks to my family and friends who encouraged me to go to graduate school after many years away from the academic world.

Secondly, I would like to thank the wise and insightful people who helped make this thesis possible: Dr. Melissa Goldman, Dr. Diana Owen, and The Washington School.

Finally, and most importantly: this thesis is dedicated to my sister Marianna, who was born in the very Mod year of 1966 and forever shaped my worldview when she brought home The History of British Rock.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: AN INTRODUCTORY DOSSIER TO MOD STYLE.. 1 CHAPTER II: FORWARD INTO THE RETRO-FORWARD .......... 19 CHAPTER III: READY, STEADY, STILL GOING .............................. 40 CHAPTER IV: BUYING MOD ...................................................................... 59 CHAPTER V: THE KIDS ARE STILL ALRIGHT ................................ 79 CHAPTER VI: IS IT A MOD WORLD AFTER ALL?....................... 101 APPENDIX: INTERVIEW PARTICIPANTS ......................................... 124 WORKS CITED AND REFERENCED ...................................................... 127

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Chapter I: An Introductory Dossier to Mod Style In 1966 the British cultural critic George Melly wrote, “Pop culture admits neither past nor future” (7). As Melly wrote these words, a pop style known as “Mod” invited those who enjoyed it to focus on the present. However, since Mod actually merges the best of the past with hopeful projections for the future, the style challenges Melly’s notion of pop. Whether apparent in commercial or non-commercial manifestations today, Mod’s continued presence is based on an intricate collage of media texts from the 1960’s and beyond. Mod illustrates how Melly’s “country of now” is forged and how an eternal present is celebrated through this unique combination of influences (Melly 8).

In our contemporary “now,” still within the early years of the new millennium, and in a cultural landscape that theorists such as Fredric Jameson describe as created from “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (18), visions of the recent past continue to saturate the media. Photographs and film footage from the latter half of the twentieth century continue to bring a crisp immediacy with them. It is assumed, then, that photography allows for a more accurate simulation of the recent past. However, as these images recycle, they also become susceptible to new readings.

Sequels, movie remakes, and syndicated TV shows ala “Nick at Night,” propel the contemporary fascination with “repeat viewing.” This retrospection and media-based nostalgia creates an in-between space for pop culture as something both temporal and timeless.

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During the early to mid-1960’s, or the Mod sixties, there was a media-spin emphasizing a momentary, pop newness that undoubtedly sparked Melly’s theories.

Cultural and material capital rested in the hands of a large, youthful population. This was coupled with affluence brought on by a strong, post-WWII economy (Gardiner 133). TIME magazine went so far as to proclaim “The Young Generation,” its 1966 person of the year, also calling them “The Now Generation.” At a young age, this populous and highly anticipated generation reveled in the knowledge of their unique position. This acknowledgement of being “in the right place at the right time,” created an overly self-conscious focus on the present. As TIME wrote in January of 1967, “Theirs in an immediate philosophy, tailored to the immediacy of their lives. The young no longer feel that they are merely preparing for their life; they are living it” (“The Young Generation”). Somehow, even as their “golden youth” was in the process of unfolding, there was a constant awareness that whatever was happening to this “Now Generation” was destined to be special and memorable.

As the emphasis on youth culture continued to build during the 1960’s, the voice and vision of this generation was the first to be heavily recorded by many forms of mass media such as television, film, and radio. Author Don Tapscott describes how endless documentation followed this generation when he writes, “Television chronicled and amplified their presence […] Right in front of the baby boomers’ eyes, television turned youth itself into an event” (19). In 1987, an entire BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today was dedicated to the year 1967. In the 2

companion book of the same name, former Jefferson Airplane band member Paul Kantner describes 1967 as indicative of this dynamic period: “Something enveloped the whole world […] and it just exploded into a renaissance” (D. Taylor 25). Given this instantaneous idealization of the period, it seems as if young people then could already picture future documentaries made in their honor. In Fred Davis’s words, this generation “could […] envision themselves at a relatively distant point in the future looking back nostalgically” at these years (Yearning for Yesterday 12).

Today, further access to these texts can be easily retrieved through the Internet.

With many different media available through which they can channel, the genealogies of these images have grown more complex. As a result, the original narrative of these images tends to go lost, or is forever reinterpreted for today’s youth. Easily retrievable images of the Mod sixties period, accompanied by nostalgia for spirited, youthful times are given a boost not just by mediated images, but by remediated ones. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, define remediation as “the representation of one medium in another” (45). For instance, with Mod images today, it is not unusual to see TV images as photographs that are then placed on the Internet. This mediated remove is less important than the access to them and their direct impact on the viewer. Due to this immediacy, it is still possible to relate to an image as original, or “fresh,” even if it is one of numerous duplications.

How is it possible to feel close to vastly duplicated images? Walter Benjamin defines the “aura” of original art, as “a unique phenomenon of a distance however 3

close it may be.” This distance provides “cult value,” imbued with a nearly spiritual presence (“The Work of Art” 243). With the advent of photography, film, and now interactive media, this distance is collapsed but the aura remains. The object’s aura lures the viewer into a feeling of virtual intimacy. It is such with Mod enthusiasts today who relate to a forty-year-old style as if it had been created just a moment ago, and feels as if it has been made for their consumption alone. When The Who shout out “My Generation,” the Mod sixties are eclipsed by a greater, eternal moment of ecstatic youthfulness that transcends decades. Intrigued by the fact that many twentysomethings were simulating Mod sixties culture in contemporary Manhattan nightclubs, The New York Post ran an article in September 2002 on the phenomenon entitled “A Touch of Modness.” Musician, artist, and film producer Charles Wallace is quoted in the article saying that Mod “works with the New York nightlife--wide open and free” (Garvey). If these ideas of freedom and openness are linked to Mod style, then its appeal to youth today is not surprising.

Spying on Mod The most deliberate example of the Mod moment as forever present is in the metaphor of the 1960’s spy genre and its revival today. This particular genre, in both television and film, accentuated all the elements that made the Mod sixties what they were: an escalated level of fashion consciousness, the maturation of rock music, a globalization of youth culture, stylized technology, modernist design, pop art, new 4

concepts of gender, and a fascination with the future and outer space. With this heightened awareness of internationalism, youth culture, unabashed consumerism, and a love of everything new and modern, the early to mid-sixties was an era in which western culture’s fascination with the future and state-of-the-art living was a reoccurring theme in popular media. Coupled with innovation came a commodification and fetishization of technology. During the height of the Cold War, this fascination with technology enabled people to--in the words of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick-- “Stop worrying, and love the bomb” or, at least, live with it.

As 1960’s spy films revealed, hidden behind this obsession with youth culture and modern life were the uneasy bedfellows of tradition and innovation. Sometimes, this fused fashion with technology. For instance, the spy genre gave television viewers the opportunity to see The Avengers’ spy extraordinaire Emma Peel slither around in a leather cat suit and other Mod fashions, while her partner John Steed typically wore more traditional suits and bowler hats. Emma Peel’s fashions transformed her body into a streamlined weapon all its own, while John Steed’s dandified fashions usually hid secret, crime-fighting gadgets. In the case of James Bond, sophisticated style was wed with high tech gadgetry. Rather fussy in his refined tastes (as in his penchant for martinis “shaken, not stirred”) and holding a traditional, if secretive “government job,” Bond had no qualms in utilizing the latest gadgets to escape from his enemies, such as the quasi-space-age jetpack used at the beginning of 1965’s Thunderball.

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These projections of ultra-modernism given the realties of 1960’s technology seem as quaint as Disney’s Tommorowland vision of the future where most everything was made of plastic. There is also something playful and cartoonish about these images that suggest the science fiction of many years earlier. Contrastingly, today’s world offers gadgets galore to help shape us into wired-up, ueber-citizens of the future, and are less aesthetic and more functional. There are not many devices today that display the hoped-for Mod aesthetic save for perhaps, as Richard Barnes points out, Apple computers (“Introduction” 9). And, contemporary gadgetry’s appearance aside, machines today still primarily play the role of intermediaries for communication, as is the case with cell phones and the Internet. We are not, as predicted by Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, holding conversations with sentient machines themselves. In further contrast between Mod future visions and today’s reality, cyberspace has replaced the space race as a means for exploration, as interest in simulated, digital space has eclipsed that of the cosmic.

This genre, both in film and TV form, successfully completed its mission by aptly illustrating that modern living would be a colorful wave of style and excitement spurred by modern advances. This quintessentially Mod genre illustrated both that “Pop culture could be its own kind of art [and that there was a] belief that technology really could make our lives easier” (Zacharek 1). Perhaps this is why a recent article called “The Spies Who Thrilled Me” focuses solely on the spy films of the 1960’s as the most important in the genre. Interestingly, the fact that remakes of sixties 6

espionage films and television shows, such as Mission Impossible (1996) and The Avengers (1998), began cropping up so close to the new millennium paralleled a revived interest in the Mod style embedded in the original genre. Tipping-off this revival was the well-received release of Goldeneye (1995), the first Bond film since 1989. The then newly crowned James Bond--Pierce Brosnan--stepped into the shoes of the most infamous spy of all time; a role first made famous in, and still referential to, the Mod sixties aesthetic.

The contemporary definition of Mod itself remains somewhat mysterious and is hotly contested to this day. Is Mod only something from the 1960’s? Is Mod only applied to pop culture of British origin? Paralleling the many versions of James Bond over the last forty years, Mod has also been personified differently through the generations of its existence. In the history of Bond films, many actors have portrayed 007, and still it is Bond, the character, who is the true star (Seiler 12). Similarly, the concept of Mod as eternally youthful, innovative, streamlined, and new remains the nucleus for its many incarnations. Just as there might be Sean Connery enthusiasts, or those who cite Roger Moore as their favorite Bond, different generations of Mod culture fans, while defining it in various ways, still love what they love in the name of characteristics they recognize as Mod. Whether Mods today cite a 1960’s Kinks song, a reissued Volkswagen Beetle, or a pair of white leather boots as Mod, they remain variations on the same theme. As documented in a November 2002 article from

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Stoke-on-Trent, England’s The Sentinel newspaper, entitled “Revival Night For Mods of All Ages,” nineteen-year-old Warren Stubbs says, What people see as Mod has changed a lot over the years, but it keeps going on and on. I think a lot of people my age have got into [Mod] through Oasis who keep name-dropping these bands […] You start digging deeper and deeper and it all stops with Mod. (26) If Mod’s definition has evolved over the last forty years, it is, as Warren Stubbs says, necessary to “dig deeper.” As this thesis will show, exploring Mod’s roots will shed light on its eclectic manifestations today.

From the Swinging Sixties to Cool Britannia It is not surprising that while the Mod-tinged spy genre was making a comeback, the so-called Britpop music movement, featuring bands like Oasis and Blur--sounding as if they had just awoken from a thirty-year slumber--gained popularity as well. Other bands such as Pulp and Kula Shaker soon followed suit. In 1997 magazines such as Maclean’s began announcing that London was “swinging” again. And, with the help of young, charismatic Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair at its helm, England was once again “Cool Britannia:” the influential center of hip style (Wallace).

Meanwhile, there were other signs. The Beatles Anthology TV documentary was viewed by millions around the world, and the appearance of mid-1960’s period 8

films like the independent Grace of My Heart (1996) and the more commercial That Thing You Do (1995), reintroduced mid-sixties imagery back into mass culture like a strangely familiar spy from the past. As Deborah Cartmell and I.Q. Hunter write in “Retrovisions: Historical Makeovers in Film and Literature,” remakes from the Mod period, like The Avengers, are “nostalgic for the style of the 1960’s rather than for the 60’s themselves” (6). This, too, holds true for enthusiasts of Mod style today.

It is precisely in this sense that the Austin Powers films (1997, 1999, and 2002) create stylistic nostalgia for a mix of both subcultural and commercial visions of 1960’s Mod. As I will outline in chapter four, the fusion of mainstream and alternative style is actually a recurring theme in the Mod narrative. Arguably, the camp quality of the Austin Powers films, and the obvious references to anything affiliated with Mod sixties England, are simply exaggeration and parody. While true in one sense, it is also true that faithful adoption of a past style such as Mod inherently displays a certain amount of self-parody and kitsch that is celebratory, rather than demeaning.

In her “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag underscores this idea by writing that camp is a “vision of the world in terms of style--but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” (279). For people to adopt a past style, whether it is obscure or commercialized (and historically, Mod has been both), automatically places them in this camp. When Mike Myers, as “international man of mystery” Austin Powers, uses antiquated (and specifically British) slang terms like “shag,” “switched on,” and “smashing,” they seem hopelessly 9

dated. For someone hearing this type of slang, not aware that there are Mod subcultures today, it must seem that what this language connotes could only exist in movies. As unbelievable as it may seem to some, there are still pockets of young people around the western world wearing Mod-style clothing and even using some of these terms as if they never went out of style.

To fully understand how Mod influenced the 1960’s spy genre, it is necessary to more carefully examine the perceptions of this style both in the past and present.

Regardless of how one encounters the term or idea of Mod, it does have an original narrative. The term Mod was originally attached to a British, youth subculture from the late fifties to very early sixties. There were certain codes that these Mods lived by that set them apart from other youth. For instance, with an emphasis on sharp, personal style, Mod teenage boys wore copies of European suits. At first glance it was somewhat difficult to distinguish them from the mainstream. Upon further examination, though, there was something definitely unusual about them. A defining characteristic of this “difference” was their excessive attention to minute style details.

And, since many Mods were working-class, they used hyper-chic style as a way to out-dress the upper-class gentlemen of the era.

With these intentions, Mods created a mixture of straight style and something more bohemian. To outsiders Mods were often just seen as super stylish and overly self-conscious. Author Tom Wolfe described them as the “noonday underground” set (qtd. in Hebdige, Subculture 53). Fleeing from boring clerical jobs during their lunch 10

break, Mods would frequent what The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein called “a cellarful of noise” (Du Noyer 24). In these underground bars Mods would listen to rock music and show off their latest clothes to like-minded friends. It was one of their many escapes from the normal working world, and a way to signify otherness.

Belonging to a subculture is similar to being part of a secret society. Once the word is out, something seems amiss--or at least, a juicy secret becomes fodder for collective consciousness. However distinct and separate the Mods aspired to be from mainstream youth, the worldwide success of The Beatles by early 1964 changed the way the word Mod was used. The early jazz and soul-music-collecting Mods dismissed The Beatles as bubblegum pop for pubescent girls. Nonetheless, with their worldwide success, The Beatles were suddenly associated with the term. This, in turn, added a new dimension to the definition of Mod. As Birmingham School theorist John Clarke writes, The Beatles era is one of the most dramatic examples of the way what was in origin subcultural style became transformed, through increasingly commercial organization and fashionable expropriation, into a pure ‘market’ or ‘consumer’ style. (187) Almost overnight Mod became the latest descriptor for a myriad of the era’s new attractions.

In All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counter-culture, Jonathan Green writes that the term Mod “was applied to anything new and shiny and supposedly 11

‘young’” (74). This was particularly true in the United States, where anything new and British was deemed as such, and where the class-consciousness of the original Mod subculture did not translate. In this constellation, Green groups The Beatles together with the success of London’s trendy shopping haven, Carnaby Street, and designer Mary Quant’s mini-skirts (74). Mod became associated with an unprecedented youth culture phenomenon, and therefore quickly mass-marketed. Today, Mod combines its subcultural and commercial faces. With the recent success of Austin Powers and his “shagadelic” world of ascots, velvet suits, and union jack imagery, it appears that the more commercialized face of Mod is the most familiar one. It is also this face that clearly influences new generations of “Post-Mods,” who, in various cycles since the late 1970’s, have attained subcultural status once again with signifiers of primarily the commercial (and, therefore, more easily identifiable) side of the phenomenon.

Mod Today Contemporary Mods in cities like San Francisco, London, Cologne, Stockholm, and New York are almost spy-like in their bohemian exclusivity. However, the commercial sector, probably thanks in part to Austin Powers and the success of Britpop, has adopted Mod imagery as well. Target Stores, tapping into the fact that their red and white pop art target logo is in fact a Mod signifier, ran their 1998 “Sign of the Times” commercial featuring the 1965 Petula Clark hit of the same name and go-go dancers in target motifs. Around the same time, The Gap ran their “Khaki 12

a-go-go” campaign featuring dancers doing “The Frug” to a 1960’s-sounding instrumental track called “Wild Elephants.” Interestingly, this song is actually from 1973 and was also featured on a compilation CD produced by the popular, Modthemed, London nightclub called the Blow-Up. The CD was marketed in the U.K. as containing the song “from the Gap advert.” As these examples illustrate, Mod distinguishes itself as something that has not only been torn between subcultural and mainstream identity from its inception, but also as something that has had various media manifestations within pop culture.

The reemergence of Mod today also suggests past and contemporary notions of modernity. The irony in this implication is that some of the most modern visions of the future have come from the past. This concept that I call retro-forward logic will be explained further in chapter two. When Mod first emerged during the early 60’s, it promised a youth-centric and energetic society based on playful, if sometimes excessive, material consumption. As the antithesis of the hippie, back-to-nature ethos that followed it, Mod was in fact preparing the world, as an Apple computers’ commercial recently put it, to “think different.” Mod, in a shiny, brilliant package of sleek lines, primary colors, and frenetic rock beats was a world that envisioned space stations, troglodyte homes, and televised phone conversations. The style encapsulated high modernism’s utopian dream of the ideal world.

If one examines the linear progression of Mod culture and its subcultural roots, it is clear that Mod presents itself as the harbinger of significant cultural 13

transformation. It is also the stylistic manifestation of modernity and change. As I have mentioned, there were many cultural and technological developments that began surfacing during this time. More importantly, though, is the fact that this era was and continues to be painted as a “renaissance,” or “golden age” by the media. In the words of TIME magazine, this period was perceived as one where “science and the knowledge explosion have armed [man] with more tools to choose his life pattern” (“The Young Generation”). Historically, revolutionary transformations in western culture usually entailed bloodshed. The Mod sixties defied this unwritten, cultural law.

Unlike most revolutionary periods, Mod times are still remembered in the present as suggestive of a party--a non-stop celebration of the modern world’s potential. In Jonathan Green’s words, this was a period “into which would be poured all the energies, all the creativity, all the hopes of a generation who foolishly but genuinely believed that they could change the world” (xiii). As chapter three will outline, in the minds of many Post-Mods, the Mod era has become symbolic for “the party” that youth today had the back luck to miss. Given this reason alone, it becomes clear why some young people still seek to simulate this particular impression of the past. Even as the seemingly absurd Austin Powers shouts out to all watching him, “Yeah, baby, yeah,” one begins to understand the resurgence of Mod and more specifically, why the sixties-born Mike Myers created this character.

The appeal of Mod today stems from the way the era and style has been historicized as both grand and on the brink of something unfathomably bigger. The 14

original Mod times certainly allude to modernity’s progress--but it is hard to imagine that the youthful and stylish movers and shakers of the Carnaby-era sixties expected war protests or the vast social upheaval that followed later in the decade. It is more likely that their idea of the future was more of the same. In other words, the future would be similar to the present, but an even better version. What could be more modern than the stark minimalism of modernist furniture and architecture offset with wild color schemes, op and pop art, rock music and fashion, or the ability to create and live-out alternative lifestyles?

Fashions aside, Jameson’s concept of bricolage definitely comes into play when examining Mod concepts of technology and the future with contemporary eyes.

With the post-September 11th world entering into war and other unknowns, the memory of Mod’s futuristic vision seems a more optimistic and defined dream of the future than our present, millennial reality. Is the “country of now” which Melly wrote of in 1966 lost? Or, is there some way to salvage the “nowness” of Mod and resurrect it to be our “now,” too? From the 1960’s up to the present, media images of the past have continued to fuel technological fantasies of the future. While moving toward the mysterious and portentous year 2000, 60’s visions of the millennium were still present in the mid-1990’s. Danny Hillis notes that it is hard to look to the future when the future has, within the recent past, been defined as the new millennium

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(qtd. in Lewis 218). Where do we go from here? Is the only way of finding a new future by revisiting the past? Until new cultural myths are built around the future, forward thinking remains somehow beholden the past.

If we learn from Fredric Jameson’s theories that we are living in a hybridization of past modern ideals, than the recurrence of, and attraction to, Mod makes perfect sense. In piecing together past reflections for the new millennium, one’s perceptions of the future are always influenced by the essence of past texts. Trying to make sense of the new state of the world, and hoping to make the past visions of the future real, the mid-90’s introduced the world to a new fluidity between man and machine, spurred by the innovative technologies emanating from the labs of Apple and Microsoft. With the introduction of the Internet (which has its origins in the sixties as well) and higher-speed personal computers, it appeared that the hoped-for high-tech gadgetry so aptly displayed in the spy films of the 1960’s was evolving into reality.

If the Mod of the 1960’s heralded a new age, or was in fact, as Shawn Levy describes, “the place where our modern world began” (5), then what are we to make of Mod’s current incarnations? Is Mod style today a reassertion of our love for the now-classic modern style celebrated during the 1960’s? I would like to suggest that Mod’s original manifestation was actually a preview for what is happening today.

Rather than the contemporary as postmodern, are we just now entering the real “Mod-ern times?” The spy films of the 1960’s allowed westerners to glory in a visualization of a newly playful consumer culture embodied in the fashion, modernist 16

designs, and pop music of the decade. If Utopia lay ahead, it was to be one where materialistic pleasures reached pinnacles of perfection, a world transformed into one “completely automated with sleek push button sliding panels and doors” (R. Barnes, “Introduction” 5). Neither James Bond nor Austin Powers have saved the world, but in more ways than obvious at first glance, we are living the 1960’s Mod future today.

Thesis Structure This thesis will explore three main issues regarding Mod as a phenomenon of both the past and present. First, this thesis examines the idea that Mod is a self-reflective style that looks to the past for clues to forward thinking. A second theme will address the way Mod has always been a style torn between subcultural values and commercial marketability. Finally, this thesis focuses on Mod’s sustained viability as a cultural phenomenon. Mod has been construed as the “classic” youth culture style, or has been painted as such by the media to a point where--coupled with its mediated presence--it still has the ability to influence young people today. The retro-forward logic of Mod style will be discussed at length in chapter two. Chapter three will focus on mediated versus lived experiences as the primary difference between Mods in the sixties and Mods today. Chapter four will look at the fusing of subcultural and commercial elements in Mod style, while Chapter five will closely examine fashion and music as primary examples of all of the three theories listed 17

above. Chapter six will serve as a summary for what has been discussed, but it will be no less stylish! Read on and see why Mod style still holds such sway over our supposedly postmodern world.

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Chapter II: Forward into the Retro-Forward The world of the 1960’s sought a new design for living. In the manifestation of Mod style, this cultural wish eventually surfaced in many facets of life such as music, fashion, architecture, film, and advertising. Often coupled with state-of-the-art designs and forward thinking, Mod style’s great irony is that it had a retrospective quality despite this future-oriented direction. At first, one can perhaps only think of the obviously modern styles that have nothing to do with the past. This era is most often associated with images of The Beatles’ music and clothes, “space age” bachelor pads of white and silver, or women in short, op-art skirts.

Although its origins were as a British, youth subculture, Mod eventually became the popular term associated with the dominant style impulses of the 1960’s. As TIME magazine pointed out in 1967, “What started out as a distinctively youthful sartorial revolt--drainpipe-trousered men, pant-suited or net-stockinged women, long hair on male and female alike--has been accepted by adults world over (“The Young Generation”). While all these forward thinking visions were associated with the Mods, this group was just as likely to ransack their grandparents closets and vintage stores for odd items of the past. Rock bands associated with the style, such as The Kinks, were not afraid to evoke Victoriana or the British Empire in their lyrics, nor were The Beatles opposed to introducing classical orchestration to their pop hits.

How could the same era that envisioned modular homes, bubble-shaped cars, and moon landings be one that was also enamored with the past? By dictionary 19

definition, Merriam-Webster supplies two meanings to Mod, which they identify as coming into the vernacular in 1964 and stemming from the word modern. In its adjective form, the primary definition of Mod is “relating to or being the characteristic style of 1960’s British youth culture.” However, it is also listed as synonymous to the words “hip” and “trendy” (“Mod”). Mod, as rooted in the word modern, indicates the contemporary. Nonetheless, the term also seems pointed at the future. Linked to youthful, postwar idealism, Mod conveyed a wishful thinking for present and future progress. This particular dictionary definition implies a youthful bent as well as aspirations towards modernity, yet its secondary meaning links it to obsolescence.

Mod’s association with all things ephemeral, or “trendy,” suggest that modernity’s trappings are easily transformed into “yesterday’s news.” Taking this into account, is the search for a modern ideal actually an old-fashioned notion?

Modernity’s ideal of progress through technology and innovation seems to have reached new highs during the last turn of the century, and so it is this era where Mod style actually has its roots. Innovative technologies from the late 1800s and early 1900s, such as photography and film, fundamentally changed the way lives and lifestyles were shared, viewed, and perceived. By mid-century, many aspects of popular culture were reflected in colorful magazine pages, films, and television programs. Whether linked today to pictures of Mary Quant’s mini skirts or James Bond films, sixties Mod, with its many easily recognizable images, could not have had the

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global impact on culture the way it did were it not for the vast dissemination of its “look” through reproduced imagery.

The Mod style, with its sharp architecture, fashion, music, and movies bespoke a yearning for the “latest and greatest” offerings of modern life. However, this attitude and style echoed and reflected the many changes that had been building since 1900.

For instance, postwar, British youth were most likely drawn to the materialism of Mod as a result of the advances in consumer culture in the earliest part of the twentieth century. Department stores opened earlier in the century had introduced many citizens to the joys of shopping and the gluttonous end-result of consumer culture.

The Mod attraction to motor scooters and amplified music also attests to the love affair between man and machine (not to mention speed) envisaged by the Italian Futurist art movement. The Futurist Manifesto, written in 1910, which illustrates the group’s impulse to “express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed” (Kern 120), seems prophetic of Mod culture’s frenzied pace. Writing on “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in 1904, Sociologist Georg Simmel anticipated that urban living would ultimately shape a new kind of person, one who struggles “to maintain independence and individuality of his existence against […] the external culture and technique of life” (324). As the Mod sixties exemplified, this search for individuality was expressed through fashion. Simmel predicted this too. In “Fashion” Simmel asserts that “the individual derives the satisfaction of knowing that as adopted by him [fashion] still represents something special and striking” (304). Given these turn of the 21

century “predictions,” it is no wonder that Mod arrived by mid-century. At the outset of the original subculture, Mods differentiated themselves from the British (and, primarily, adult) mainstream through their own distinct fashion and music. This attraction to “difference” and innovation continued to be the case as Mod became the term du jour to describe sixties style.

Ideologically there was a connection between people of the 1900s and the 1960’s due to their expectations and views of modernity. People of both periods saw modern life as materialistic, fast, individualistic, and urban. It is not surprising then that many of Mod’s distinctive fashions and philosophy call upon this earlier, modern period. Despite its assumed aesthetic of “hip living” and forward thinking, Mod has always had one eye on the past. Due to this continued dialogue between past and future, Mod does in fact appear forever modern. Today, for those who use Mod as either a subcultural or commercial expression, it has become the “classic” style of the here and now, even if it stems from the past. As this thesis will show, looking forward to Mod and modernity is also about looking back at former expectations of it.

Retro-Forward Logic: 1964 to 1924 to 2004 Let us rewind to the spring of 1966. It was during this time that Life magazine ran a cover story with the tagline reading: “Face It! Revolution in Male Clothes.” The photo on the cover features four Chicagoan teenage boys posing in what is, according to the subtitle, “new Mod gear.” With the Chicago Tribune building and several other 22

skyscrapers behind them, the boys--whether in a black turtleneck and checked pants, leaning on an umbrella and wearing a tartan cap, or garbed in striped, pegged trousers-are meant to represent this “revolution.” Inside, the article reveals much more than how “fab” and “gear” these new fashions are, or how men are finally able to cut loose from the traditional meanings of suits and ties. The article uncovers that much of this revolutionary spirit, while having an innovative energy all its own, is paradoxically also looking to the past for inspiration.

While Life highlights that this British-based fashion revolution has made it stateside, as per the cover and the opening page of the article, it quickly switches to the London scene from which it stems. And, in the pages that follow, references to the past tie it all together. One photo shows cousins Baron Nikolai Solovier and Jenny Phillips leaving a Chelsea-area coffeehouse called Guys and Dolls. Interestingly, Guys and Dolls is also the name of very successful 1950 Broadway musical about 1930’s gangsters and became a movie starring Marlon Brando in the 1955. The caption under the photo reads that Chelsea is a district in London “where clothes reflect a nostalgia for the styles of other eras,” adding that the young Baron is wearing “a nipped-in suit of his own design which looks as if it came right out of the broad-shouldered ‘30’s” (“The Guys Go All Out” 84). Flipping a couple of pages further into the article, the reader is introduced to a photo of a young artist named Neil Winterbottom. In his Edwardian style suit with cravat circa 1912, Winterbottom’s look is one that Life describes as popular among “England’s modern dandies” (88). The final page of the 23

article features a group photo of young friends “lunching in a turn-of-the-century pub,” with another line adding: “The latest in London--elegance from the past” (90).

At first glance, the Life magazine feature story--with its many descriptors of the past--contrasts sharply with futuristic images of the Mod sixties such as André Courrèges’ space-age, metallic mini dresses or Vidal Sassoon’s geometric hairstyles.

Indeed, these allusions to the past are remarkable considering how often the sixties have been documented as the pinnacle of modernist aesthetics and futuristic ideals, or “high modernism.” While the Mod sixties envisioned a technological future, where its youth were of the moment and looking towards the future, it was also a time that could not yet be fully imagined. Futuristic fashions aside, it was difficult to predict what modern citizens of the world were supposed to look like without referencing models from the past. This is in keeping with Fred Davis’s notion that “the distinguishing ‘looking back’ feature of nostalgia is retained in [a] forward projection of an as yet unrealized state” (12). Therefore, in Mod style, the synthesis of past and future created the happening now.

This synthesis was most pronounced in Mod fashion. This would hardly have surprised Georg Simmel. In 1904 he wrote, “Fashion always occupies the dividingline between the past and the future, and consequently conveys a stronger feeling of the present” (303). While Mary Quant was creating the shortest skirts any women had yet dared wear, designer Barbara Hulanicki, known for her London Biba boutiques and mail order catalog, designed affordable fashions that often smacked of the 1920’s 24

flapper look. By 1967 the success of the films Bonnie and Clyde and Thoroughly Modern Millie carried on this fascination with 1920’s chic. Even Mary Quant couldn’t resist completely, and had a line of make-up with the retro-twenties name of “Jeepers Peepers” (Levy 187). And, while the roaring twenties style proved a vital one during the Mod sixties, traditional images of the British Empire also resurfaced with a pop art makeover. A new enthusiasm for the Union Jack and the Royal Air Force’s target symbol became part and parcel of the Mod phenomenon. Where the flag had once meant oppression to thousands of people around the globe, these symbols of the old, British establishment now had a hip, youthful cachet that suggested fun rather than oppression.

And, while these more commercial manifestations of Mod obviously hint at past styles merging with contemporary looks, the adoption of retro fashions also affected the original Mod subculture. As Dick Hebdige vividly details, the early, male Mods sought to emulate the style of “Italian Mafiosi-type” ala Al Capone. These Mods adopted quasi-1920’s and 1930’s looks that provided with its “brooding menace [a] suitable background to the Mod’s ideal lifestyle” (“The Meaning of Mod” 89).

This ideal lifestyle included the thrills of fast living: money, sex, drinking, and drugs.

As Terry Rawlings chronicles it in 2000, “[Mod] was spawned in direct opposition to the drabness of the world [where Mods] lived in a twilight world of speed, clothes, music, and excitement” (118).

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Similarly, this retro-forward logic is evident in the early James Bond films. As 007, James Bond is always working for “her majesty’s secret service.” Therefore, while Sean Connery’s Bond is an icon of the Mod 1960’s with all his state of the art gadgetry, fine tailoring, and highly individualistic tastes, this character also represented old Britain--one that still embraced the monarchy and class system. This is made apparent in a scene from 1964’s Goldfinger. Bond, in embracing the elegance of Britain’s past, is a little out of step with contemporary sentiment when he says, “Drinking warm champagne is like listening to The Beatles without earplugs.”

In another reading, the tradition-minded James Bond is often confronted with technologically ueber-modern environments as evident in the films’ set design choices.

Ken Adam became famous for his signature Bond set designs. The sets were known to be angular, open, and airy rooms in keeping with modernist design trends. These designs were used for scenes set in exotic locations that underscored their “otherness” and was symbolic of 007’s jet-set lifestyle. The more traditional interiors, such as the Intelligence office where he receives assignments from his boss, M, were normally set in England. Here the tension between old and new worlds, or past and future, is made especially clear.

In a similar tack, TV’s The Avengers made use of an analogous motif. As Toby Miller points out, the traditional “gentleman spy,” John Steed, raced around the English countryside in a vintage Bentley, while his partner, Emma Peel, did so in the latest Lotus convertible. Importantly, he notes that the show sought to “broker the 26

modern and the traditional […] modernity [was] achieved in a stylistic embrace of art and technology” (61). Both the Bond films and The Avengers series were extremely popular media texts during the sixties, and therefore introduced this past meets future dialogue into the minds of millions.

In writing about the year 1966, George Melly offers insightful analysis of the era’s style trends when he writes, “Any movement is in fact partly retrospective, a summing up or codification of widely held ideas rather than a startling new insight and the shock it gives is really one of recognition” (19). This sentiment brings to mind also what Winston Churchill once said: “The further backward you look, the further forward you can see” (qtd. in Margolis 72). By adopting eclectic, past styles in their contemporary aesthetic, Mods were not simply living in nostalgia, but doing something which has become identified today as the ultimate in modern, if not postmodern: recycling the old into something new. This recycling of styles also added theatricality to the Mod look and paved the way for bolder pop visions such as those that leaned towards the space age. It was this merging of past with present styles that reflected a thrust towards the future--the mini skirt and moon boots (AKA go-go boots) for women and the collarless suit and flamboyantly colored shirts and pants for men.

Accompanying this wardrobe was an envisioned future society of supersonic jets, spaceships, and mega-computers.

In the middle of the twentieth century, after more than fifty years of intensified technological innovation and “progress,” Mod’s original appearance had everything to 27

do with its temporal positioning. In the most literal and linear sense, Mod was caught between the dueling forces of nostalgia for earlier, twentieth century modernity and the endless possibilities attributed to the approaching millennium. Not surprisingly, while the Mod sixties were inspired by earlier decades of the twentieth century, it steered clear of anything reminiscent of either World Wars. Despite nostalgic motifs in fashions, Astrid Kirchherr, German photographer and friend of The Beatles, says it was a time where all inspiration came from the future. “We didn’t want to get our inspirations from the past because our past was the War, was Hitler, was uniforms, so we were searching form something fresh and creative” (D. Barnes).

After two world wars and The Great Depression, the 1960’s was the first time in the twentieth century that European youth were able to fully celebrate their existence without a world crisis. As suggested by futuristic fashion and the fetishization of the space race, the progression of technology, which had previously been attached to industry and warfare, now became a reoccurring image in Mod’s playful aesthetic.

That Mod style originated in postwar Britain is of importance. Only one generation removed from surviving Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, England’s postwar youth was especially eager to look forward rather than back. By the end of World War II, Britain was indebted to the United States for more than three billion pounds and much of its infrastructure needed massive rebuilding. It is not surprising then that the British baby boomers were eager to leave that England behind, welcome the modern age, and become the new leaders of style. If the WWII generation of Brits had to wait in lines 28

for horseflesh and other noxious food products due to depleted resources, the generation following waited instead for the latest Beatles album and go-go boots because of a new affluence (Gardiner 31). As Shawn Levy describes, this transition was almost jarring--so much so that “it seemed like the sixties started on a single day: Everybody woke up and the monochrome world was suddenly a riot of color” (104).

While Mod style marveled at past progress, sans War, its vision of the future itself exhibits a retro-forward logic. Starting as early as the late nineteenth century, images of spaceships and technologically enhanced gadgetry became the standard vision of how people pictured “the future.” Jonathan Margolis describes how pulp magazines such as the 1920’s Amazing Stories graphically laid out models of the future that, to this day, we are still unable to shake. In his words, “Today’s view of the future as not merely science but gadget-dominated has its roots in these boys’ comics.

And that future may in a sense have been influenced a little by its fictional pre-publicity” (40).

Certainly, if the year 2000 was already fantasized about as early as the 1800’s, as Margolis’s book claims, the 1960’s were also treated as midway to this highly idealized turning point. With its moonlike Perisphere, General Motors’ highly popular Futurama exhibit, and its theme of “Building The World of Tomorrow,” the 1939 World’s Fair in New York emphasized the future. Exhibits featured bullet-like trains and cars, a robot named Elektro, and, of course, Futurama. GM’s Futurama speculated on the near future of 1960. It imagined it as a place with futuristic homes and 29

highways allowing cars the rocket-like speed of 100 miles per hour. This exhibit was reprised at the 1964 New York World’s Fair as Futurama II and took these ideas of the future into the new millennial world to come. Interestingly, the rocket-like cars, and futuristic homes shown in the original Futurama looked similar to those at the 1964 Fair. In looking at images from both World’s Fairs it seems that expectations of the future between 1939 and 1964 remained similar. However, it also seems plausible that the modernist leanings that emerged mid-century were an assumed necessary step to the new century and millennium. Was the Mod sixties seen as a bridge to the new century? The narration to 1964’s Futurama says it best: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future” (General Motors).

While the technological and futuristic bent of the Mod 1960’s is normally attributed to the space race, it also--as illustrated in the example of Futurama--had a lot to do with fantasies of the year 2000. It certainly was equated with unimagined leaps forward and was a visual presence in anything from popular films (2001, In Like Flint), TV shows (Lost in Space, The Jetsons), to fashions (André Courrèges’ and Pierre Cardin’s silver dresses and boots). Just as the closing decades of the nineteenth century speculated on what new photographic technologies could bring, the Mod sixties focused on the advent of a computer age. During, and by the end of the sixties, there were many “forecasting” books published predicting what the new century and millennium would have in store for the future citizens of the world. While some took a dystopian view predicting media-based dictatorships ala George Orwell’s 1984, others 30

envisioned a world in which environmental, nuclear, and racial tensions had been peacefully resolved due to a deft and positive utilization of technology.

In 1970, a popular book entitled Future Shock took a more dystopian view of things to come. Author Alvin Toffler speculated about the future of our commodity-based and globally domineering, western culture. Coming out of the 1960’s, it is obvious that his forecast had gestated within this period--referencing sixties’ icon Twiggy, and often referring to “hippies” in the book. Toffler describes a super-industrial society that has exchanged thinking of things in terms of permanence to transience. Not unlike Simmel’s view of urban life circa 1904, this world is one in which people are frazzled by a frantic pace of life and an overload of information. It is a world of ever more disposable plastics and paper dresses where “new” and “now” are ideals. Toffler writes, “From cardboard milk containers to the rockets that power space vehicles, products created for short-term or one-time use are becoming more numerous and crucial to our way of life” (49). Where the Mods celebrated the playfulness of consumption and transience, Toffler saw it as damaging to the future of modern life.

Like his titular comparison to the term “culture shock,” Toffler observes that the developed world was in the process of dealing with the “effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor” (12). The faster speed of the times, with its rock music, pop art, and technologically influenced fashions, reflected a cultural embrace of this potentially chaotic, consumer-based future. From this modern stew emerged George Melly’s hip, happening, pop now. In this context, and somewhat 31

ironically, “now” had not only to do with future thinking, but with futuristic fantasies based on nineteenth century science fiction and events like The 1939 World Fair’s Futurama. In the end, what happens culturally when visions of the future do not measure up? Are we in shock today that the Internet exists but jet packs and bubble cars do not?

From the eve of the twentieth century through its first years, there was a growing fascination with the fusion of man and machine, technologically advanced urban spaces, and utopian societies as illustrated by early science fiction tales by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. In this sense, there is a strong similarity between this period and the 1960’s. Norman Brosterman documents the turn of the century ideal with old posters and postcards that illustrate things like “One Hundred Years Hence--Roofed Cities, Fine Weather Assured” (1895) and “Copley Square, Boston in the Future” (1910) in his book Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth-Century Future (7, 14).

Most compelling about these images is the way predictions measured change and stasis in the future. For instance, many of these illustrations predicted that gadgetry, transportation, and architecture would change, but people’s clothing would not. Similarly, in the Mod sixties, despite the push toward modernity, it was hard to predict what new designs for living would come to pass. Two turn of the century illustrations in Brosterman’s book show women wearing bustle dresses while elevated trains and odd-looking airships float by in what is meant to be 1995 and 2010 respectively. Meanwhile, the then new medium of film helped further build and 32

illustrate ideas of the future. While the space race was still decades away, one of the first films produced was Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902). With space imagery prominent during the 1960’s, particularly in popular films and TV shows, it is possible to read even these visions as nostalgic because of their similarities to those designed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Even during the turn of he century, this futuristic thinking took on a campy, fetishized look that emerged stronger still in the sci-fi movies and books of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and reemerges as such even more so today. Brosterman writes, “The future was no longer just a concept or a place, it had become a style” (29). He goes on to suggest that this style was a dominant one in the mid-twentieth century and that The futuristic impulse managed to infiltrate every area of twentieth century culture as a gambit in advertising, for the plot lines in innumerable movies, classic radio shows, and television serials, as an expression of progress in automobiles, trains, and ocean liners, in the gratuitously swooping shapes of prewar toasters and postwar architecture, and in cold war military paranoia.

(29) Eventually this impulse towards the future became entangled with sixties Mod. Mod, linked to the future, “infiltrated” the imagination of mid-sixties popular culture. Mod’s retro-forward logic is where Jameson’s theories of periodization and the bricolaging of the past intersect with both George Melly’s insistence that pop culture is driven by an

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ever-ready “now” moment, and Alfred Toffler’s notion of an ever more transient culture.

In Mod, bits and pieces of earlier modernist moments and texts were incorporated into the present. Space-themed clothing and gadgets, suggested from earlier Sci-Fi films, were reintroduced into pop culture, given a contemporary spin, and marketed as the latest fad. Furthermore, if Toffler’s future entailed “throw-away” culture, it has also now come to include endless recycling. It could be said that today’s Mod lifestyle is reflected in Jameson’s theories regarding fragmentation. It is only through the collaging of disparate Mod fragments that contemporary Mods achieve a new understanding of the style today. In abandoning linear patterns, culture instead “reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage” (96). In this bricolage, Melly’s “now moment” is found. If the popular expression that “everything old is new again,” is true, then it is also more than likely that everything new is “old,” too.

The Retro-Forward: 2003 to 1963 to 2203 It is here where the Mod narrative itself propels into the future. The January 2003 issue of the fashion magazine W features one of the latest millennial “it girls,” actress Selma Blair, on its cover. The striking thing about the black and white photo is that Blair is made-up, according to the credits, to resemble famed sixties model Peggy Moffat. Even if one didn’t read the fine print, or understand the signifiers of fake 34

eyelashes and doe-eyed make-up, the tagline spells it out with the words, “Mod Times: The Sixties Rediscovered.” Reading further, the article accompanying the fashion shoot declares that the “swinging sixties” look “just happens to be […] this spring’s new trend” (Ginsberg 106). How can this be a new trend when it has already been the “new trend” for many past springs? In quoting a 1991 article by New York Times fashion critic Woody Hochswender, Fred Davis observes amusedly, “The cycles in fashion get shorter and shorter. How many times have the 60’s been revived since the 60’s?” (Fashion, Culture, and Identity 107).

Besides the irony that the “Mod look” has been a reoccurring “new trend” over the last few decades, the very sound of the word “Mod” reminds us of its modern pretenses. While it is clear from the aforementioned hints that the reader is to identify this image with a particular period of the sixties, “Mod” also reads shorthand for the terms modern, modernism, and modernity itself. If the Mods of the mid-sixties stepped back and revisited the stylistic elegance of the past to get to the future, then it is hardly surprising that the Mods today do the same. And, it is by this retro-forward logic that in simulating sixties Mod today, Post-Mods are authentic to the style itself. In adopting Mod style today, latter-day Mods are still formulating what it means to be modern. What does this new “now moment” require from the past and where does it lead? Until new visual concepts are built around what the future potentially offers the present, the past models of such an exercise, such as that of “Mod times,” will continue

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reappearing. With its discourse between the past and the future nothing as of yet has surpassed Mod’s unique vision.

In another contemporary example of this nostalgia for the past’s future, perhaps “the Mod future,” is Roman Coppola’s film CQ (2001). Set in 1969 Paris, the film is about a young filmmaker working on a futuristic spy film ala Roger Vadim’s Barbarella. What is most interesting about the film is not necessarily the revisiting of Mod spy films, but how the film envisions past notions of technology. In the movie there is a party scene where people are looking at a prototype video camera exclaiming, “This is the way we will make films in the future!” Also, in the same scene, are sounds of the Concorde passing overhead. The supersonic, deafening rumble make the party guests pause and listen in wonderment. These elements serve as reminders to viewers today that technology never lives up to the initial enthusiasm that created it--as is especially the case with the dangerous, overly expensive and polluting Concorde, which will be grounded indefinitely starting in October 2003 (Associated Press).

In still another scene, CQ’s protagonist Paul (Jeremy Davies), dreaming that he is with secret agent Dragonfly in her spaceship, asks her: “How will it end?” While his question is based on anxieties about finishing the awfully scripted film rather than concerns over the future, the spaceship setting is visually suggestive. During the Mod sixties, there was a pronounced self-consciousness that technology was hurtling people towards the future with increasing speed. What would this acceleration bring by the 36

new millennium? Since this is a question we are still grappling with, does the Mod past once again provide some illumination?

Today, when a person who was born in the 1970’s or 80’s wears clothes that attempt to duplicate the Mod look circa 1966, they are in fact doing something very Mod in and of itself. Just as the youth of Chelsea and Carnaby Street took old styles and fused them with new vitality and ideas, Post-Mods do the same with sixties style clothes. While it appears that these Post-Mods are disavowing contemporary trends they are also, by wearing these styles, reintroducing them as something again of the present. Most importantly, and without intentionally doing so, today’s Mods, in their adoption of what they see as a innovative, forward thinking style, are reviving a style that originally existed against the backdrop of preparing for the new millennium, or the Mod sixties future.

The nostalgia for Mod today is inherently for a time of forward thinking that, despite major events such as the Cold War, gets a rose-colored rewrite as being more optimistic than what we have today. The Jetsons-like sheen of silver clothing, accessories, and appliances seem playful and innocent in its preconception of the future. It would be easy to look at these retro-future visions as frivolous and ultimately inaccurate since; for instance, silver clothing never really took off as Mod times predicted. However, like science fiction in reverse, the envisioned Mod future of the 1960’s seems a more interesting place than our vision of the future. As Dick Hebdige writes, “Postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made 37

modernity bearable” (Hiding in the Light 195). What is our current view of the future anyway?

Amidst theories, such as Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” and a generally dismissive “everything’s been done” viewpoint, Mod stands out as an important cultural moment. In this unusual nostalgia for the past’s future, a potential is seen personified in Mod style that people continue to revisit. The innovation of the 1960’s appeals to postmodern culture in that it finds comfort in co-opting and “reliving” a time that exemplified and celebrated what it meant to be modern. Mod style precipitated and symbolized changes--particularly linked to technology--which the world actually experiences today. Therefore, the recall of 1960’s Mod in the twenty-first century suggests that this style--even forty years later--remains the ideal visual expression of what western culture deems “modern.” If this is the case, the Mod sixties--with its retro-forward thinking--was where the past and future met to invent what it meant to be a person of the modern era. In the final analysis, is it Mod’s retro-forward thinking that is key to our modernity?

While one who adopts the 1960’s view of “the future” could affect a postmodern perspective that all possible futures have been already imagined; this thesis offers a more optimistic reading of Mod’s incarnations today. A recent Wired article underscored the idea that creative visualization of the future in the past ultimately led to technological progress. The article quotes communication and media studies professor Kurt Lancaster as saying, “Young readers in the late nineteenth century were 38

so inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells that they became rocket scientists so they could invent the technology that could help them travel to other worlds” (Mayfield).

Much as nineteenth century and early twentieth century science fiction prepared the sixties for moon landings and space odysseys, Mod style imagined and then spawned today’s world of chic laptops and cell phones. Despite our lack of silver clothing or homes on the moon, today’s technologies come indirectly from these fantasies.

In this respect, Mod is a constant assertion of nowness, whether it stems from past ideals of the future or romanticized visions of history. In the years since the Mod period ended, the media has played a role in romanticizing its fashions and the era itself. In the next chapter I will explore how media coverage of the period slyly indoctrinated new generations with a longing for Mod style. In the words of Generation X author Douglas Coupland, there was suddenly a kind of legislated nostalgia that asked the question, “How can I be part of the 1960’s generation when I don’t even remember any of it? (47).” In the Walter Benjamin-coined “age of mechanical reproduction,” the answer to Coupland’s question is to be found in a vast archive of recycled media texts.

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Chapter III: Ready, Steady, Still Going The last chapter describes the retro-forward effect that is inherently part of Mod style. This chapter explores this logic in a different light: the contrast between living through an event versus vicariously experiencing it as a collage of media-generated events. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, images of 1960’s culture such as movies, art, music, and fashion were easily accessible, and this accessibility has continued up until the present. Professor Michael Bérubé’s 1999 article on popular culture for The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “The Elvis Costello Problem” describes a media landscape comprised of “oldies radio […] motion-picture ‘revivals’ and ‘remakes’ of practically every 1960’s sitcom […] and retrospective [TV] shows like Where Are They Now? and [VH1’s] Behind the Music” (B5). This constant recycling of images has led cultural critics in recent years, such as National Public Radio’s Susan Stamberg, to believe that there is a “paucity of anything fresh or original in contemporary pop culture” (Nelson). It is my contention that the sixties, painted by the media as a cultural renaissance, caused the public at large to believe the apex of modern, pop culture had long since passed.

In the years following the “swinging decade,” it has been virtually impossible to avoid references to the era in its many media manifestations. Michael Bérubé notes that while pop culture has normally been considered something ephemeral, something tied to the consumer ethic of “mov[ing] products quickly,” this view has begun to

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change. The last few decades have seen pop culture texts canonized into a kind of “classic popular culture” (B5). J. Brendan Williams, in his review of a 2001 photography exhibit in San Francisco’s Transamerica building entitled “Mods and Rockers: The Rise of Youth Culture,” remembers “how much the styles of the late 70’s and early 80’s youth culture actively imitated those presented [in the exhibit].” In light of this, the retelling of Mod, drawn from a rich visual archive, becomes the classic model for pop and youth culture today.

Due to both this canonization of the 1960’s and Mod culture’s reappearance, it is plausible that mass culture has not fully processed all the events that occurred during the 1960’s. The construction of a collective media memory, particularly, according to Arthur G. Neal, “becomes a form of dream time in which specific imagery becomes highly focused and events are experienced as only fragmentary, [emphasis added]” (121). A fine-tuned mythologizing of the 1960’s had a specific effect on those who grew up after this decade. A telling Salon.com article by Jamie Allen alludes to this constant media memory of the sixties, and how it influenced his perceptions of youth culture in the nineties. He describes that by college he and his friends would Sit around and talk about other times. I listened to Bob Dylan and wished I had been alive in the early 1960’s […] I had been bred to believe that I had been born at the wrong time, that nothing happened in my generation and that the last real cultural and artistic revolution was at least twenty years in the past.

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Based on this concept, as well as Douglas Coupland’s musing that 1960’s nostalgia has been forced upon people who have no real memories of the decade (47), it appears that post-sixties youth were conditioned to covet what was seen as youth’s golden age.

Thomas Frank writes that although he is “too young to remember much about the 1960’s,” he sees it as his “temporal homeland […] the beginning of the present, the birthplace of the styles and tastes and values that define our world” (ix). Likewise, Shawn Levy contributes to this mythologizing canon in his 2002 book Ready, Steady, Go: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, by describing the Mod sixties as “The party of all parties; the time of all times […] the seed of everything we’re about,” adding that “You hadda be there. You are [emphasis added]” (322). If, as Levy writes, we somehow still inhabit Mod times, I posit it is primarily media imagery that takes us there. It is the exposure to former media moments that recharges the force of these images--making them more than just dusty archives of a dead past.

Lived Versus Mediated Experiences In observing Mod and the media, there are two key differences between people who were Mods in the 1960’s and people who have identified with its style in the following decades. First, Mods in the sixties saw a reflection of their current youth culture within popular media forms, whereas latter-day Mods took media imagery from the sixties as a template for an aesthetic and youth scene they wished to recreate. As Los Angeles actor and musician Alex Baker (b. 1970) explains, “It’s the old testament 42

of pop culture. A lot of what they did we’ve been reinventing for the last forty years” (Interview 3 Jan. 2003). Secondly, Mod style became a recognizable force within the 1960’s, making it fairly easy for Mods to find communities as well as the consumer goods that supported their aesthetic. Since Mod style was quickly co-opted by dominant culture in the 1960’s, it was a style perched between subculture and commercial culture. This is perhaps most evident in today’s parallel worlds of Mod-themed fashion and design spreads in mainstream magazines like Vogue and Esquire and the pockets of young people around the globe who create their own underground Mod scene (Bowles, “It’s a Mod World,” Menkes). Today’s Mods have to make concerted efforts to find like-minded individuals and the accompanying material goods that reflect this lifestyle choice. Activities Post-Mods take on include scouring thrift stores for 1960’s clothing and furniture, scanning record shops for authentic vinyl editions of music from the era, and, since the mid 1990’s, surfing the Internet to find others who are fascinated by this culture. And, while today’s Mods are not subscribing to current mainstream youth culture, their “look”--thanks to years of commercial images of the style--still comes across as familiar to the public at large.

It is especially important to note that photographic images, in all their forms, play a large role in blurring the lines between past and present with regards to the evolution of Mod culture. The fact that photography can freeze a moment in time, allowing for endless reinterpretation, brings immediacy to the past that was absent in the years before its invention. Here, technology plays a crucial role in allowing the 43

past to be more immediate and accessible. It also makes it harder to distinguish between what is original and what is copied. It is John Frow’s opinion that “newsreel footage, the soundbite […] and archive-based documentary remove the past from its lived context to replay it within an electronic space of multiple possible worlds without ontological hierarchy or fixed relation” (219). Similarly, Joshua Meyrowitz notes, “electronic media, in general, have greatly changed the significance of physical presence in the experience of social events” (vii). In the years following the 1960’s, Mod style has been represented in various media whereby new generations of youth have been exposed to it, and consequently, have reformulated the aesthetic to suit their contemporary lives. The sharing of information through the Internet has become a large part of this reformulation. As British Mod David Steel (b. 1977) tells me, “Mailing lists and websites have brought so many people together, and also given us the opportunity to learn more about Mod from other people who you probably would never come across were it not for the Internet” (E-mail 8 Mar. 2003).

While Mods in the 1960’s took their style consciousness very seriously, their fashion was of the moment and therefore easily accessible. Even the Mods’ craving for older styles--like those of the 1920’s--were catered to by trendy designers of the day. With the exception of Jessika Madison’s recent Dada die Brucke clothing company (which will be described in detail in chapter five) and a handful of other contemporary resources, Post-Mods have had to look through thrift and vintage stores for original clothes from the era, or have designed their own clothing. Mods today find 44

themselves in a role that sixties Mods did not. In uncovering and referencing media images of the past, Post-Mods take on a role not unlike that of a cultural historian.

Those emulating the Mod culture of the 1960’s defer to past ideals of what it is to be modern and stylish because, like the Mods of the sixties realized, the definition of modernity is tenuous and eclectic at best. Because of this, the past modern ideal adds shape and definition to something uncertain like the present’s view of the future.

Musician Bart Davenport (b. 1969) notes that this attraction to past modernism might exist because Mods today can sometimes be afraid of anything that is actually modern. They are sort of like renaissance fair people if you think about it. I mean the sixties were such a long time ago […] like we’re living in the time of The Great Gatsby but we still have to keep reenacting the Civil War for kicks. (E-mail 26 Feb. 2003) Simply stated, when a past time period or text is romanticized; it takes on a whole new meaning in the present and becomes a period where flaws are less visible thanks to historical remove. More so than the printed word, environments combining photographic and aural media have shaped this idealized view of the Mod sixties.

Media images of the Mod past, highlighting its retro-forward thinking, have virtually instituted among latter-day Mods what Douglas Coupland calls now denial where it seems “The only time worth living is in the past and the only time that may ever be exciting again is the future” (47). It is then important to examine how Mod was perceived in the 1960’s and how the style has been reinterpreted since then.

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Where the Action is: Mod Culture in the 1960’s Those who actually lived through the 1960’s Mod era experienced the fashion and music first-hand with the media images simply documenting what was happening.

It is often remembered as a time that was decisively exciting for all who experienced it.

Mod’s adoption of the twentieth century’s most positive achievements combined with wishful, forward thinking helped shape this atmosphere. Poet Alan Ginsberg called this period a time where “There was an element of adolescence opening up and discovering the universe […] after the apocalypse of Hitler and the apocalypse of the Bomb, there was […] the rediscovery of joy and what it is to be alive” (D. Taylor 41).

In the now famous 1966 TIME magazine article cover story of “Swinging London” entitled “You Can Walk Across It On The Grass,” Piri Halasz documents a time and place “dominated by youth […] where “30% of its population is in the 15-34 age bracket” (30). With its eye on the youthful influence that dominated the period, it is clear that Halasz’s article succinctly captured Mod times as they were happening and made sure the word got out to the masses that they were in the throws of a unique cultural moment. Fast forward to 2002: Shawn Levy’s book, Ready, Steady Go, attempts to reconstruct and then deconstruct the scene that this article depicts as so vibrant and happening. Almost forty years later, Levy still has to ask how much of this article reflected the truth, and how much of it actually sowed the seeds for the Mod mythology that continues to be constructed?

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How do people who lived through Mod times remember it, and furthermore, how did the documentation of the time support its existence? Kevin Roberts, CEO for the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising group, worked for Mary Quant cosmetics in the late 1960’s. His first visual memory of Mod was at the Markham Arms pub on the King’s Road in London. He remembers seeing “a couple of teenagers in parkas on Vespas roar up to the pub. They had basin cut hairstyles [and] a peace symbol emblazoned on one parka and a Union Jack on the scooters” (E-mail 21 Jan. 2003). While Roberts remembers the peace sign connected to the Mods, news stories about the subculture did not usually describe a peace-loving gang. The Bank Holiday riot of 1964 in the small, coastal town of Clacton between Mods and their rival youth group, the Rockers, branded Mods violent thugs. Headlines in various British tabloids and newspapers such as “Wild Ones Invade Seaside--97 Arrests,” and “Riot Police Fly to Seaside,” were attached to the Mods (R. Barnes, Mods! 112-115). According to Terry Rawlings, subsequent news stories about the riots “painted the perpetuators of violence as ‘Vermin,’ [and] ‘Mentally Unstable’” (77). As Mod progressed from teen subculture to a style impulse within youth culture at large, this reputation softened.

Despite the negative media attention paid to the Bank Holiday riots involving a faction of Mods, TV shows like Britain’s Ready Steady Go (AKA RSG 1963-1966) and Shindig (1964-1966) in the United States, presented a tamer reflection of the burgeoning Mod scene. Every Friday night, with various rock and pop performers taking the stage, Ready, Steady, Go’s hostess Cathy McGowan would pipe up with the 47

show’s slogan, “The weekend starts here” (Levy 111). These shows helped validate the idea that there really was a vibrant Mod scene influencing youth culture. An online article by Johnnie Taylor, a Mod who had once appeared on the show, remembers the excitement of a television show that reflected the scene. As Taylor describes, the show became “a phenomenon overnight with all Mods talking about it.” The Halasz TIME article features a photograph of McGowan with its caption quoting her saying, “The war is over--the Mods have won.” This quote underscores the fact that Mod, rather than Rocker style, was adopted into the mainstream and was the one that eventually defined youth culture during this period. The leather pants, slick, greased hair, and motorcycles of the Rockers did not fit with the modernist, high-tech leanings of sixties culture, while Mod did.

Another media reflection of what was happening with the younger generation during these years is evident in the 1966 film Blow-Up. Filmed in London, Michelangelo Antonioni’s film captures the Mod moment at the pinnacle of its appeal.

While the film’s plot is that of a photographer, modeled after sixties “snapper” David Bailey, who finds himself in the thick of a murder mystery, the film also features Mod fashions and a foray into a rock club featuring The Yardbirds. An article by Peter Lev points to the fact that Mod culture is at the heart of the film to such an extent that The press releases on Blow-Up heavily emphasize the youth appeal of modern London ‘where teenage pop singing groups have their records sold in ships

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owned by people their own age, and photographers who have barely started showing drive Rolls Royces with radio telephones.’ (135) With all the media attention paid to them, it would be difficult to believe that 1960’s youth thought of their scene as anything other than extraordinary. How could they not be living during a special time?

Where the Action Was: Mod Media Imagery and Post-Mod Realities In the late eighties going into the early nineties, while mainstream culture had almost completely forgotten about Mod, a long-held underground interest in the aesthetics of the period remained. Mod has had different incarnations as expressed by the Mod revival in England and the U.S. in the late 70’s and early 80’s, as well as the slew of what were called “Paisley Underground” bands coming out of Los Angeles at roughly the same time. According to J. Brendan Williams, “The Paisley Underground craze poured from college radio [and] was so indebted to […] mass produced and expertly marketed images that in order to be ‘truly Mod’ one had to smoke the right cigarettes.” While “bohemian” or alternative subcultures existed long before the 1960’s, it is interesting that the contemporary Mod scene plays on media memories that many Post-Mods acquired during childhood. Although this is a form of nostalgia, it is not from directly lived experiences, but mediated ones. Nonetheless, this still creates “an emotional linkage to a specific period of time. The thrill of going back in time is to find something unique” (Lopiano-Misdom 9). It is also something more. As 49

Fred Davis explains, this is part of secondhand nostalgia, that is a “passed on reflection of their parents’ youth [that] already has been smoothed and prettified through the filter of the parent’s nostalgic memory” (Yearning for Yesterday 62). As I have shown, much of this cosmetic enhancement of the past can be attributed to media interpretations of the 1960’s.

Susan Sontag discusses the notion of an era’s sensibility as “perishable.” She posits, “One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior” (“Notes on Camp” 276). People who came of age in the 1970’s and 80’s, without necessarily being aware of it, were exposed to Mod style in the form of media texts whether in the form of record albums by bands like The Who or The Small Faces, Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and the James Bond films, or syndicated television programs like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) and The Avengers (1962-1969). In light of Sontag’s argument, how has this constant access and exposure to Mod artifacts affected the retelling of the aesthetic? San Francisco musician Paul Bertolino (b. 1969) realizes that his concept of Mod is such a mish-mash in my brain […] Every image that has ever been thrust upon me by TV, magazines and records comes to mind. From the image of Jimmy and his scooter on the cover of the original Quadrophenia LP to early Sonny and Cher to the many guys I see walking down the street in the Bay Area with

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their little British invasion haircuts to the image of the woman I saw today on the cover of W magazine. (E-mail 13 Jan. 2003) In this definition, Bertolino cites Mod media sources from disparate points in time: Quadrophenia was a 1979 film about a group of 1960’s London Mods, Sonny and Cher were commercial pop stars of the early sixties, and the issue of W magazine is the same “Mod Times” issue from January 2003 that I described in chapter two.

Others whom I interviewed had similarly eclectic ways of defining Mod. In all cases, their knowledge about Mod came from a flurry of sources. It is because of these intertextual readings that Mod’s definition is much broader today than what it was during the original subcultural movement. While Mod’s current appearance on the cultural radar is linked to an institutional canonization of pop culture, it also shows the transformation of Mod into something with cult status. According to Umberto Eco, for something to attain cult status “one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole” (qtd. in Jenkins 50). The reappearance of Mod today, and the understanding of it by those interested in the lifestyle, is an example of this very transformation.

Particularly visual, but aural texts also, have a power all their own. One might say that combined they serve as the only kind of “time machines” that have ever existed. John Frow writes that electronic media allows for a unique revisiting of the past. An example of this is in a Post-Mod’s viewing of the film Quadrophenia today.

In one scene of the film, the protagonist, Jimmy Cooper, is watching The Who on the 51

TV show Ready, Steady, Go. In watching this scene today, one is actually viewing a film shot in 1979 where an actor is watching TV footage from 1964. According to Frow’s theory, reviewing old images disconnects them from the lived moments that created them. In his words, “Rather than having a meaning and a truth determined once and for all by [the past’s] status as an event, its meaning and truth are constituted retroactively and repeatedly; if time is reversible then alternative stories are always possible” (229). With film and television in particular, a sense of time and place is captured and replayed in a way that reconfigures their fixed nature.

There is an intimacy in this mediation of images due to its normalization into modern living. This normalization process has much to do with the nature of photographic media. Starting in the twentieth century, the photograph came to equal historical reality, or “what the past looked like.” Today, photographic images are a primary part of a collective media archive--much more so than even paintings or other cultural artifacts. Fredric Jameson says that photography has “the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future [and] has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (18). In these simulacra, where images of reality have become their own virtually real-feeling entities, Post-Mods finds the starting point for their contemporary experiences.

Based on interviews with people in their twenties and thirties who identify themselves with Mod style today, all evidence shows that their fascination with Mod 52

stems from visual media cues. Musician Bart Davenport was a teenager when he became involved with the Mod scene in Berkeley, California. However, at a younger age, he had glimpses of Mod style through old album covers of The Who and The Kinks. The photographs on the albums made Bart envision a “world of super cool English people that existed mostly in the 60’s […] I thought I’d only see that world in old photos. It seemed untouchable and totally out of reach for me at twelve years old, in Berkeley, California” (E-mail 26 Feb. 2003). A short time later, Davenport saw a showing of the film Quadrophenia. It occurred to Davenport that this style was part of something bigger. He and his best friend began scouring thrift stores to find clothing that imitated the style. They even “rented VHS tapes of Ready, Steady, Go and copied the dance moves of the original Mods.” By 1988 Davenport was part of what he describes as a “pretty massive east bay Mod scene” which included his band, The Birminghams, a rhythm and blues oriented group “that played almost exclusively to Mods and 60’s scenesters at scooter rallies, all-ages gigs, and house parties” (E-mail 26 Feb. 2003).

Musician, graphic artist, and producer of the short film American Mod (2000), Charles Wallace (b. 1971) grew up in Michigan where his first impression of Mod style came from a viewing of Quadrophenia at the age of eleven. As a web designer, Wallace is still “passionate about the design and ‘look’ of the modernist movement […] the fashion, the amazing design of the scooters, the graphics, the architecture, the furniture, even the design of the 60’s instruments like the Rickenbacker or a 53

semi-hollow body Epiphone” (Interview 11 Oct. 2002). Wallace’s involvement in any kind of Mod scene didn’t happen until the early to mid nineties. Having moved to New York City, Wallace eventually started meeting others interested in the aesthetic and remembers going to a nightclub with a music night called “On” in 1996 that reignited his initial interest in Mod. American Mod is a fictionalized account of a “night in the life” of three friends experiencing the New York Mod scene. The film debuted in an east village theater in March of 2001 with two sold-out shows. Wallace has since shown the film throughout the U.S. and Europe, mainly to other Mod enthusiasts, but the film has also aired on the Sundance cable channel in the U.S. The website that Wallace designed to promote the film also features a link to a site for his retro-inflected rock band Headquarters and listings to Mod-themed events happening in and around New York such as “Smashed!

Blocked!” “’Tiswas,” and “Splashdown: A Rock and Soul Explosion” (“Out in New York”). Still, Wallace notes that even New York’s Mod scene is rather small, “with the same thousand or so people interchanged throughout these clubs. It sounds like a lot, but in New York that is very underground” (Interview 11 Oct. 2002). However, while this adoption of Mod is particular to a certain community, Mod imagery continues to be co-opted into the mainstream. As Thomas Frank writes, “From the very beginnings down to the present, business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the

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titillation of the TV watching millions” (7). As applied to Mod specifically, this tension will be spelled out for the reader in the following chapter.

The present day reality of a media-generated Mod scene is not lost on comic book artist Chynna Clugston-Major (b. 1975), who makes a unique media contribution to the contemporary Mod landscape. One volume of her Blue Monday series, published in 2000, is named after the 1965 Who song “The Kids are Alright.” Another issue, published in 2001, gets its title from Colin MacInnes’s 1958 British cult novel Absolute Beginners, a favorite among the earliest Mods. Her drawings and text further support the cult status and continued enthusiasm of Mod culture. In Blue Monday, Clugston-Major not only uses Mod culture as content, but does something very Mod in and of itself--in the tradition of sixties pop art--by using comics as a narrative form.

Just as artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol borrowed from comic book imagery, Clugston-Major lays bare the essential elements of Mod style in an almost iconic way. Mod’s key signifiers such as scooters, parkas, miniskirts, and pop art targets are everywhere in her stories. “By stripping down to essential ‘meaning’ ” Clugston-Major “can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” (McCloud 30). In the rainbow colors of Clugston-Major’s cartoon kingdom, Mod is emphasized as a youthful, playful style. To paraphrase Scott McCloud, there is also a suggestion that cartoons are not just for children. He sees them as often having been associated with underground or alternative ideologies as well (56). This concept is in synch with the fact that Mod style’s origin is subcultural.

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Clugston-Major’s stories follow a group of high school students who listen to Blur, The Jam, and The Kinks--a fact that instantly signifies Mod style in its 90’s, 70’s, and 60’s musical incarnations. Set in the early nineties, Clugston-Major’s characters are unexpectedly wise to sixties Mod culture. Bleu, the heroine of Blue Monday, runs around in mini-skirts and target emblem t-shirts. The boys who torment Bleu and her friends at school are parka-wearing thugs who ride scooters. Bleu fantasizes about pop stars, which is not unusual for a teenage girl, but Clugston-Major makes sure they are mostly retro-stars. A cartoon version of The Jam’s Paul Weller makes his first appearance on the first page, with Bleu eventually shouting out to the 90’s world by page 30: “Where’s that handsome Mod dream on a Lambretta?” While Mods today still exist in small subcultural clusters, it is interesting to see Clugston-Major actively promoting the style as something that could potentially still dominate youth culture today.

While Mod still has the potential to dominate youth culture, it continues to inhabit peripheries of cultural space. Mod remains a small, yet vibrant, international community, with interesting traces within the commercial world. In the last few years, with the widespread adoption of the Internet, Mod voices have become far more prolific. Popular websites among today’s Mods are The Uppers Organization (www.uppers.org) and Mod Culture (www.modculture.co.uk). I only want to briefly mention these sites in terms of their layering of Mod visuals, since I will talk about the impact of these websites in more depth in chapter four. Virtually encyclopedic in their 56

information, these sites offer a new mediated form of contact with Mod images. What is most interesting about these websites is that they are designed by Post-Mods. Many images presented or referenced are taken from famous films and books about Mod culture such as Quadrophenia and Richard Barnes’s Mods! It is also key to note that the people who designed this website never grew up in Swinging London or with the sense that their youth was imbued with any great, cultural significance. By virtue of encountering these images throughout their media-saturated lives, these Post-Mods become self-proclaimed authorities to write about this style, even as “second generation” consumers of it. These Internet sources continue combining texts in an endless spin cycle of Mod reconstructions.

A 2001 article posted on the Uppers website is made up of interviews with young people today on why they enjoy Mod style. One correspondent, a twenty-two-year-old named Sarah, explains that she is attracted to Mod because in the sixties “stuff was happening in the world and people dared to different, and they don’t anymore […] and ‘cause I don’t want to be just stuck in this horrible boring decade where everyone is grey!” (Banaszkiewicz). If the contemporary world seems grey to Sarah, it is also a world of intensified uncertainties and fears. After the horrific events of September 11, 2001, this longing for a colorful and positive modern world is even more enticing. The irony is, of course, that the Mod sixties with the backdrop of the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and the U.S. escalation in Vietnam, had its share of worries and tragedies. However, since people have been nostalgic for this time 57

practically since it was happening, more distance from the era gives it a near magical gloss today.

This nostalgia is also evident in the commercial sector with its intermittent flirtation with Mod style. In doing so, marketers can utilize the power that nostalgic images can have. In September 2002, The New York Times wrote an article on the wave of nostalgia-laden advertising that had cropped-up after 9/11. The article quoted corporate identity consultant Marc Gobé as saying, “When we feel less secure, with less control of our daily lives, we reach out in brands to connect with a time when things seemed better, more comfortable” (S. Elliott C8). Today’s desire for Mod, with all its presumably ideal trappings--whether subcultural or commercial--is the longing for modernity’s promise of a better world. While the repetition of media images pronouncing Mod times as utopian have created a new and youthful Mod culture today, the other side of the story is to be found in the consumption of Mod style as a commodity.

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Chapter IV: Buying Mod Before the Mod aesthetic hit the United States in 1964 the only subcultural group remotely similar to the early Mods were the Beatniks. However, this comparison is problematic. Beatniks, or “Beats,” were generally college educated and middle-class, while the majority of Mods were working-class with the British equivalent of a high school diploma. Due to this cultural difference, the U.S. interpretation of Mod style was instead based on common interests between British and American youth. Consumer-based leisure pursuits revolving around fashion and rock music united youth in both countries under a “Mod umbrella.”

While some Mod enthusiasts argue about differences in current interpretations of Mod as commercial and subcultural and what is “authentic,” I posit that Mod has always been both. What is Mod? Mod is about past and future inciting action in the present as per Melly’s notion of a pop “now.” Mod is about the quest for the ultimate modern fashion, music, spaces, and technologies. Mod is about both the individually tailored and the mass-produced. Mod is about subculture and marketing fads. Mod, in its resurrection as a subculture and style impulse today takes its cues from all of the above. The fact that Mod’s definition is eclectic and open to interpretation remains part of its appeal.

How is it that Mod embodies all of these tensions? For Mod to be thought of today as the primary style choice of the 1960’s did not happen by chance. It was in fact these complexities, particularly the mix of bohemian and commercial sensibilities, 59

which made Mod well suited for a youthful and affluent decade. Despite its roots as a subculture, the Mod ethic of copious consumption and consumerism made its early commercial adaptation unsurprising. Bill Osgerby explains that postwar subcultures such as Mod created a pattern for British youth culture at large--something that soon resonated with Americans as well. These “young people seemed to embody all that the consumer dream stood for and throughout the fifties and early sixties advertisers habitually used images of youth to associate their products with dynamic modernity and ‘swinging’ enjoyment” (33). John Clarke, in his examination of the original Mod subculture, similarly identifies “the whole mid-1960’s explosion of ‘Swinging London’ [as] based on the massive commercial diffusion of what were originally essentially Mod styles” (Clarke 187). In this respect, Mod was susceptible to commercialism from day one. Consequently, Mod defined much of what the early to mid-sixties looked and felt like, with echoes of the style continuing on through the end of the decade.

This dynamic has created two distinct visual identities of 1960’s Mod. One identity is primarily associated with mainstream, social and commercial trends, and the other with subcultural connotations. First, there is the more familiar, commercialized Swinging London Mod, which is attached to everything from Mary Quant mini-skirts to spy films. Secondly, there is the subcultural Mod world of angry young men in suits on Italian scooters, battling their rivals, the Rockers. It is interesting that these two generalized descriptions of Mod fit with the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition 60

given in chapter two. Swinging London remains the Mod portrait of “trendy and hip,” while groups of London Mods on Vespas fit with Mod’s meaning as particular to British youth culture. If Mod is remembered and reinterpreted by young people today through a series of media texts, then the most compelling fact about these contemporary Mods is that they are people who have synthesized the “best” of both commercial and subcultural aspects of the style and original era. How one thinks of, or reinvents, Mod has a lot to do with what kinds of images one was first exposed to as being “Mod.” It also has to do with which aesthetic one chooses to emulate.

Despite small clusters of new wave, Mod-influenced scooter boys that emerged in early 1980’s America, it is the “Swinging Sixties” imagery has remained the dominant U.S. adoption of Mod style. In all likelihood, the difference in class issues between the U.S. and Britain is the reason why the authentic British subculture of Mods did not translate over the Atlantic. Class issues related to the original subcultural definition of Mod were played down in favor of Mod’s “trendy” and “hip” connotations. American teens certainly had no problems relating to that idea. Since Mod’s roots are in Britain, there is more of an attempt by British Post-Mods to succinctly echo the original subculture’s style.

Just as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings of soup cans and comic strips introduced individualized, mass marketed objects into the elite art world, Mod culture struck a similar balance between the commercial and the subcultural. So, when speculating on Mod style, it is the aforementioned tension between commercial and 61

subcultural values that are quintessential to its style and culture today. I contend that Mod’s continued cultural appearance and appeal has to do with the fact that it was the first youth culture style to successfully cross boundaries between dominant and subcultural style on a grand level.

Subsequent youth subcultures have also had their impact on mainstream culture, as in the case of Punk. However, the Punk era of the seventies was not heralded as a golden age for youth culture, and London was no longer seen as “swinging.” In the 1970’s England suffered from economic hardship and therefore did not exhibit the same rampant and youth-driven consumerism of the 1960’s. Unlike Punk, Mod became deeply rooted in mainstream popular culture and served the British economy well. The “no future” anarchism of Punk proved a much harder sell indeed (The Sex Pistols). Despite some generational conflicts, the Mod period’s optimism was appealing to many adults, too. The editor of The Times (London) during the sixties, Sir William Rees-Mogg, remembers this as a time where he was “very conscious that something was happening and that people were just coming out with new ideas, a new vision of the world” (D. Taylor 42). In this “Mod generation” there was also a fusing of past and future ideals of modernity. The concept of the “new” was sought out and imbued with hope. Youth were trying to shape a new and better reality for their present and future. Since 1960’s Mod style linked youthful optimism with consumer culture, it also succeeded in becoming one of Britain’s hottest exports.

Permeated with such ideals, how could a style like Mod not sell?

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Mod Diffusion in the Sixties When one is part of a subculture there are certain codes one lives by and visual accessories and signifiers that set one apart from the mainstream world. The (male) Mods became recognizably different from other young men with their suits, parkas, Vespas, and French-crew haircuts. Women involved in the scene looked slightly boyish with shorter or bobbed hair, but also European and mysterious with dark eye make up and tailored clothes. Their near-insane attention to style details was unique to them and made them stand out from the crowd. Before the commercialized, Carnaby Street version of Mod hit the popular imagination there was something sneaky and secretive about Mods. To understand Mod’s absorption into the mainstream, or as John Clarke coins it--diffusion, one must start at the very beginnings of Mod culture (Clarke 185).

Starting in the late fifties and moving into the earliest part of the sixties, the first Mods were modern jazz fans who frequented nightclubs in London’s Soho district.

As Graham Hughes explains, the British music magazine Melody Maker coined the term Modernist. Their look was slick “because of modern Jazz,” he says. “We felt [this music] was always a bit more stylish and we responded to that” (Rawlings 11).

While the Mod subculture was soon made up of British working-class youth, it did not start amongst them. In fact, many of these early Mods were the sons of middle class, Jewish tailors--making access to fashionable suits easy (Green 41). Another early influence on Mod was from the gay community. Bill Osgerby notes that Mods were 63

mostly heterosexual, but “shared a set of musical and sartorial preferences which had first begun to cohere as an identifiable style within the gays clubs” of London (43).

Early Mod culture also smacked of continental flair that was visible in the Mods’ Italian scooters, coffeehouses, and a preference for black clothing. Boys wore copies of Italian or French suits while girls wore smart, tailored outfits and mimicked the doe-eyed make-up and fashions of French, existentialist pop starlets such as Juliette Greco and Francoise Hardy. On a superficial level this sophisticated look was attractive to the working-class who saw this style as a way to override class distinctions.

Despite efforts following World War II to improve the standard of living for Britons, and Prime Minister Macmillan’s claim that the English “never had it so good,” class differences continued to divide its citizens (Green 2). Mod became one of several postwar youth movements to question the authority of the state and the overall structure of a mainstream British culture based on class. One aspect of the Mod ideology was a focus on leisure pursuits rather than on work. While working low-level service jobs, Mods took weekend trips to resort towns such as Brighton and Margate where much wild socializing--and sometimes violent riots with their rivals, the Rockers--took place.

This Mod ideology was also attached to conventional British imagery such as the Union Jack and the Royal Air Force’s (R.A.F.) target symbol. As stated in chapter two, this was a way to tie Britain’s imperialistic past to its present, consumer-based 64

modernity. In terms of its first appearances within the Mod subculture--as a logo affixed to Mods’ parka jackets and scooters--these traditional British symbols implied a love-hate dialectic between Mod and its parent culture. The use of the British flag and the R.A.F. target implied a longing for a “different” England--one where working-class youth felt included rather than excluded. In adopting these symbols, the Mods declared, “Your England is my England, too--but my England is more fun!” The diffusion of these images into the mainstream is exemplified by the work of sixties pop art designer Paul Clark who created a plethora of Union Jack adorned paraphernalia such as coffee cups, ash trays, and clocks (Sparke 120). As Penny Sparke writes, “While many subcultural groups now create their own styles, they are almost always appropriated by commerce and mass production and are thus rendered fashionable” (121). In the case of the Union Jack as a cultural signifier, it traveled the currents from mainstream to subcultural icon and then back again to mainstream culture.

British theorist Dick Hebdige has written extensively on subcultural style as a form of rebellion. In reference to Mods, Hebdige portrays a lifestyle that rebels against the mainstream by inverting visual signifiers. With their tailored look, Mods were able to “negotiate smoothly between school, work, and leisure [...] quietly disrupting the orderly sequence which leads from signifier to signified” (Subculture 52). If being well dressed implied being a respectable middle or upper-class gentlemen, then Mods--with their working-class accents and sporadically rowdy behavior--corrupted the stereotypical meaning of the suit and tie. However, as “King Mod” Pete Meaden’s 65

saying, “Clean living under difficult circumstances,” expresses, their visual references to the “straight and narrow” were not easily achieved (R. Barnes, “Introduction” 1).

Being a Mod, achieving the look, required economic dedication. As a Mod, much of one’s income was spent on keeping up with the lifestyle. The best new clothes, haircuts, scooters, and music collections were expected. And while Mods rebelled against a certain set of mainstream ideologies, they were also setting-up expectations of their own. There was a systematic use of imagery that bound this group of young people together. And so it happened that mainstream, British culture eventually caught wind of Mod’s glorification of youth, style, and consumer fantasies.

This, in turn, soon made London the center of early to mid-sixties youth culture worldwide: the place where the “future was now” and the party already in progress.

In Modernity and Postmodern Culture, Simon Frith is quoted as saying, “the Mods became, indeed, the 1960’s symbol of consumption […] Mod style was exploited to transform shopping (the rise of the boutique), listening (the rise of pirate radio), and dancing (the triumph of soul music)” (qtd. in McGuigan 191). The mixture of ideology, fashion, music, and rampant consumerism inherent to the Mod subculture soon created what Guy Debord calls a “spectacle,” lending itself well to commercial exploitation.

Debord writes that in contemporary culture images bind a spectacular society together, and spectacle is “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” (24). The Mods’ feverish attention to themselves was a vanity derived from their 66

clothes, records, and scooters--in fact, all the material things that helped define who they were. What is more, Mods were competitive. There was constant impetus to be more up-to-date than other Mods. This obviously promoted consumerism even within their subculture. When examined in this light, it is clear that the Mods always had a natural, if unusual, affinity with capitalist values. This being said, it was only a matter of time before marketers caught wind of Mod and turned it into a full-blown commercial phenomenon. As Mod became incorporated into a mainstream youth culture full of media-driven fads and trends this feature of the culture became even more exaggerated. Soon there were specifically “Mod” products available in Britain unabashedly labeled as such.

Embodying both the subcultural and commercial aspect of Mod culture on a musical level were mid-sixties London band, The High Numbers who, shortly after, were renamed The Who. Today, The Who is historicized as the first truly successful band to rise from London’s underground Mod scene. Mods! author Richard Barnes, an observer and participant in the original London Mod subculture, and a close friend of The Who’s Pete Townshend, recounts that The Who’s “Modness” was primarily manufactured (Mods! 14). Acting first as their manager and then as their publicist, Pete Meaden marketed them as part of the scene, even though they were just on the periphery of it. Early Mods were Motown and soul music fans. Finding a marketable niche to fill, Meaden “realized that the Mods were not listening to the charts and had

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no group to focus on. They were missing out on the great English rock thing that was happening since The Beatles had come along and opened the whole thing up” (14).

Pete Townshend later reflected on his Mod past. “I was attracted to the idea of image building. I was at art school […] so I was constantly looking for visual value as it applied to what was going on in the street” (“Interview with Pete Townshend”). In The Who, marketing the image of “Mod authenticity” was a commercial act in itself.

And, as this story of The Who’s start demonstrates, the tug between subculture and commerce was already markedly visible early on. Since The Who adopted Mod style as a marketing move, it is not surprising that after the commercially successful Mod period of Swinging London died down that the band slowly transitioned out of the look. It is most likely that this was also done to attract a wider audience. The Who’s 1968 album, The Who Sell Out is a self-mocking portrayal of this shift. The album is laced with faux commercials and radio commentators announcing such things as; “It’s smooth sailing with the highly successful sound of wonderful Radio London.”

However, based on this line of reasoning, it seems that by helping to commercialize Mod to mainstream youth culture, The Who had “sold out” long before 1967.

Nonetheless, The Who’s success within the mid-sixties rock scene helped forge the alliance between underground and mainstream youth that made Mod style culturally pervasive and highly influential.

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Post-Mod Diffusion After the mid-sixties, Mod faded from view temporarily. However, it never fully disappeared. As made clear in the last chapter, it is the image that creates feelings of immediacy with the past. In this age of mechanical reproduction and spectacle, it has been fairly easy for Post-Mods to recreate styles taken from older photographic images. The continued reassessment of Mod has been possible mainly because of these crisp and vibrant images. This reinterpretation of former lived experiences is also bound to happen because photographs intentionally show or leave things out of their frame. Only a glimpse into the past is possible. Hence, Post-Mods might see things in old photos that perhaps are being noticed for the first time, or that people who lived through that time do not even remember. As Walter Benjamin writes, “Photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision” (“The Work of Art” 220). A more specific example of Mod’s subcultural style fused with commercial representation is The Who’s 1979 film about a group of London Mods, Quadrophenia.

As mentioned above, The Who had moved away from their original Mod look and had, by the seventies, firmly established themselves as simply a bombastic, hard rock band. Quadrophenia was first the name of a 1973 Who album and then of their 1979 film. The film paid tribute to the Mod subculture as they remembered it. One of the more curious aspects to Quadrophenia is that it is a film conceptualized by a band 69

that never really was part of the subculture, but nonetheless had become commercially linked to it. Since they were coupled with the movement early on, and owe much of their success to support from the early Mods, did The Who feel they were the best candidates to historicize this part of 1960’s youth culture? The answer to this question not withstanding, Quadrophenia paints a specific portrait of the Mod scene that has not been forgotten. The film follows a Mod named Jimmy Cooper who, among other things, participates in a Mod versus Rocker riot in Brighton. Little did The Who know that their film would ignite a Mod revival, and actually a succession of revivals, that continue up until this day.

The power of Quadrophenia’s portrayal of what Mod was supposed to be plays into Susan Sontag’s idea that “photographs,” and thereby images, “turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past” (On Photography 71).

That the film sparked such a wave of renewed curiosity about Mod amongst people from an entirely different era is testament to this power. Suddenly the darker side of the Mod subculture--such as the riots between Mods and Rockers--is viewed through nostalgic lenses.

While conducting my research, I interviewed people who currently align themselves in some way with Mod culture. Nine of the ten people who participated in my study were born between 1969 and 1977. Of these respondents, quite a few cited

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Quadrophenia as their first visual encounter with what they now associate with Mod style. Dan Melendez (b. 1974), Disc Jockey and host of Los Angeles’s “Club Au-Go-Go,” remembers seeing a film still from Quadrophenia when he was in high school. As a teenager, the style influenced him so much that he switched from Goth fashion to suits (E-mail 6 Feb. 2003). As mentioned in the last chapter, the film was also Charles Wallace’s first impression of Mod style. An older brother, who was interested in Mod style at the time, took him to see the film at a small theater in their hometown. Charles was struck by “by the whole idea [of Mod]” though as he states, “I didn’t quite understand the [film’s] more subtle social commentary about individuality” (Interview 11 Oct. 2002).

What is fascinating here it that Quadrophenia, as The Who’s 1979 rewrite of Mod--and a fairly commercial one at that--is the basis for many Post-Mods’ understanding of what sixties Mod culture was about. As a filmic simulation of this period and style, Quadrophenia is like Baudrillard’s retelling of the fable of the simulacra in which a map covering an entire kingdom soon becomes the only remaining sign of its existence--where we are faced with “the generational models of the real” (174). While original photographs illustrating Mod style abounded in the 1970’s and 80’s, as an initial impression, the simulated, filmic reality of Quadrophenia proved the most potent introduction to Mod for future Post-Mods. In this sense, the film was merely symbolic of what Mod had once been about. Even if its portrayal copied certain aspects of Mod style correctly, its simulation was still strewn with 71

clothing, hairstyles, and music that represented 1979 more than the early sixties. As Nicholas Schaffner writes, “None of the music sounded like The Who of 1965” (131).

In the twenty-first century the original subcultural definition of Mod--working-class British youth rallying against a class system through fashion and rock music--has, in many ways, morphed into a worship of all things from the early to mid-sixties and therefore has become a new kind of subculture. While Quadrophenia attempts to visually capture the subcultural Mod past, it still reads, according to Marc Leaman, as a “British American Graffiti,” and therefore more of a generalized, nostalgic reading of the real thing. Interestingly, just like the younger incarnation of The Who, Quadrophenia is at its core a version of the Mod subculture mass-marketed.

So, even in avoiding the Mod clichés that became fused into Carnaby Street, King’s Road, and all the rest of Swinging London--those very same clichés that are inevitably linked to Austin Powers films today--the film becomes another media text that blurs the lines between subcultural and commercial readings of the style. It is in this juxtaposition that, in fact, makes both Quadrophenia and Austin Powers inherently Mod. As Thomas Frank writes, “Whatever form prefabricated youth cultures are given by their mass-culture originators ultimately doesn’t matter: they are quickly taken apart and reassembled by alienated young people in startlingly novel subcultures” (17).

All these images become compacted into today’s re-visioning of a new kind of subculture still called “Mod.” As a consumer-friendly subculture from the beginning, Mod has always been unusual and unique because of this distinction.

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While Mod signifiers pop up in the commercial arena, hawking everything from Target, Starbucks, Gap, and Sanrio products, it is important to momentarily shift the scope to the presence and manifestation of Mod subcultures today. The retelling and refashioning of Mod, the establishing of subcultural Mod networks, as well as endless arguing about what Mod is, takes place in many arenas. However, like other subcultures, it is more easily found on the Internet. The two websites I mentioned in the previous chapter: the British Mod Culture (www.modculture.co.uk) and the Swedish Uppers Organization (www.uppers.org) provide articles aplenty written by people in their twenties and thirties ruminating on the ideals of what Mod is, or what they envision Mod to be.

Mod Culture has recently published articles such as “The Real Quadrophenia,” one older Mod’s remembrance of a trip to a Mod rally in Southport, England (Ward), and another piece written by a thirtysomething Mod woman who wonders if she is “Too Old to Be a Mod?” (C. Elliott). The site also shows an interest in tracking where and when contemporary Mods first got involved in this subculture. The Mod Culture homepage features a poll with the caption: “I entered the Mod scene in….” It gives the user the options of the 1960’s, the Mod revival era, early 90’s Britpop, or the last few years. As of March 29, 2003 the results of this poll had 53.5% saying the Mod revival (of the late 70’s and early 80’s) 21.3% early 90’s Britpop, 16.9% in the last few years, and 8.3% in the 1960’s. Mod Culture also acknowledges all subcultural to commercial dimensions inherent to Mod. While many of its sections offer brief, historical glimpses 73

into Mod’s subcultural past--whether under the “Scootering” or actual “Mod Culture” sections--there are still many commercial references. If one is looking to buy a Small Faces CD, new, made-to-order Mod fashions, or mid-century furniture, Mod Culture offers links to commercial sites that offer consumption of Mod style in the most modern way possible--through the Internet.

The Uppers Organization website is another example of active promotion of international Mod culture through mediated space. Founded in Stockholm, Sweden in 1987 as a Mod revival club, it is now a website featuring articles written by an international group of Mod enthusiasts. The site is divided up into the following sections; music, fashion, culture, travel, literature, debate, gallery, and city guide.

Each section rewrites the Mod story mostly by people who grew up with Mod “media memories.” In response to the question: “What is Uppers?” the site’s creators define it as a place that Provides essential information for anyone on or interested in the international Mod/60’s movement. Whether you look for info about related music, fashion, clubs or gigs or want to know why this culture has lasted for over four decades or just want to get in touch with other people within the world wide Mod community--this is the place for you. (Chamberlin) In the Uppers world of Mod, the definition of Mod is just as hard to come by. The fact that the debate section exists serves as evidence of the term’s ambiguity. The webmaster of the site ends his explanation on “What is Mod?” by very astutely 74

acknowledging that the only thing he sees agreed upon amongst fellow Post-Mods is “that it is necessary to know the history of the subculture to understand it.”

Mod manifests itself subculturally today in other forms as well. In the many micro-scenes that pop up from San Francisco to New York to London, events and “happenings” are being created to unite interested souls in Mod-themed events. Bart Davenport, who has traveled extensively with his many bands and also as a solo performer, told me that his encounter with European Mods, especially in Spain, was impressive. “Those kids really got the wild and irreverent spirit of the movement.

They wore very flashy stuff too--very pop art looking” (E-mail 26 Feb. 2003). From the various websites I visited, whether from Britain, Germany, Sweden, or the U.S., it is clear that these Mod-themed events consist of dance parties hosted by DJs spinning music mainly from the sixties. How “Mod” is determined musically seems subjective, but also culturally influenced. Some scenes, primarily the ones in Britain, focus on soul artists and British rock bands that Mods listened to in the early to mid-sixties such as The Small Faces, The Kinks, and The Who. San Francisco’s Diabolik organization (www.diabolik-sf.com), on the other hand, offers parties that seem to have a psychedelic, late-sixties feel. Many clubs will also mix Mod sounds from all decades, whether it is sixties British Invasion sounds, 1980’s Mod Revival, or 1990’s Britpop.

The variation from city to city and country to country does exist. Perhaps the Post-Mods of Britain find comfort in trying to mimic their “Mod tradition” as accurately as possible, while Americans and others feel that there is more room for 75

interpretation. Alex Baker explained his reaction to the Los Angeles Mod scene after being part of the San Francisco scene for years: When I first got here I though it was ass-backwards and square to be honest, because I came from San Francisco where the whole Mod scene seemed to have a 1966 to 1968 feel that was harkening to the 70’s [and] was very groovy and psychedelic and drugged. I got down here almost three years ago and it was very ’64, ’65 and everybody had skinny ties and short hair. It was just like this Dave Clark Five thing and I was not interested in it.

(Interview 3 Jan. 2003) I find it particularly interesting that Alex describes San Francisco’s scene as more “1966 to 1968,” which was also the period where Mod had diffused the most into mainstream culture and became influenced by the Bay Area, “Flower Power” aesthetic.

That being said, the Diabolik website features photos of women dressed in polka-dotted mini-dresses and white go-go boots, and men with shaggy Beatle haircuts.

These styles definitely reflect popular, Mod media images associated with the 1960’s.

Another dimension of the Mod scene today, that taps the subcultural image of Mod, is that of the scooter and scooter clubs. Yet even in what seems primarily a subcultural signifier, commercialization is still not left behind. Piaggio, the company that makes the favored, Mod brand of scooter--the Vespa--still uses Mod connotations to sell their products. On the Vespa website (www.vespa.com) one can link to the “Vespa Scooter Obsession” page (www.vespa.org) where it is possible to find 76

like-minded scooterists and groups all around the world. The tie between scooters and Mods goes back to its very early days and remains key to the image of the Mod. And again, no matter how much subcultural cachet the Vespa has, it is still bound to its role as a highly commercial product.

So, what is to be made of all this? Does this mass marketing of a subcultural aesthetic mean that there is no “authenticity” to Mod? While this would be a very nihilistic view indeed, I would like to instead propose that the longevity of Mod style is based on this unique compatibility with two cultural territories that are often deemed polar opposites: the commercial and the subcultural. Mod was, and continues to be, a way in which youth can celebrate newfound financial independence in a playful, fresh way that expresses a sensibility different from older generations. Since Mod culture is dependent on visual cues and signifiers that are based in material objects, consumerism becomes a necessary aspect of the lifestyle. And, it should be further noted, that there are different levels of Mod appropriation by the commercial sector.

The level of commercialism tied to Piaggio scooters seems more accepted by Mods today because Vespas have always been a part of Mod culture and community.

I suspect it is not as welcomed when Starbucks and Target stores start appropriating Mod insignias to sell their products when their motivation is strictly commercial with no element of Mod community-building. The commercial appropriation of Mod style particularly from the 1990’s onward fits into Thomas Frank’s notion that the 90’s “mirrored the sixties” in that “the ‘revolutionary’ forces of globalization and 77

cyber-culture [caused] the nation again [to become] obsessed with youth culture and the march of generations” (ix). Therefore, despite apparent contradictions, Mod’s dual purpose today as both a marketing tool and an underground subculture is surprisingly true to its origins. As in the 1960’s, the market’s current enthusiasm for Mod reflects awareness that youthful energy is once again dominating popular culture.

In the reclaiming of Mod in contemporary youth culture--and a youth culture that has expanded past the teenage years and sometimes well into one’s thirties--the best of subcultural and commercial Mod is found. Today, just as in the 1960’s, Mods are looking for the ultimate expression of modernity, and again, this is done through looking back before looking forward. The recycling of Mod, in its successful blending of the subcultural and the commercial coupled with its retro-forward logic, makes it easily translatable to contemporary culture. To more clearly see the pattern of this cycle, it is important to examine the two most vivid areas of Mod culture: music and fashion.

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Chapter V: The Kids are Still Alright All around the world today, in cities as widespread as San Francisco and Stockholm, there are people between the ages of eighteen and forty identify themselves stylistically with Mod culture. It is a current subculture that is hard to define because although it appropriates Mod signifiers from the past, it also continually redefines their meanings. While some of these Post-Mods try to align themselves with purely what they see as the original Mod subculture of the early 1960’s, there will nonetheless always be a disparity between past realities and present incarnations. Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once described his 1969 film of ancient Rome, Satyricon, as “science fiction of the past,” where much speculation and imagination was needed to simulate this distant time (Sanford). Despite access to vivid media memories that Fellini’s ancient Rome never offered, Mods today still take artistic license with their re-visioning of Mod. Moreover, since today’s Mod enthusiasts learned about the style and culture primarily through mediated images, current interpretations of Mod are nothing if not quintessentially kaleidoscopic.

Whether “Mod purists” like it or not, most contemporary Mods base their style on loose readings and a mélange of subcultral and commercial imagery of the original movement. As illustrated in chapter two, much of what Mod has always been about is the exploration of modern identity’s contradictions. In particular, these contradictions have a lot to do with what we expect of modernity, as well as our past expectations of it. These contradictions, as most obvious in Mod’s own retro-forward logic, are 79

magnified in Mod’s contemporary manifestations and raise a number of questions. Are Mods today likely to listen to Oasis because they sound Beatlesque--even if the Beatles were never really Mod to begin with? Does buying a vintage sixties Vespa make one more “authentically” Mod than owning a new one, even though Mods in the sixties actually bought the “latest models?” Why is Paul Weller called “The Modfather” when his band, The Jam, was part of the late 70’s Mod revival? Why would one want to own both scratchy record albums and streamlined CDs? Finally, how odd is it that since one cannot easily find vintage sixties Mod dresses, one can instead order new dresses through the Internet that are recreated to look exactly the original ones? From these examples, it is clear that many interpretations of Mod today are not Mod per se, but take their cues from the original style. It is also evident from these questions that music and fashion are the two strongest signifiers of its original incarnation.

As London Mod enthusiast Richard Hutt (b. 1970) laments, he sees that the reality of Mod fashion today has more to do with “people in swirly fabrics” than his own preferred interpretation of “attention to detail and nice accessorizing” (E-mail 3 Mar. 2003). When thinking of how Mod is appropriated today, Philadelphian Jason Rollins (b. 1970) has “often wondered what those [early Mods] would think of all this?” He also does see a distinct difference between Mod as a subculture and Mod as something 1960’s.

Much of the ‘classic’ Mod visual style has been evolving and recycled non-stop since it was invented […] If I had to guess, I would imagine the mainstream 80

media is probably mislabeling something as ‘Mod’ and/or lumping it in anything that is vaguely 60’s as ‘Mod.’ (E-mail 10 Mar. 2003) Both these views illustrate the concern some Mods have about how Mod style is currently interpreted. However, as expressed in the last chapter, this perspective is inevitably part of Mod’s history based on its dynamic of fusing commercialism with subcultural style.

Despite the popularity of mid-nineties Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis, and the subsequent success of Austin Powers, one of the most interesting recent readings of Mod style is to be found in the 1998 film Rushmore. In the wave of publicity that preceded the release of the film, one thing was certain: the song used in its commercials was memorable and seemed oddly familiar. Nonetheless, even for many pop culture aficionados, the song was not instantly recognizable. Was the song from the past or present? Was it a long-lost Who song, or was it by some trendy, new British band yet to be discovered? It was hard to tell. As a 1999 Internet article by Aaron Poehler states, When the ads for the Disney-financed film Rushmore hit the airwaves last winter, millions of people got their heads turned by the catchy tune that spiked the commercials--a classic guitar riff-rocker, with attitude to spare and enough melody to put the nouveau-pop clique in its place.

That this Disney-backed, highly successful film had such a retro-forward-sounding soundtrack raises interesting questions. Is this just another example of Mod style’s 81

power as a marketing tool? Is Mod style so familiar to contemporary America that even the family-oriented Disney Corporation would put out this quirky film and soundtrack?

When both film and soundtrack were released, the 1966 song “Making Time” by an obscure 1960’s band called The Creation became more popular than during the time of its original release. In the most literal sense, “Making Time” had been ahead of its time. And while the song was “new” to many mainstream audiences, The Creation already had a cult following among many latter-day Mods, particularly in Britain. As Richie Unterberger explains, it was as early as 1994 that “A new generation of fans now revered The Creation as Mod icons. One of them, Alan McGee, was sufficiently inspired to name his independent label Creation [Records]” (35).

Looking further into possible motivations for Wes Anderson’s choice of soundtrack, I see it as retro-forward logic that drove him to utilize primarily Mod, sixties songs for the film. Within this logic, the old and obscure were rediscovered, evaluated as fresh and new, and thus reintroduced as timely and hip. In Rushmore’s protagonist Max Fischer, the director drew upon a thematic link between his story--set in the present--and the music and style from the Mod sixties. In the director’s mind this was so much the case that Anderson originally intended to have an all-Kinks soundtrack. Jeff Stark’s Salon.com review of the soundtrack picked up on these reflections found in the CDs liner notes. Wes Anderson explains that:

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The Kinks played loud, angry, teenage rock songs, and they wore blazers and ties […] Our movie is about a teenager who is loud and angry, and he is almost never seen without his blazer and tie.

Stark adds that, “Anderson eventually decided to open the soundtrack up to more British Invasion bands like The Who and The Creation,” because Anderson saw that the bands “all basically dressed like that.”

In Wes Anderson’s choice of a very Mod soundtrack for a contemporary film, the director hit on three very important points regarding Mod culture both in the past and present. First, Mod exhibits an intrinsic interconnectedness between fashion and music. Secondly, Mod style is highly marketable. Lastly, Mod style is easily linked to youthful angst and energy. While the film and soundtrack’s success speak to the continued commercial appeal of Mod style, the narrative of the film itself also suggests Mod’s subcultural roots. Max Fischer is a teenager who disguises his working-class roots while attending an elite private school called Rushmore. Even after he is expelled from the school and starts attending a public high school, Max continues wearing his uniform of a suit and tie. Max also denies his roots by telling those who ask that his father is a brain surgeon rather than a barber. In this plot device, Max is mimicking exactly what the working-class Mods did in the early sixties with their choice of clothing. Dick Hebdige sees that “The Mod was determined to compensate for his relatively low position […] by exercising complete dominion over his private estate--his appearance and choice of leisure pursuits” (“The Meaning of Mod” 91). In 83

this respect, the angst-ridden, frenetic attitude of Rushmore’s soundtrack is a perfect fit to its visuals and story line.

Making Time: Yesterday With its pulsating, tick-tock beat, frantic chorus, not to mention the unusual use of a violin bow on an electric guitar, The Creation’s “Making Time,” symbolizes the Mod “vibe of the mid-sixties [with its] anticipation [and] headlong rush into the future’s neon glare” (Reynolds and Press 159). It is not only anticipation of the future, but also reflection of the past that is felt--particularly in the lyrics: “Why do we have to carry on--always singing the same old song?” So much of the 1960’s Mod aesthetic seems bound up in the idea of time. Are there better moments to come--the new millennium, for instance? Are the 1960’s a golden age or renaissance? If the present is this good, wouldn’t it be better to “live fast and die young?” Tomorrow may be better, but who really knows? The Mod era is read today as a cultural moment where the speed of the times was conveyed through the relatively new genre of rock music and experimentation with mind-altering substances. The original Mod subculture used amphetamines to accompany the frenzied beat of the rock and rhythm and blues music they favored. This “speed” made their bodies sustain a machine-like stamina for all-night or all-weekend parties.

In the first years of the twentieth century people worried about an “excess of speed [and] an excess of intensity” brought on by transportation and communication 84

technologies (Rabinbach 140). By mid-century, Mod-affiliated music, with its amplified sounds, fueled those anticipated rhythms of modern life. Was the frenetic Mod lifestyle the culmination of earlier predictions, or just an omen for more advanced technological changes to come? As Simon Reynolds and Joy Press write, “The Mods not only embraced but amplified the neuroses of late twentieth century capitalist life [and] accentuated the anti-natural rhythm of industrial life” (159). This pattern is reflected in the lyrics of various Mod anthems such as “Making Time” and “My Generation.”

The Who’s (albeit overanalyzed) “My Generation” is indicative of this fast-paced, Mod lifestyle. “Don’t try to d-d-d-dig what we all s-s-s-say,” exhibits the antagonism between age and class and alludes to the use of a slang vocabulary specific to Mods. The stuttering delivery that Roger Daltrey builds into the song is supposed to mirror the altered speech patterns of Mods on amphetamines. Another track off the Who’s debut album, “Instant Party (Circles),” illustrates the pill-popping Mod’s druginduced state: “Circles, my head is going round in circles/my mind is caught in a whirlpool/dragging me down”. The Kinks’ first big hit, “You Really Got Me” is also highly emblematic of this time. It continues, much like “My Generation,” to stand as a totem for the early British Invasion sound and has become an oldies radio favorite. The Kinks’ hit captures the urgency of rhythm and blues in its guitar work and in its appellation of “Girl! You really got me so I can’t sleep at night.” The amplification and feedback effects employed by lead guitarist Dave Davies underscore the rushing 85

energy of the lyrics. Speed, more so in its musical rather than in its pharmaceutical variety, became a metaphor for the direction of Mod living.

Due to their position in the public eye, these bands also helped popularize Mod (male) fashions. Often credited for starting “The Peacock Revolution” of the mid-sixties, the original Mod subculture consisted of men with an obsessive preoccupation with personal appearance (Frank 161). Mods were new age dandies who concerned themselves more with their own appearance than those of the girls around them. The British Invasion bands all interpreted this fashion differently. The Kinks dressed in red velvet hunting jackets and frilly shirts. Their retro-Edwardian garments “repopularized old materials like velvet, suede, and leather and made ‘dressing up’ an integral part of their style” (Grossman 43-44). The Who, dressed at first by Pete Meaden to fit with the original Mod subculture, had a distinctly pop art look--bright and bold colors, stripes, and lots of Union Jack imagery. As the Mod fashions of The Kinks and The Who show, traditional elegance coexisted with contemporary irreverence. Amidst the Mods’ self-obsession, The Beatles, with their tailored look courtesy of Saville Row tailor Douglas Millings became the commercially viable Mod faces of the sixties. Interestingly, The Beatles, despite presenting themselves visually as a “package” of four fairly identical men, gave a new generation of men the impetus to dress differently from their fathers.

Even at this early stage of the style’s development, it is difficult to sort out the subcultural and commercial nuances of music associated with Mod. Out of the popular 86

bands from the era, it is yet again The Who and The Kinks who are interesting studies in this phenomenon. As mentioned in the last chapter, while The Who are always mentioned as the preeminent and original Mod rock band, they were more or less positioned by their early publicist, Pete Meaden to visually and aurally be such. Pete Townshend was an art student, and therefore related to the pop imagery of Mods, but never considered himself necessarily a Mod. Meanwhile the commercial success of 1964’s “You Really Got Me,” painted The Kinks as a more mass-marketed Mod band, synonymous with the frenetic youthquake of Swinging London. Despite this connotation of The Kinks, in his 1994 autobiography X-Ray, Ray Davies remembers that Kinks’ bassist Pete Quaife actually ran with London’s Mod crowd (Davies 95).

As the American market gravitated toward the idea of Mod music and fashion, it inevitably became associated with all things English. The Who’s Pete Townshend would later describe The Kinks as “the quintessentially British band” with catchy lyrics and recognizable melodies (Solt). The Who also kept their British profile up by adorning themselves with jackets and shirts sporting the Union Jack.

While the 1960’s British Invasion bands popularized the Mod look for men on a global level, the changes in women’s fashion during this time are almost always attributed to Mary Quant. Quant’s name is the most instantly recognizable of sixties fashion design. Her mini-skirts caused a revolution in women’s casual wear, but even Quant attributed much of her ideas to what she saw the female Mods wearing. In her autobiography, Quant describes the Mods as “those who gave the dress trade the 87

impetus to break through the fast-moving, breathtaking, up-rooting revolution in which we have played a part since the opening of Bazaar. We had to keep up with them” (Quant 74). Her Bazaar boutique opened in 1955, but the height of her influence came in the early to mid-sixties.

Quant’s fashions were an odd mix of androgynous, feminine, and childlike.

Quant’s girlish style echoed the Mod’s Peter Pan-like desire to never grow old. “Adult appearance was very unattractive,” Quant once said. “It was something I knew I didn’t want to grow into. I saw no reason why childhood could not last forever” (Gardiner 133). In this respect, Mod fashions for women were always about staying as girlish or androgynous as possible. Womanhood was a less attractive and fashionable option in the way it had been presented up to this moment in history. Coupled with these clothes, the look was often accompanied by shorter, bobbed hair. While this look suggested the twenties, it also resembled pageboy cuts that many little girls wore.

Twiggy would later take this look to the extreme. While there were no hugely successful female counterparts to bands like The Beatles or The Who, singers like Dusty Springfield, Marianne Faithfull, and Lulu definitely sported the Mod styles of the day.

Along with Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba boutique, Quant’s Bazaar catered to the young trendsetters of England. The boutique idea in and of itself was marketed as an alternative to impersonal department stores. However, as her styles became popular around the western world, Quant began designing low cost versions of her clothes and 88

marketed them as The Ginger Group. This line of clothing would go on to be sold at large chain department stores such as JC Penny’s in the United States. With the boutiques of Swinging London came an interest in second hand and vintage stores that continues to this day among latter-day Mods. London stores in the 1960’s like I Was Lord Kitchner’s Valet allowed young people to “ignore mainstream fashion in favor of vintage clothing, army surplus, and cast-off designer originals” (Powe-Temperley 11).

While Quant and Hulanicki’s fashions stimulated the Mod sixties look, there was also a more futuristic and sexier style included in the era that fused technology with the female body. As the space race took off between the United States and the Soviet Union, designers such as André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin created clothing of new materials, or as Stephen Fenichell describes them, “unnatural materials to evoke an ethereal, androgynous future of moon missions and space stations” (297). The science fiction that had been popular in the earlier part of the century was once again popular and “sparked endless ideas for living--and dressing--alternatives” (Powe-Temperley 12).

During the 1960’s these futuristic styles were often associated either with stewardesses or characters in the decade’s popular spy genre. The Avengers’ Emma Peel (as played by Diana Rigg) is a good example of this futuristic look.

Her body--tightly wrapped in a fitted, leather cat-suit--became as sleek and streamlined as a machine. With all curves of her body visible, Emma Peel presented a sexy, womanly presence that contrasted the girlish Carnaby Street look. Toby Miller quotes 89

a 1965 Sun article where Rigg’s Emma Peel is described as “the new Judo Judy […] all op art, kinky cat-suits and four-inch-above-the-knee skirts […] Mod, modder, moddest” (25). While gadgetry was associated with Mod style via the spy genre in particular, Peel’s transformation of feminine body into machine is beyond modern and precipitates Donna Haraway’s vision of a gender-free cyborg that is a “hybrid of machine and organism” (28). It also suggests that female sexuality is less threatening when it appears “automated.”

From its visions of fashion and music alone, Mod has an unusual and distinct pattern. Mod is about the past expectations of modernity merging with speculations about the future. Mod is also about the space between subculutural and mainstream living. The very first Mods had a style that imitated the British upper-class, and therefore appeared somewhat “straight” despite the alternative lifestyle that accompanied the look. And, since the earliest Mods appropriated the signifiers of continental Europe and America, along with those of the British upper-class, their lifestyles fit neither the traditional British working-class nor upper-class communities.

Aside from these primary examples of Mod’s intermediary nature, the following ideas are not to be dismissed. With its new brand of androgyny, Mod also symbolized a cultural space between male and female. From the start, Mod was linked to youth culture. Therefore, its childlike fashions represented the energetic impulses of those between childhood and adulthood. As Mod culture first surfaced midway through the twentieth century, its participants were in a unique position. In more ways 90

than one, they were indeed in the “middle of something.” Mid-century, they were able to reflect on the best and worst that the modern age had given them so far. What would the future hold? Today at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the appropriation of an essentially past style creates a different lens with which to examine Mod.

Making Time: Today Invariably, when asking Mods today what attracts them to Mod style, they will comment that it is music and clothing. The American Post-Mods with whom I spoke became interested in Mod via the British Invasion rock bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Kinks, and usually this led to a fascination with the fashion. It is important to note that the British participants in the study mentioned these bands but also added 1970’s Mod revivalist Paul Weller and The Jam and Soul music as important influences as well.

Also, as evidenced by the Rushmore soundtrack, it is safe to assume that the 1960’s British Invasion bands have become intertwined with the idea of Mod, particularly outside of Britain. In an infamous line from The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Ringo Starr is asked if he is a Mod or a Rocker to which he responds: “I’m a Mocker” (Lester). The Beatles, who were never considered Mods in England, nonetheless introduced a unique look and sound into international youth culture that had a rebellious, youthful attitude that was eventually labeled Mod. As 91

Thomas Frank explains in his book, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, It was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counterculture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemians that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particularly the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies. (8) So while The Beatles were never, by subcultural standards, a Mod band, their worldwide fame--presented in Mod-ish, bowl-cut quaffs and hip, collarless suits-introduced the international masses to these new English and European styles. As Juliet Gardner cites, “The Beatles were not the most outrageous or iconoclastic members of the pop scene, but their example was the most influential” (149). And, since The Beatles’ look and sound became marketed as Mod early on, it therefore continues to influence Mod style today.

Many of my interview subjects made mention of The Beatles when reflecting on Mod in some way, usually in reference to their first impression of something “Mod.” Since they are primarily Americans, this is not surprising. As San Francisco musician Paul Bertolino recollects, “The Beatles […] were not necessarily ‘Mod’ per 92

se, but definitely pointed in that direction. The Beatles circa 1964 to 1967 did epitomize what Americans considered to be Mod at that time” (E-mail 13 Jan. 2003).

Los Angeles-based actor and musician Alex Baker who strongly identified with the Bay Area Mod scene for years, nonetheless describes The Beatles as “a major influence on [his] life” (Interview 3 Jan. 2003). Even British Mod enthusiast David Steel mentions The Beatles alongside The Small Faces, The Who, and The Kinks as some of his first encounters with Mod music (E-mail 8 Mar. 2003).

There are those who insist that The Beatles have absolutely nothing to do with Mod. This is particularly true among those who participated the original Mod subculture. Ken Browne, part of the original London subculture, remembers that early on, “Mods hated The Beatles […] they invented nothing clotheswise” (Rawlings 22).

Regardless, The Beatles do have a role in the Mod story, particularly in its evolution over time. Had it not been for the mass appeal of The Beatles’ hip, exported British sounds and fashion, Americans and others in the western world may have never dug deep enough to get to Mod. Given The Beatles’ role, is it any wonder that many younger rock bands today who adopt what they think of as Mod fashion or musical style, reference The Beatles?

In a September 2002 YM magazine interview with hard rock band Loudermilk; the band associates their Mod attire with The Beatles. “We get asked all the time are we rockers or Mods. We're both--rock and experimental. We like the Mod look, but we know we don't sound anything like The Beatles. We love them, though” (Adams).

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Separating the signifiers of Mod even further from their original sixties meaning, Loudermilk, bedecked in matching suits, are in YM’s opinion nonetheless visually appropriate enough for their September 2002 “Back to School” Mod fashion spread.

Despite sounding nothing like The Who, The Small Faces, or even the “non-Mod” Beatles, the members of Loudermilk nonetheless look the part. And, for selling clothing dubbed “Mod,” that is primarily what YM cares about. The design concepts used for Loudermilk’s CD covers and website make liberal use of Mod pop art and presents the band in suits. The band certainly doesn’t see any reason to play down their appropriation of Mod fashion if it can sell CDs. It is also possible to peg British bands Oasis and Blur as adopting Mod signifiers. On the cover of the 1997 Oasis album Be Here Now, not only is the Mod preoccupation with time displayed with a sign showing the date “August 26--Tuesday,” but a Vespa and bubble-shaped television are visible as well.

As the most internationally successful Britpop band of the mid-1990’s Oasis are bricoleurs of Mod style. Oasis’s Noel and Liam Gallagher sport early-era Beatle haircuts and their melodic songs, “Live Forever” and “Up in the Sky” sound like the Beatles circa 1966. As an online article points out, Noel Gallagher internalized The Beatles' model, absorbing the musical style he had grown up listening to, and when he began to write songs for his band he used that same musical recipe. (Uhelszki)

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Blur issued a “Greatest Hits” collection in 2000 that features minimalist, pop art cartoons of the band on its cover. As a rule, Blur’s Damon Albarn, mimicking the Kinks’ Ray Davies, accentuates “Britishness” by singing with his native English accent. Blur’s overt Englishness is evident in the song “Parklife,” which Alex Baker considers a very Mod song since it features guest vocals by Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels (Interview 3 Jan. 2003). While Mod has long been adopted by youth around the world, Blur emphasizes the fact that its roots are still in Britain. Their 1997 song “Look Inside America” casts aside the present U.S. dominance of popular culture as Albarn sings that America’s “alright sitting out in the distance/but I’m not trying to make her mine.”

If anything, the mid-nineties Britpop sounds reminded twentysomethings of their earlier media glimpses into Mod culture. And, one must not forget that these very bands were primarily comprised of people in this same age group. The style also received more media exposure stateside than the Mod revival of the 1970’s and 80’s.

As Bart Davenport remembers, “In the 80’s Mod bands were for the most part so far underground that you had to be in the scene to know about them. But in the mid-nineties all of a sudden there was Oasis, Ocean Color Scene, Kula Shaker […] and these bands were on TV!” While Oasis remains in the press today, many of the Britpop bands have since faded out of public view. However, there seems to be a continued desire to recognize Mod’s influence in pop culture.

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In 2002 Rolling Stone dubbed The Vines, The Hives, and The Strokes as heralding a “Return of Rock” (Nicholls). The most media-hyped of these bands, The Strokes, were described in a 2002 New York Times article as having “the taut popblues structurings and boyish sweetness of London Mod, circa 1966 (The Kinks, The Who and especially The Yardbirds)” (Marzorati). The fact that these bands are somehow linked with Mod style has caused controversy amongst the contemporary Mod subculture.

Jason Rollins sees absolutely no connection between these bands and the Mod ideal. “The fact that they wear skinny ties only proves that they have stylists that are paid to dress them in those clothes--nothing else,” he says (E-mail 10 Mar. 2003).

Much like Loudermilk, these bands sport “the look,” but not necessarily “the sound.”

Or, if the sound is mimicked, it is done so simply to sell records. If the public doesn’t miss Mod style, what does that kind of marketing imply? British Mod and writer Richard Hutt sees The Strokes, on a visual level, as “unkempt rich kids who don’t seem bothered by or interested in personal style,” whereas The Hives are “at least well-tailored” (E-mail 3 Mar. 2003). Bart Davenport remembers visiting the New York Mod club “Shout” last spring. As he recalls, that week the club had been featured in SPIN magazine and the article was called “Strods”--combining The Strokes with Mods. “Some of my friends who have been going to Shout for years were very put off by it,” he says. “They had never even heard a Strokes song” (E-mail 26 Feb. 2003).

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As far as women’s fashion is concerned, the legacy of Mary Quant is alive and well. Aside from the British Mod revival of the late seventies and early eighties, Americans really began to see a resurgence of mini-skirts in the new wave movement of the early 1980’s. In 1981’s The Fashionable Mind: Reflections on Fashion 19701981, Kennedy Fraser suggests that designers “are drawn time and again to the past as to a world of paradisal certainties” (240). Just as Quant nostalgically attached her designs to the past freedom to girlhood, retro-fashions offer a similar comfort. Or, as rock journalist Ann Powers charmingly recounts, the youthful, sometimes childish, clothing currently worn by thirty-year-old bohemians reminds them of when their “personalit[ies] first arose” (204). Is it that by wearing Mod fashions, youth today are reminded of when a collective youth culture persona first arose, too?

Still in her twenties, contemporary designer Jessika Madison is drawn to this utopian ideal of Mod fashions. Based in Minneapolis, she started her own fashion e-business called Dada Die Brucke because “original items of 60’s clothing are scarcer to find and are increasingly in a sorry condition” (Barrell). Her website (www.dadadress.com) advertises “Style A-Go-Go for Young Moderns,” and in the truest sense, she not only envisions sixties Mod, but the Mod era’s fascination with the 1920’s. However, probably the most Mod thing about Madison’s business is that it suggests an updated version of Biba, which started as a mail order business. Even Madison finds that “The Internet is an ideal way to reach our customers, because we

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cater to such a specific group who are geographically scattered all over the globe” (Barrell).

Reflecting on Jessika Madison’s age, the overarching question of young Mods’ understanding of Mod style resurfaced. When I asked Charles Wallace if he thought the younger Mods in the New York scene appreciated or understood Mod’s origins, he replied “I’ve met people who are twenty-two who know all about [Mod history], but most of them don’t. They just like the music--they like the dancing. They’re either in art school, or interested in politics. It’s usually an intellectual crowd” (Interview 11 Oct. 2002). Contrastingly, Alex Baker thinks that investigating Mod’s history is part of its appeal in the present.

One thing that I find really appealing about [Mod] is that you have to be a little bit of a detective to really get into it. It wasn’t really happening when I first started to dig it. It wasn’t around and it was this secret trail. Are you going to go through the looking glass, or not? (Interview 3 Jan. 2003) Given the transformations Mod has gone through, and the way that it is interpreted in its new subculture today, following its trail is not always easy. What does one find going through the looking glass? In Mod’s retro-forward logic, the patterns within Mod today are similar to a 1990 remark by the late designer Gianni Versace: “I am not interested in the past, except as the road to the future” (Fashion, Culture, and Identity 129).

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So, have we reached Mod times? The cyclical reoccurrence of Mod suggest that its continued appearance is our modern inheritance. While Frederic Jameson might argue that this is simply the postmodern condition, I feel his theories primarily see this as a cultural negative that stops progress dead in its tracks. I would argue instead that the recurrence of Mod is a cultural reminder that progress is still possible.

Giving a cultural nod to Mod suggests that its ideals of modernity exhibit a potential that has not been fully tapped. Therefore Mod will keep resurfacing as a symbol for this modern ideal that western cultural nostalgically longs for, but sees as forever out of reach. It is then in this reconfiguration of media texts, appropriated by new generations that the Mod desire is reenacted. Cultural theorist Angela McRobbie aptly recognizes that Mainstream fashion has a lot to thank youth subcultures for. It can gesture back in time knowing that its readers have been well educated through the media, in postwar pop culture history. Often it is enough to signal [Rolling Stone] Brian Jones’s hairstyle […] or [RSG’s] Cathy McGowan’s floppy fringe, as though they have been immortalized as Andy Warhol prints. (39-40) It is clear that the reproduction of Mod images and sounds has filtered through from subculture to mainstream via mass media forms. In doing so, these images have had almost forty years to leave indelible marks on impressionable, young minds. And is that not what the formula has always been: youth equals modernity equals the future? It is in this continuous longing for a now classic version of modernity, both in 99

fashion and music, that the Mod subculture today continues to be both revisited and recreated.

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Chapter VI: Is it a Mod World After All?

Ryan fancied himself a bit of a Mod…[He] rode a green Vespa GS scooter that he polished twice a day with a baby’s diaper and kept encased in a custom-built corrugated iron shield. To Ryan’s way of thinking, a Vespa was not merely a mode of transport but an ideology, family, friend, and lover all rolled into one paragon of late-forties engineering.

- from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

How is it that Mod is still around, and what exactly does it mean these days? In the last forty years youth culture trends and styles have come and gone, so why should Mod still exist? Although it does not dominate contemporary trends, it remains a vital and recurring presence. Through an endless stream of photographic images from the 1960’s, coupled with a relentless mythologizing of the era, Mod style captures an immediacy that eras previous do not. However popular Jane Austen film adaptations have been within the last ten years, it is more than rare to see someone on the street in full Regency-era regalia. Mod style’s immediacy makes it possible to wear styles from the sixties without feeling that one is at a Halloween party. Fashion replays of Mod since the late 1970’s have helped to establish this style as familiar, even to people just entering their teens and twenties today. What is more, even if one is not aware that Mod subcultures exist, one cannot escape the Mod-nostalgia-laced advertisement 101

campaigns of huge corporations like Starbucks, The Gap, and especially Target. There is something singularly attractive about Mod that has to do with its historical connotations. Whether this style will continue to resurface hundreds of years from now is not so much the point. Rather, it cannot be denied that part of its current appeal is its connection with an innovative time period and era that believed young people held the answers to a much improved world; that these people would eventually “land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and no doubt, write finis to poverty and war” (“The Young Generation”).

With its origins in the twentieth century’s golden age of youth culture, today’s version of Mod is the product of three very special conditions. First, Mod is imbued with a constant vibrancy and appreciation of the present that stems from its retro-forward logic, where something of the past is expressed as something hip and even “ahead of its time.” In the sixties, Mod took the best of the past, mixed it with ideals of future (some of which came from the past as well), and shook it into a potent martini of excessively stylish and modern culture. For business or pleasure, people simulating Mod style today are seeking the benefits that come from drinking that intoxicating cocktail.

Secondly, the prevalence of original and simulated Mod media texts and artifacts during the 1970’s and 1980’s were part of a cultural echo that affected people of the post-sixties generation. Mediated experiences that Post-Mods had as children 102

influenced them to simulate Mod culture around them. As JoEllen Fisherkeller writes, “Young people can appropriate, adjust, and discard--in their minds at least--the identities or social roles associated with TV characters and stories, much as people do with visible style trends in fashion, music, and décor” (120). Whether one has come to understand Mod from commercial images only, or has had experiences with Mod-identified, subcultural communities, traces of Mod still linger today. Mod’s influence on pop culture during the last forty years has created a varied landscape of what Mod means to people today. One person may describe it as a lifestyle, another a culture, and still someone else could say it is simply an aesthetic choice. Were it not for media’s glorification of the 1960’s as a “classic” period for youth pop culture, Mod would not exist in its present form.

Finally, Mod’s longevity as a viable style impulse both in the commercial sector and as an alternative lifestyle choice is as old as the style itself. Mod shows that while subcultures will be influenced in some ways by material and mainstream values, subcultures can also mold the mainstream. In its postmodern incarnation, Mod is an awareness of the inconsistencies of modern life. In these Mod times, technology does not necessarily simplify life, but instead adds new and interesting complexities to the way people live. In the form of media-influenced experience, Mod is about a cultural moment that still feels fresh despite constant circulation through pop culture. This is especially evident in reinterpretations of the style and culture by new generations of

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young people. It is a reminder that youth can be ebullient, fun, and progressive--even if the present condition of the world does not support such hope or expectations. Walter Benjamin sees wishes for the future as wishes for “happiness through redemption” (“Theses” 254). Mod’s wish for an ideal modernity and future potentially offers this kind of happiness. With all its stylish accoutrements, Mod culture is a redemptive facet of modernity’s foibles. It is the flipside to industrialization’s pollution, consumer culture’s soulless materialism, and the computer age’s austerity. Like in the 1998 film Pleasantville, Mod is a style that embodies the cultural shift from a black and white to color world.

The Scooter As this thesis has shown, Mod has used many material symbols to express its ideological bent. If one were to think of a single, metaphorical object from the archive of images that exist to describe Mod’s past and present incarnation, it would also be the Italian scooter. In 1997 the San Francisco, all-female pop-rock outfit, The Kirby Grips, recorded a song called “Mod Boy” as an ode to the latter-day Mods that lyricist China Tamblyn had encountered in the 1980’s and 90’s. “Mod Boy,” she sings “Meet me in Brighton and bring your Lambretta.” Invoking the Lambretta in a British setting, Tamblyn touches upon what remains the premiere image associated with Mod style: the Italian scooter. Just like the sleek and stylish Lambretta or Vespa favored by the Mods, today’s incarnations also symbolize youth and forward movement. As both 104

consumer goods and objects coveted by a particular group, scooters, like Mod, are about the brokering between commercial and subcultural style. And, as mirrored in the sprightly speed of the scooter, Mod represents a playful spin on a fast-paced, urban-centered world.

Looking even further beyond these interpretations, though, there is something else valuable to be gleaned from the idea Mods and their scooters. Rushing by on their Vespas at feverishly fast speeds, the Mods take in a great mass of images that blur together within their vision. What is understood through this visual montage? Is it similar to Wolfgang Shivelbusch’s observations on early twentieth century train travel where “speed causes objects to escape from one’s gaze, but one nevertheless keeps on trying to grasp them?” (57). Similar to media-driven experiences today, with their constant glut and rapidity of images, it is often hard to discern how one picture connects to the next. We are nonetheless required to make sense of them. The pace of the scooter in conjunction with these images mirrors this identifiable modern reality where we are expected to make quicker connections between the things we see.

In its signification of movement, it is the scooter that embodies Mod’s urgent nowness, whereby a moving panorama of past and future visions are always present.

Taking in many visuals at once, Mods on their scooters are somehow simultaneously aware both of what lay behind and ahead of them. Mods today see and interpret a mix of signifiers and images as if they were spread across a wide horizon; where revision of history is juxtaposed with future possibilities. Alex Baker touches on this metaphor.

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The thing about the [original] Mods was that they were actually embracing newness […] they were scanning the horizon and looked beyond where they were. [They thought:]‘We like these suits and scooters from Italy’--they were trying to invent their own little culture and they were very in tune with things that were going on. (Interview 3 Jan. 2003) Taking this narrative one step further, it is possible to imagine a group of Mods speeding on their Vespas from club to club and party to party. Amidst all the comings and goings there was a palpable anticipation that the next party would be better than the last--but would it really be? Wouldn’t it just be more of the same--with all the recognizably familiar signs of their culture? As I have touched upon earlier in this thesis, an essential part of the Mod narrative is that excitement for the present was combined with expectations of an even more exciting, more modern future. However, there was tension inherent even in that sentiment as expressed by The Who lyrics “Hope I die before I get old.” As much as the Mods embraced modernity and all the trappings of contemporary life, there was still some doubt as to whether the future would indeed be better, or even as good as “the now.” Perhaps this was as good as it would get. Besides, the future also meant an end to youth. Would idealism fade away with their youth?

As I have referenced in previous chapters, Mod, with its constant retro-forward discourse, couples past ideals of modernity and transcendence with mindfulness of what is to come. Writing about the Vespa, Umberto Eco recognizes its 106

transformational powers: “The Vespa came to be linked in my eyes with […] the subtle seduction of faraway places where [it] was the only means for transport” (qtd. in “Vespa Obsession”). As I have suggested throughout this thesis, if the recall of Mod-imbued with nostalgic, wishful thinking takes us back to a better version of modernity, then it is the Vespa that take us there. The Vespa becomes symbolic of places continually longing to move forward. Eco’s words are certainly suggestive of the way Mods today nostalgically paint the sixties: no matter how fast your drive, you have inevitably missed the party. In embracing the scooter, and therefore, Mod, Post-Mods attempt to find a new kind of party.

In an ironic twist to the Mod narrative, the popular notion of sixties Mods today is linked to images of Mods on scooters racing down the highways of southern England in the 1979 film Quadrophenia. For Post-Mods, this was a seminal film that first introduced them to Mod. It also etched the scooter prominently into people’s minds as key to understanding culture. While Quadrophenia is hotly contested by Mods today regarding levels of aesthetic and chronological “accuracy,” the film nonetheless focuses much of its attention on the relationship between Mods and their scooters. In fact, the film goes so far as to make the scooter synonymous with the Mod’s sense of identity. When the film’s Jimmy Cooper feels like he no longer wants to be a Mod, the only solution is the destruction of his scooter and all it symbolizes.

One song featured on the soundtrack is called “The Real Me,” so the issue of identity is central to the film. In Quadrophenia the scooter becomes an extension of 107

who Jimmy is, or at least, who he is trying to be. In this identification between the Mod and his scooter, Jimmy projects all that he desires to be onto a mechanically precise machine. Like Jimmy, the first subcultural Mods strove for an excessively perfect appearance and the affect of upward mobility. The Vespa was symbolic of both these aspirations. As Dick Hebdige explains, “The Mods converted themselves into objects, they ‘chose’ to make themselves Mods, attempting to impose systematic control over the narrow domain which was ‘theirs,’ and within which they saw their ‘real selves’ invested” (Hiding in The Light 111). With all its streamlined perfection the Vespa symbolized a type of soulful materialism to the Mods. It was more than just machinery, it was a metaphor for what kind of person they sought to be: urban and sophisticated, modern and well traveled.

Based on their consumer rationale, Mods assumed this personal excellence-and therefore happiness--could be bought. In Mod style, with its emphasis on image and consumer culture, there was a sense that happiness could indeed be purchased. It is then not altogether unsurprising that the scooter, as the ultimate symbol for “dreams that money can buy,” has made its most pronounced, recurring appearance in the commercial world rather than in the contemporary Mod subculture.

A recent example of the scooter’s commercial appropriation is to be found at your local Starbucks. With its mass marketed attempt at Italian café culture, Starbucks takes the continental, modernist flair that the early Mods cherished and tries duplicating it in a uniform manner. In keeping with this, Starbucks currently has a 108

clever, new campaign called “La Dolce Vita.” At the counter there is a CD of the same name available for purchase featuring songs by, among others, Henry Mancini and Dean Martin. It is coupled with a contest that offers the winner a trip to Tuscany or a brand new Vespa. Whether seen in online, pop-up advertisements, the Starbucks website, or posters in the store, the main image used is that of a couple on an Italian scooter. “A great cup of coffee should transport you,” says the ad, adding that “La Dolce Vita” (“the sweet life”) is available “with your Starbucks card.” In the second Austin Powers’ film, The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), Dr. Evil’s headquarters, atop Seattle’s Space Needle, is a Starbucks. In an online interview with Mike Myers, where he is asked about the rampant product placement in his films, he replies, “Haven’t you noticed that everything has turned into a Starbucks lately?” (George). Although it may seem less obvious at first, Starbucks is actually one of the most blatantly commercial offshoots of early Mod style today.

While this particular Starbucks’ marketing angle adopts the title of Federico Fellini’s well known, Vespa-filled 1960 film, the image of the Italian scooter is, as I have explained, unquestioningly Mod. In the eyes of the early Mods, films like La Dolce Vita were like so many deliciously decadent fairytales of continental Europe, which they tried hard to emulate. As Penny Sparke acknowledges, the Vespa was introduced to Britain “with espresso coffee bars and Italian suits [but] it soon developed […] into a cult object, used almost exclusively by young male members of the subcultural avant-garde” (155). From these first filmic influences, the Mods’ 109

adoption of Vespas and Lambrettas was at such an epic scale that Mod expert Terry Rawlings describes scooters as “the Mod accessory” (129).

Aside from the European cachet that Italian scooters provided the first Mods, they also supplied a sense of movement, speed, and freedom--Vespa literally means “Wasp.” When I asked Alex Baker which songs come to mind as being Mod, he mentions The Creation’s “Making Time” right away. “The title is so sixties Mod, I can’t even explain why. Speed? Trying to get places? You don’t think of Mods as laid-back hippies. They’re on speed and going place to place” (Interview 3 Jan. 2003).

Where were the Mods in such a hurry to get to, and what are they moving towards now? It is actually through these connotations that the Vespa provides the most insight into Mod’s presence today. Mods today still connect ideals of exploration, discovery, freedom, and consumer-enhanced individualism with the Mod lifestyle. If the Mods were speeding on to find the best that modernity had to offer, then Mods today seek to do the same.

It would, however, be incorrect to say that all scooter enthusiasts today, particularly Americans, are latter-day Mods. Many Post-Mods do not even own scooters. Still, there is a cultural connection between scooters and Mods that has not vanished. It seems that somewhere along the way, scooterists will inevitably come across this long-held association between scooters and Mod style. As a member of Portland, Oregon’s all-female scooter club, The Hell’s Belles, Lisa Libby (b. 1972) did not learn about this connection until well into her twenties: 110

Shortly after moving to Oregon I randomly acquired a 1979 Vespa scooter. To me the scooter represented a stylish form of urban transportation. I had no idea of the cult scene that was involved with Italian scooters. Once I began riding in Portland I quickly received a crash course in the ‘scooter scene.’ I was told that most Vespa riders are Mods, but not the kids in Portland […] they are the equivalent of a Mod’s white trash, punk rock cousin. Soon I was introduced to kids from San Francisco and Seattle that fit my idea of what a Mod was […] they always seemed slightly overdressed. (E-mail 17 Mar. 2003) Whether current scooter enthusiasts are wise to Mod style before purchasing a Vespa seems less the point. The fact that Vespas still attract those in favor of “stylish, urban transportation,” attests to its Mod legacy today. Walking down Georgetown’s Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. it is difficult to ignore the newly opened Vespa boutique. From a distance, one’s eyes meet those of mysterious, ultra-hip creatures displayed in gigantic, storefront posters. The models in the black and white ads, wearing both dark sunglasses and a cool indifference, seem like Mod characters straight out of 1963. Just like the attitude conveyed in these posters, it was the Vespa’s continental flair that Mods assumed would transport them beyond what they saw as their very ordinary lives. Today this rose-colored view serves Vespa dealers well.

Based on the success of his Vespa boutique in Riverside, California,

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thirty-one-year-old Paul Kinsella sees that what he is “selling [is] romance [and] a quality of life” (Hermann). In adopting the Vespa, Mods of past and present strive for an idealized quality of life.

As the Umberto Eco quote above implies, the Vespa has become iconic and somehow imbued with an almost spiritual power despite its obvious materialism. As symbolized in the Vespa, this presumed power is attached to the whole notion of Mod style and culture itself. Saatchi and Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts, who lived and worked in London during the Mod sixties, describes that period as “a time of optimism, hope, youth and freedom […] My generation in action. London was the center of the universe and youth was providing the fuel.” Roberts, who now lives in New Zealand, adds that even his eighteen-year-old son “thinks Mod styles are terrific” (E-mail 21 Jan. 2003). Paul Bertolino notices that “the 60’s generation is the only one who continues to romanticize the era. The people who grew up in the 70’s just talk about what a drag it was and now find the styles to be tacky […] likewise with the 80’s” (E-mail 13 Jan. 2003). Certainly due in part to this idealized view, Post-Mods today see Mod as the pinnacle of modernity, the ultimate hip moment. As Bart Davenport contends, “Music and fashion were at a high point in the 60’s. The style of that generation will never be matched. So there will always be people who want to copy it” (E-mail 26 Feb. 2003). No wonder then, that there are still a handful of young people who see Mod as symbolizing “The party of all parties; the time of all times; the

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granddaddy of all golden moments” (Levy 322). There has been a lot of cultural and generational reinforcement in adopting this view.

Mod World While today’s information age has offered young people a unique “now moment” of their own, it is a youth culture primarily about work and efficiency, with emphasis placed on careers rather than leisure. This is squarely in opposition to the Mod culture of the sixties, where its main concerns were in fact leisure and style.

While speed once connoted Vespas and rock music, it now evokes computers and wireless technology. Instead of aligning oneself with people who wear the same fashion, many people relate over the Internet through chat groups and message boards where their fashions and identities are ambiguous. The new Mod (read: trendy) lingo has become: How fast is your Internet connection, or how much memory have you got? In this era of the Internet, it seems that the young have more work to do at an earlier age and that the endless party of the 1960’s has turned into the endless business lunch of the 2000’s.

Since digital technology continues to shape youth culture today (and, latter-day Mods are not immune to this as evident from various Mod-centric websites and chatgroups), the new subculture of Mods focuses on both commercial and subcultural images evocative of times when youth was equated with a free and easy

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lifestyle; La Dolce Vita. It was then interesting to learn, from speaking with Alex Baker, that many Dot.com companies in the late nineties held Mod or Austin Powers-themed corporate parties (Interview 3 Jan. 2003). Jonathan Margolis remarks that every generation has “an arrogance of the present,” or “the belief […] that at last, sophisticated, modern folks that we are, We’ve Got It, and indeed We ARE it” (22). In the current, younger generation the verdict is split. How arrogant are we about the uniqueness of our time and place? While some young people see today’s state of the art gadgetry as a digital revolution, in which youth feel more knowledgeable than their elders, there are also those who defer back to the Mod ideals of circa 1966 as if that was the time when the term “We got It” really meant something. The Mod era was a golden age, was it not?

In July 2000 a festival was held called The Las Vegas Grind. Billed as three days of “Sixties Trash, Garage, Surf and Exotica amidst the glitz of Las Vegas” (www.lasvegasgrind.net), the influence of Mod style was everywhere. The ballroom walls were covered in fluorescent flowers, there were go-go dancers, and all the bands that performed had more than a twinge of Mod flavoring their repertoire. Most of the bands were made up of people in their twenties and thirties. Two of these bands, New Jersey’s The Insomniacs and Florida’s The Hatebombs were especially Mod in sound and fashion. The Insomniacs sported mop tops, tailored suits, and Rickenbacker guitars. Their presentation of mid-sixties style was flawless and their music true to the pop sounds of 1964. An online Insomniacs CD review describes the band as “having 114

heard the clarion call of the British Invasion from across the span of decades” (Ashlock). Despite their “nowness,” their sound is of the past as well. The Hatebombs, with similarly matching suits and musical gear, performed a version of the 1966 Kinks song, “When I see That Girl of Mine.”

Scanning the festival crowd while the bands played, it was obvious that the majority of the audience was far from being even a “glimmer in their parents’ eyes” during the sixties. This odd spectacle in cultural “time travel,” or “past worshipping,” returns us to the main question of this thesis, which is: How is it possible to be a Mod in the twenty-first century if one never experienced the Mod sixties? Furthermore, why would one seek that lifestyle out? As I have suggested, the reason is threefold. It is the result of Mod’s continued retro-forward logic, its continued marketability, and its continued media dissemination as the premiere progressive, youth style and period.

An article in London’s The Guardian from April 2001 reminds readers that today’s era is similar to the original Mod times in its recasting of old trends. Just as the first Mods adopted a mélange of older and newer fashions, so do today’s Post-Mods. However, writer Dom Phillips also says that Mod is unique from other styles. Philips quotes DJ Gilles Peterson as saying; “There’s something classic about Mods that’s far more relevant to now than other tribes. They were eclectic from the start” (11). It is in contemporary culture’s continued eclecticism that Mod still finds its voice.

It is clear that access to a vast media archive of Mod images helps facilitate continued interest in the style. Yet the fascination with Mod moves beyond notions of 115

mediated experiences filtering into the real. Personal taste seems largely immeasurable. People like what they like for a variety of reasons, but incorporating cultural artifacts into one’s lifestyle proposes that there is a connection between one’s lived experiences and particular texts. Larry Grossberg writes: as fans of something, “People are constantly struggling, not to merely figure out what a text means, but to make it mean something that connects to their own lives, experiences, needs and desires” (52). When the Post-Mods that I interviewed first encountered Mod imagery there was something that resonated with them, no matter how physically or chronologically far away they were from it. As Jason Rollins told me, “[Mod] seemed very far removed from white bread, suburban America and somewhat romantic” (E-mail 10 Mar. 2003). When Bart Davenport was a teenager, he aligned himself only with purist readings of the Mod phenomenon. Everything had to be directly adapted from the 1960’s. Today, he likes the fact that younger Mods today “don’t give a fuck about dates” (Interview 26 Feb. 2003). Given the raw, youthful energy that Mod times exerted, it is quite possible to see Mod as an eternal symbol for youth, innovation, and change, and therefore it continues to speak to young people today.

Peppered throughout current pop culture are signs of Mod style’s continued influence. The record-breaking success of the latest Austin Powers’ film Goldmember (July 2002), YM’s Mod “Back To School” fashion spread (September 2002), and W magazine’s declaration of “Mod Times” in January 2003 attest to its staying power.

Trendy, youth-oriented stores such as Washington D.C.’s Commander Salamander 116

currently sell shirts by the Yum Pop company featuring a cartoon Mod girl. Yum Pop has two lines that specifically evoke Mod: “On the Go-Go” and “Mod-ified.” All shirts feature variations of the Union Jack, the R.A.F target symbol, or the London Underground sign. Furthermore, the shirts feature titles of rock songs such as “Rebel Rebel (David Bowie, 1974),” “Who’s Next (The Who, 1971),” and “London Calling (The Clash, 1979).” The interesting thing is that none of these shirts pair Mod signifiers with titles from 1960’s songs at all--therefore mutating the meaning of Mod even more. At the same shop one can also find an assortment of products by Los Angeles designer Paul Frank. He has become known for his cartoon images of monkeys riding Vespas, and launched a successful tee shirt in 2001 called “I Love Mods,” which featured a Union Jack within the heart used to represent the word “love.” The use of Mod images on a wide commercial level is definitely happening today, and is part of the retro-forward logic of which I have been writing. What the Leo Burnett advertising agency identified as “Trend Surfing,” in 1994 is no different to what the Mods did in the 1960’s, or what they do today. The article announces, “Kids are borrowing old trends and creating new ones to establish their own unique identity” (“Kids Go Back in Time”).

How far has the current commercialization of Mod gone? Meandering through Manhattan’s east Village, one will inevitably stumble upon a store with rainbow colored letters called “Mod World.” Upon entering the shop, it soon becomes clear that one is not likely to find sleek tapered suits, scooter accessories, or even Austin 117

Powers paraphernalia. The store instead offers all sorts of random knick-knacks and baubles found in many other gift stores. Here one is likely to find a string of chili pepper lights, unusually packaged scented soap, or raunchy, B-movie themed magnets.

In this case, “Mod World” is Mod only insomuch that it touches on the disposable, plasticity of a contemporary culture: Alfred Toffler’s much maligned throwaway society. If this is so, then where are the paper mini-dresses? This store suggests that the link between the word “Mod” and material consumption is stronger than ever.

Hans Magnus Enzenberger, invoking Debord, could be referencing Mod when he suggests that “consumption as spectacle is--in parody form--the anticipation of a utopian situation” (73). However, the utopian bent on consumption that Mod style fostered is noticeably absent from this particular “Mod World.” Can it be felt elsewhere, though?

What about those who feel they identify with the Mod scene today? What do they make of the tension between Mod and commercial culture? David Steel is appreciative of Mod’s material aesthetic. He identifies himself as a Mod because not only does he think it “fits his character and outlook,” but “it so happens to incorporate a whole load of consumer goods [he] loves as well” (E-mail 8 Mar. 2003). Lisa Libby of Portland, Oregon doesn’t identify herself as Mod per se, but describes herself as a very interested onlooker. She sees a built-in reflexivity between Mod and commercialism. She observes that because “Fashion and trends are so cyclical [it is]

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hard to determine whether the media encourages [Mod] style or if the interest in the style inspires the media to pay attention a particular group or image” (E-mail 17 Mar. 2003). Jason Rollins doesn’t think the cooption of Mod into the mainstream is not “necessarily bad--just a bit inaccurate.” He thinks that Mod “a la Austin Powers […] misses the point of the original London Mods who seemed to have defined themselves exclusively in the subtle details of clothing, behavior, and style.”

However, he later adds in the interview, “There is no real authoritative voice that dictates what is truly Mod or what can or cannot be added to the style. I am sure there are those who disagree with this but I have never heard a very convincing argument” (E-mail 10 March 2003).

In many ways, the twenty-first century Mod is not unlike Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth century collector “who dreams he is not only in a distant past world but also, at the same time, in a better one” (“Paris” 155). Technology may change the pace of how things happen, but some things remain constant. There will always be desires for the past even as there are hopes for the future. Just as the early Renaissance inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, and fashions of Regency era England cast an eye to ancient Greece and Rome, twenty-first century Mods romanticize the look and lifestyle of Mod’s original, historical period. As an Uppers Organization article on Quadrophenia cites, a Guardian newspaper critic found the British Mod revivalists of the late seventies odd because “they didn’t want to emulate wealthy people [as the original Mods had] they just wanted to emulate the original Mods” (Rave).

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Furthermore, with their main reading of Mod through a mediated experience (Quadrophenia), they were primarily simulating a filmic, seventies retelling of the Mod sixties. A Baudriallardian reading of this occurrence reminds us that in today’s world we often interpret the world around us through a “proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality, of second hand truth […] where object and substance have disappeared” (Baudrillard 173). In this reading we are left with images sans objects where new meanings have to be created. While this might be interpreted as a negative, it is potentially freeing. In this analysis, Mod becomes whatever it has evolved into today, infused with different ideals and interpretations over the years, and through a “proliferation of myths.”

However, moving beyond the mere repetition and nostalgia of Mod images, the question of Mod today still has much to do with utopian longings coupled with modernity. I posit that what George Melly described as sixties Pop in 1966 is related to what I am describing as Mod. It is Mod style that is “a direct expression of the aspirations and dreams of society as it is, rather than an attempt to impose a ‘desirable’ culture from above” (11). From the start, Mod--with its many ambiguities and tensions--somehow seemed to suggest that modernity’s dreams are sometimes buried beneath mainstream culture’s rat race and need to be sought out. Beyond its working-class roots, even beyond the “Youthquake” trends of Swinging London, Mod style and culture was and continues to be where the hopes and dreams of modernity are expressed among “the people.” Fredric Jameson sees that the emergence of new, 120

social groups or subcultures has actually taken the place of class-based groups in contemporary culture (319). Mod makes it clear that it is lifestyle, not class, which determines possible fulfillment.

Keeping up with the Joneses now means keeping up with the speed of the times. Is this where Mod dreams have left us? While the Mod subculture today mimics the past aesthetic, it seems the dominant culture of the information age has picked up on less playful aspects of Mod. For instance, did Mod culture’s hyperattention to detail, mass consumption, and speed simply prepare us to be pro-active, multi-taskers? Is speed now only linked to efficiency and information processing, rather than--as the Mods saw--to the potentially playful rhythms of urban life? Without knowing the kind of impact it would have, Mod style continues to illuminate some core questions of our age: What does modernity mean? How does the urban individual differentiate him or herself in a homogenous world? How does one experience life and “realities� in an age of increasing duplication and mediation? As it has evolved over the years and become embedded in the collective consciousness, Mod has come to symbolize the inconsistencies, aspirations, and random associations of modern times.

As reflected in the Mod ideal, if modernity is about anything it is about keeping abreast of increasingly faster cultural transformations and having fun with them. And, because this is something we are still conscious of today, Mod remains familiar and strangely comforting. For all the questions that Mod brings to mind, perhaps the biggest surprise Mod holds is its longevity. Mod times are still here.

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For something that was supposed to signify the temporary, the trendy, Mod has become the mother of all trends and the one that both ages gracefully as it remains eternally young. And in it many incarnations and spaces, Mod style continues to blur boundaries between the trendy and the classic, the mainstream and the alternative. In Washington, D.C. alone one can visit places that exhibit the way Mod appears today.

The Washington Plaza’s International Lounge is a place where one can pretend to be in a James Bond film while sipping Martinis and eating fondue. There is also the Modinspired Wag dance night once a month at The Black Cat nightclub--a club that normally caters to alternative types and Neo-hipsters. Or, perhaps a visit to the glossy, new Vespa store on Wisconsin Avenue sounds appealing? These physical manifestations of Mod style, these “Mod places” in D.C., are microscopic in comparison to a larger international scene that includes all-weekend and international Mod music festivals. However, the presence of these happenings and spaces says that Mod is still a vital style choice to many people around the globe.

As I have suggested in my last chapter, if Mod fashion and music lead people back to some more innocent period--a historic moment when all the world was young and ebullient, optimistic and progressive--then continued yearning for such a time implies that there are fears that these qualities are absent today. David Steel thinks that “The days of new subcultural movements evolving appear to be long gone, so those with an interest in that way of living have to look back to find it” (E-mail 8 Mar. 2003).

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Author Fred Davis suggests that Nostalgic sentiment partakes of one of the great dialectical processes of Western Civilization: the ceaseless tension of change vs. stability, innovation vs. reaffirmation, new vs. old, utopia vs. the golden age. Its role in this dialectic is that of a brake on the headlong plunge into the future.

(Yearning for Yesterday 116) This concept of nostalgia was true in the Mod 1960’s and holds true today.

Mod happened the first time in conjunction with the postwar generation and prior to the escalation in Vietnam. If that generation saw war as the devastating side of technological advancement and globalization, then Mod style, with its hip internationalism and obsession with high tech gadgets also gave them a glimpse of innovation, newness, and utopia. As technology moves forward and our world enters a war with unknown implications, Mod reminds us that all is not lost. Mod sixties youth were the first to openly celebrate these choices, thereby modeling “modernity in motion” for future generations to come. It is important for youth today to come to terms with the fact that this former “highly anticipated generation” did not have all the answers. Some things have not changed for the better. However, the Mod legacy remains. With Mod style as a reminder, we can take direction from an innovative past.

Mod existence today affirms that it is possible to extend the optimism of an eternal, golden youth into the present; that our time “now” can still mean something exciting.

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Appendix: Interview Participants

Longtime Bay Area resident Alex Baker (b. 1970) is a musician, actor, and DJ who now lives in Los Angeles. He can currently be seen on reruns of Comedy Central’s Primetime Glick and has been featured in a Mercedes commercial as a British Mod on a Vespa.

Paul Bertolino (b. 1969) is a musician who lives in Berkeley, California. He currently sings lead vocals for Bay Area band The Sleaves. He does not consider himself a Mod per se, as he thinks his tastes are “too varied for that.” However, he still thinks, “everything about Mod style is attractive to me and always has been.”

Berkeley, California native, Bart Davenport (b. 1969) is a musician who has toured internationally--both with his mid-nineties band The Loved Ones and as a solo performer. “The Mod movement gave us Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, and Paul Weller,” says Davenport. “These are some of the greatest songwriters in rock music. I will never dismiss the Mod thing as an influence on my stuff.”

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London resident Richard Hutt (b. 1970) works for the BBC and also writes articles about Mod culture for various publications like The Uppers Organization. A child of the seventies, he describes his “fondness for Mod style as born from pre-teen viewings of 60’s spy movies.”

Lisa Libby (b. 1972) moved to Portland, Oregon from Michigan in the mid-nineties.

She is scooter enthusiast who has helped carry out several successful fundraising events for local charities with her scooter club, The Hell’s Belles. She is currently a graduate student at Portland State University.

Los Angeleno Dan Melendez (b. 1974) works by day for Northwestern Mutual Financial Network. By night he spins Mod music for Hollywood’s “Club Au-Go-Go” night. He has also DJ-ed at Mod-themed events in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Benidorm, Spain.

Kevin Roberts is currently the CEO of international advertising group Saatchi and Saatchi, but his first “real job” was working for Mary Quant in 1960’s. His willingness to participate in this study illustrates his continued enthusiasm for Mod style.

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Philadelphian Jason Rollins (b. 1970) identifies himself as a Mod, “but not exclusively,” he says. He has been interested in the original Mod subculture since age fourteen, and participates in the contemporary scene as a musician, DJ, and events organizer.

British Mod David Steel (b. 1977) lives in northeastern England and has played in various Mod-style bands and has DJ-ed and promoted Mod-themed events in his hometown. He says he enjoys “living [Mod] 24/7, rather than just at the weekend!”

Charles Wallace (b. 1971) once worked as an art director for the infamous rock magazine Creem. He currently works as a freelance web designer, but can also be found fronting his Mod-influenced rock band Headquarters. He is also one of the producers of the short film American Mod.

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A Concise History of the British Mod Movement

by Melissa M. Casburn

Emerging from World War II, the youth of London found themselves in a period of traditional values, conformity and drabness. Struggling to escape the oppressiveness of morals, family obligations and strict discipline in schools and on the streets, a string of youth subcultures emerged as a way of rebellion and selfexpression, beginning with the Bohemians, and continuing today with punks and skin-heads. Somewhere in the middle lie the Mods, an immeasurably large and widespread cult of fashion-worshipping workingclass teens with money in their pockets and time on their hands.

The immediate predecessors of the Mods were the Teddy Boys or the Teds. In an attempt by the shop-owners of Saville Row to reincarnate the dandy look, Teddy Boys sported drape jackets with drainpipe trousers or jeans, the distinctive uniform.

An extremely narcissistic group, the only violence that ever arose in relation to them was due to an over-reaction to insults about their mode of dress; one common insult being ‘flash cunt’. The Teds cultivated a slick image, completed by a greasy, Brylcreamed ‘quiff’, a Fonzie-style lock hanging down the center of the forehead.

The Teddy Boys, along with the Beatniks, broke fresh ground for bored youths in a grey and conformist world. By the late 1950s, however, the Teds had grown stale and predictable and youth was more than ready for a change.

Left, a Teddy Boy in London in the 1950s.

In 1958, a small group of tailor’s sons in East London adopted a smooth and sophisticated look, a combination of Italian and French styles of the period. They had Italian suits with narrow lapels impeccably tailor-made for themselves, and wore them with pointed-collar shirts. The shoes of necessity were hand-made winkle-pickers, so named because of their extremely pointed toes which so closely resembled the pins used to pick the meat out of a type of snail called a periwinkle (Author’s Note: Winklepickers are still made today. I own a pair in patent leather that I picked up in The Haight in 1987.) To top off the look, Mods wore their hair short and neat, following the lead of French film stars. Great pains were taken to get the hairstyle just right. Says one of the pioneers of the new look: “Most of us had terrific hair, French style, and you spent a lot of time on it. You had to use sugar water. What you would do was wash your hair, then get a bowl of hot water and

put sugar in it. Let the water cool and keep stirring it up and then plaster the water on your head and shape your hair. We used to leave it on all night. The longer you left it on, the better it was. If you had straight hair, you left it on for twenty-four hours. It was horrible stuff. But, if you had crinkly hair, you might have to leave it on for four days. With straight hair, it came out just the business.”

A group of London Mods in 1964.

Mods inherited the narcissistic and fastidious tendencies of the Teds regarding their appearance. Dressing for show was transformed into a religion as British youth demolished the notion of male clothing as merely a status indicator. Until this time, it had been a common stereotype that only homosexuals were interested in fashion. The Mods trampled on this idea as well. Clothing took precedence over all else, as this Mod explains: “We used to go to a lot of extremes. Once I didn’t go out because I put on my suit and my shoes were a little bit dirty so I got the polish out and --- disaster --- I looked in the mirror and I’d splashed my shirt. So I got the hump and I didn’t go out that evening. I stayed in because my shirt wasn’t perfect. And I knew guys who’d get on a bus with a sheet of brown paper so they could put it on the seat so they didn’t get any dirt on their suit. And they’d sit bolt upright so they were not touching the back of the seat. We took it very seriously and you had to be immaculate, very dandyish.”

The interests of early Mods, who at this point were fairly small in number, were things that would maintain their ‘cool’ image, such as modern jazz music and Jaguar cars; however, relatively small salaries afforded them only motor scooters for transportation. The most popular models, Italian Vespas and Lambrettas, has a sleek, ‘cool’ shape and the advantage of being less oily than motor bikes; therefore, sparing much damage to silk suits. For extra protection and cleanliness, the Mods (or Modernists), took to wearing parks, allweather cape coats with fur-lined hoods in regulation Army green, though some Mods would dye them colors to match their scooters. they began to frequent clubs, a favorite being Le Kilt, which was often filled with young French women whose ‘cool’ image they greatly admired.

By 1960, the Mods had attained minor cult status, but had not yet been discovered by the media, the movement having only a few thousand adherents who were scattered throughout London. Two key factors are believed to have been reasonable for transforming them into the massive army they would soon become: affluence and education.

As wages generally improved after the war, working-class families became much better off and were no longer relying on their children to help support the family, as had been tradition. Consequently, youth became financially independent, with a large disposable income and suddenly nowhere to spend it. This was especially true of inner-city youth.

Due to the baby boom after the war, Britain was also becoming an increasingly younger country, opening a brand new and lucrative market to cater to and exploit. In the early 1960s, almost forty percent of the population was under twenty-five. New technology was also reducing the need for manpower, thus increasing the amount of free time.

Because the older generations were conservative and fearful that pandering to the whims of the young would create an anti-social culture, the market was left wide open to young entrepreneurs who were more familiar with the wants and needs of their new customers.

The Education Act of 1944 elicited improvements in the quality of schooling, opening up new employment opportunities for youth. Many young people from lower classes could now attend colleges and universities due to more generous grants and these institutions spawned a new generation of artists, designers and musicians. Consequently, art schools were on the rise, helping students to evaluate and develop their own personal style.

A Mary Quant dress from 1964.

Driven forward by affluence and education, the Mode cult exploded onto the London scene around 1960, the first sign being the rapid rise of shops selling Mod clothing. One of the primary designers for the Mods was Mary Quant, whose black daisy logo can still be seen in alternative clothing stores today.

She became the most successful designer and purveyor of the Mod look. Speaking of the rise in popularity of her designs, she inadvertently describes the movement itself: “At first we thought it was just the art student type that wanted to look like us and buy our clothes. But what we didn’t realize at the time and didn’t discover for some time was the fact that we were interpreting the mood of the whole generation, not just smart art students. The whole thing caught on in a much bigger way than we expected. We thought we were just working for people who lived in Chelsea, but the whole thing was actually what people wanted from all over.”

John Stephen was another significant Mod designer, who was just twenty-one when he opened his first boutique, His Clothes, and began to revolutionize the men’s clothing industry. Stephen watched and noticed what the Mods were wearing and what they wanted, and every new style on the streets appeared the next day in his shop. He kept it well-stocked with the latest trends, such as mohair or white suits, as well as basic, well-cut suits, jackets and trousers. Hipster trousers, worn previously only by homosexuals because of their supposedly effeminate colours, showed up first in Stephen’s boutiques, which were rapidly expanding. Within a few years, he owned a total of seventy boutiques in London, the U.S. and various European cities. This abundance of ready-to-wear clothing in the Mod style helped to reduce prices and propel the fashions quickly around the country.

By this time, a new door was opening into the Mod world. Women, previously shunned by this male-dominant subculture, now began to enter the scene, though they remained a minority throughout the life of the cult, referred to by the male members as ‘birds’.

King’s Road, a fashion mecca comparable to Carnaby Street, sported Stephen’s boutiques that catered primarily to teenage girls and young women, though the commercialized versions were more refined than what female Mods had been seen wearing in the street and in the clubs. Hemlines moved gradually up the leg, following current fashion. The miniskirt, a necessity in later Mod fashion, was to make London world famous. Flat shoes were in vogue, as were trousers and shirts or sweaters that match those of the girl’s boyfriend. Androgyny prevailed and haircuts were short and neat. Mod females wore little makeup, staying basic with only brown eye shadow and false eyelashes, unlike their male counterparts who adorned themselves meticulously in eye shadow, eye pencil, lipstick and rouge.

Naturally, along with fashion came a necessary change in hairstyles and the newest trendsetter was Vidal Sasson with his introduction of the geometric cut. The simpler style complemented the clean lines of Mary Quant’s clothing. Sasson’s West End salon soon became a favorite of Mod women. Hair salons for men also began popping up in large numbers, eradicating the need for the early days of sugar and water.

Ready, Steady, Go! was introduced on TV in August 1963 and given a prime time slot to the delight of thousands of Mods who could now gain access to the latest styles, music and dance moves. Clubs were still increasing in popularity, aided by the newest rave, La Discotheque, the first venue to play records rather than feature live bands. Most Mods led an active social life, attending clubs two to three nights a week on average. One Mod described his week: “Monday was Tottenham Royal, Tuesday the Lyceum, Wednesday the Scene or maybe stay in and wash your hair, Thursday Tottenham Royal again, then Friday night was Ready, Steady, Go! It got difficult to get in on that, so me and a friend used to get hold of an empty film can apiece and ride up and down the lift in the studios until it was time to go in, then we would just join the crowd. Then after, you’d go on to the Scene later. Saturday and Sunday was either a party or the Tottenham Royal, then the next week, you’d start again.”

To keep up with this hectic schedule most Mods employed the help of amphetamines, legal at the time and referred to as purple hearts or purpies, French Blues or black bombers. Getting blocked was sometimes the only way to make it through the week.

Mods were generally working class apprentices, shop hands and office boys. It is speculated that their obsessive pursuit of pleasure was in some way a desperate attempt to escape the monotony and low status they had to tolerate in the workplace. This was their only way to achieve the material success promised by an affluent and consumer society. Because this was the first generation who did not remember the war, the Mods did not suffer guilt and anxiety over their extravagance.

The It Girl of the Moment was Twiggy (aka LesleyHornby, born in Neasden, a suburb of London). She was the first teenager to become a supermodel. Her impact was immediate and international. She was the first massmerchandised model and is still one of the most recognized names in fashion.

There was a very general breakdown of cliques within the Mod culture, into three loosely defined groups: the mainstream Mods, the Scooter Boys, and the Hard Mods.

Mainstream Mods entertained most styles of the subculture from time to time, but generally dressed in Italian silk suits with narrow lapels. Colours ranged from grey and black to brown, red and green. Drainpipe trousers were cut above the ankle to reveal Italian tasseled loafers for basket-weave casuals, usually with pointed toes. Ties were always very thin and usually black, worn around the necks of button-down shirts.

Turtlenecks were also popular in wool or cashmere, as were crew-neck and V-neck sweaters and polo knit shirts buttoned to the throat, with horizontal stripes being the preferred pattern. Hair was razor-short and often topped with a black bowler. Mods sported dark glasses, in keeping with the ‘cool’ image.

Scooter Boys opted for a more casual attire, wearing anoraks and Army parkas for warmth. Shrink-to-fit Levis were popular with the Mods, often in black. Like the mainstream Mods, Scooter Boys donned sweaters of wool or cashmere, but paired them up with plaid or checked trousers. They also outfitted their scooters, dressing them up with mirrors, head-lights and fog lamps around the handlebars.

Hard Mods, a group that gradually evolved into Skinheads, were aggressively working class males who wore mainly jeans and work boots. Doc Martens were and are a popular work boot due to their exceptional strength and fit.

For every action there must be an opposite and equal reaction, and that reaction was embodied in the Rockers. Driving motorcycles and dressed from head to toe in leather, studs and hair grease, the Rockers were the sworn enemies of the Mods. While Mod typically represented an effeminate phoniness, Rocker (stemming from Rock and Roll) meant dirty and crass. In 1964, the two groups came to a head in Whitsun during Great Britain’s three-day Easter Bank Holiday. They held a major punch-up in the middle of the drab seaside resort Margate, resulting in seventy arrests. Many of those arrested stated that they had done it because they were bored. Seventy is surprisingly few, considering the thousands who attended, coming droves of scooters and motorbikes down the coast. If any youths had not been aware of the Mods before, there was no escaping their presence now.

Peter Noone of the band Herman’s Hermits. In 1965 the members of the band dressed in the trim, tailored clothes that had been brought forward by the Mod movement.

By this time, the subculture had become a mass commercial phenomenon and by 1965, the working class rebels who had helped to create the original cult disapproved of it, could no longer identify with it, and were beginning to loose interest. Wealthy pop aristocrats opened their own clubs, feeding off of the popularity of the style, white the original Mods were left in their 9-to-5 jobs, feeling cheated and upstaged. They were also growing older, starting families and careers and establishing homes for themselves. As all fads do, the image gradually lost the limelight and was eclipsed by the hippies and the steadily growing drug culture of the late sixties.

The Mod scene has undergone a mentionable revival of late. It is common to see late-model Vespas and Lambrettas parked haphazardly on San Francisco sidewalks. I hear of scooter clubs in Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. Retro clothing stores stock the fashions of sixties. In 2003 the couture Spring collections were notable for their

new interpretation of Mod fashions for men and women. It is part of the way of fashion, though, that these new times will be nothing to rival those which came before.

In 2004, we will see the presentation of the sixth Mods and Rockers film festival in Los Angeles. Each of the festivals has grown larger in size with more attendees wearing the clothing of the early 1960s, both vintage and reproduction.

Barry Evans and Judy Geeson in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), shown at the 2002 Mods and Rockers Film Festival. The film features music by the Spencer Davis Group and Stevie Winwood and Traffic. Shot entirely on location in London, the film perfectly captures the Swinging London scene of the mid 1960s.

The Mod’s Bookshelf The 60s: Mods and Hippies (20th Century Fashion) by Kitty Powe-Temperley, Heinemann Educational Books, 2000.

Boutique: A 60’s Cultural Phenomenon by Marnie Fogg, Mitchell Beazley Publishers, 2003.

Everyday Fashions of the Sixties as Pictured in the Sears Catalogs by JoAnne Olian (Editor), Dover Publications, 1999.

London in the Sixties (Cities in the Sixties) by George Perry (Editor), Pavilion Publishers, 2003.

The Mini-Mod Sixties Book by Samantha Bleikorn, Last Gasp of San Francisco Publishers, 2002.

Mod, A Very British Phenomenon: Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances by Terry Rawlings, Introduction by Richard Barnes, Omnibus Press, 2000.

Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London by Shawn Levy, Broadway Publishers, 2003.

The Sharper Word: A Mod Reader by Paolo Hewitt, Interlink Publishers Group, 2000.

Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s by Andrew Loog Oldham, St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

The Swingin’ Chicks of the Sixties by Chris Stodder, Cedco Inc., 2000.