When British popular culture first captivated the world

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Gilly Turney explores the impact of music, art and celebrity on 20th-century fashion, from Rock ‘n’ Roll to Punk

Anyone who grew up in the 1960s will remember the advent of  ‘Pop’ culture.  It exploded onto the British way of life like nothing else.  It influenced everything – art, fashion, music, interiors – and changed the way we lived for ever.

The period from the mid-’50s to the ’70s  was one of the most influential and innovative times in our cultural history. It spawned a generation of styles from rock ‘n’ roll to the Mods and on to punk, and launched some of the most creative designers and artists, including Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Mary Quant, and Vivienne Westwood, whose influence and work are still relevant today.

Pop was probably the most significant cultural phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. Essentially Anglo-American in origin, it was a broad-based grass-roots culture whose young exponents constantly blurred the boundaries of its primary vehicles of expression and communication, music, fashion and design, in a fluidity of artistic interests in the widest sense.

These interests had their origins in a popular culture far too diverse and spontaneous to be identified with or controlled by any particular group of intellectuals or artists.

This was particularly so in Britain where the subtle connections between pop musicians, pop designers and pop artists resulted from a shared common inheritance, many having begun their careers in the numerous art schools  that mushroomed around the country following the Second World War.

A recent exhibition at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum explored these connections through design, the visual expression of Pop culture, and provided a new insight into 20 years of popular culture. Highlights included purple flares worn by Donovan, the Pop-art fashions of Mary Quant, items from Elton John’s personal wardrobe, and original pieces from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop, Sex.

The first hint of the growth of the ‘Pop phenomenon’ appeared after the Second World War, passing through a number of phases over the next 30 years. 

The Rock’n’Roll era (1956–9) burst onto the British and American scenes simultaneously in 1955 in a vibrant fusion of music and teenage fashion, and is portrayed by iconic images of alienated ‘Youth’, such as Marlon Brando’s glamorously delinquent Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (1953), James Dean’s angst-ridden Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and the first teenage Pop and Rock stars, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent and Little Richard.  By 1957 a confident Pop culture had emerged that was to continue for the next 20 or so years.

As the 1950s ended, Rock ‘n’ Roll declined and the era of ‘Cool’ – ‘Mad Men’‘Modernists’ becoming ‘Mods’ (1960–3)– was ushered in to the definitive soundtrack of modern jazz by Dave Brubeck, or Ray Charles’ proto-soul music, a fusion of modern jazz, rhythm and blues and country music.   These ‘Cool’ sounds perfectly complemented the crisp simplicity and elegance of early Mary Quant-inspired fashions of ‘swinging modernist chicks’, and the sharp Italian styling of young men’s ‘Modernist’ suits.  By 1963 these sophisticated young ‘Modernists’ had evolved into ‘Mods’, the harbingers of the ‘Swinging sixties’ (1964–7).

The image of Swinging London and its ‘Dolly Birds’ is forever associated with the fashions and numerous boutiques of designers such as Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki (Biba); the look of models such as Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, the ‘Face’ of 1966; youth-oriented TV programmes such as ‘Ready Steady Go’ and the style of its influential presenter Cathy McGowan; the images created by trendy young photographers David Bailey or Terence Donovan for Vogue, and the plethora of new fashion-led magazines such as Nova andPetticoat; the young dandified male ‘peacock’ who shopped in Carnaby Street or King’s Road at the emporia of designer John Stephens or Granny Takes a Trip.  This hedonistic ‘fun’ existence was lived out to the soundtrack of the new British ‘Beat’ and Rhythm & Blues, music of groups such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

But as the darker economic and ethical problems of the era became ever more apparent, such a frivolous existence was increasingly questioned, until it eventually gave way to the mores of the ’Counterculture’ and the psychedelic ‘Hippy’ culture associated with West Coast America and San Francisco, and led to the birth of psychedelia(1967–70).

With 1967’s anti-materialistic, anti-bourgeois beliefs, its ‘Summer of Love’, many young people ‘dropped out’ and led a hippy existence of  ‘love and peace’.  Poster art and graphic design became a principal expression of the cultural and social revolution at this time. The primary vehicles for protest were the pages and covers of the ‘Underground press’ such as the news sheet, the International Times (IT), and the satirical magazine London OZ – as shown in the posters by British graphic designers Michael English and Nigel Waymouth, who worked together as Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, and the ‘Big O’ posters designed for Oz by Martin Sharp.

As Psychedelia morphed into ‘Glam-Rock’, the Fun Palace(1969–73), with its ‘fun’ design from Pop entrepreneur Tommy Roberts of Mr Freedom fame, an informal group of London-based artists, designers and stylists coalesced around Zandra Rhodes, to form ‘Them’: The Art Brigade Proto Postmodernism (1970–6). 

An influential group of baroque Pop designers, who included the painter Duggie Fields, film director Derek Jarman, sculptor and jeweller Andrew Logan, and fashion designer Anthony Price, formed an almost defiantly camp Kitsch group, the forerunners of the New Romantics of the late 1970s, and an integral thread in the fabric of British postmodernist design in the 1980s.

The advent of Punk in 1975 finally gave the coup de grace to Pop culture.  Punk (1975–6) was very dark indeed under the Svengali-like influence of Malcolm Mclaren, the anti-designs of Vivienne Westwood, and the anarchic graphics of McLaren’s former art school friend, Jamie Reid.  Yet despite what is often seen as its cynical and exploitative origins, Punk arrived at exactly the right moment to give voice to the growing despair of an increasingly dispossessed younger generation.

For McLaren, Punk was nothing but the defiant end of an era:

You couldn’t be respectable.  We didn’t do it by accident, we did it by design.  We were horrible by design.