LONDON: THE SWINGING CITY

Before Affluence and After Austerity
SLIDE: London smog 1953
In the mid-1960s, London was the place to be. ‘Fifteen years earlier, few would have predicted that London would soon play host to the most swinging ball of the century’ (Sandbrook, 2006b)[i] In fact Hardy Amies had had a similar opinion when reflecting on the legacy of the Festival of Britain in 1951; nothing in it signalled the onslaught of the Swinging Sixties, making particular reference to the Britishness of design in the shape of Mary Quant and her artistic contemporaries which would have enormous further global impact (Banham & Hillier 1976)[ii]. In retrospect it is understandable; the gloomy and restrictive situation of the country locked in the interminable shackle of debt from which it seemed almost impossible to free itself, gave absolutely no hint at the transformation to come. Historical descriptions of Britain in the 1950s are invariably depressing (Akhtar & Humphries, 2001; Marr, 2007; Kynaston 2008; Sandbrook, 2006ab; Tarrant, 1990; White, 2008)[iii]. The word that tends to sum up these accounts is ‘grey’. Cyril Connolly, the writer and critic wrote in 1947 after the worst winter since records began followed by the worst flooding, that the British people had been reduced to ‘a neuter class …with [ ] drab clothes … - a careworn people … in their shabby raincoats, under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover.’ (Gardiner, 1999:35)[iv]
SLIDE: London in the smog 1953
Even London was described as ‘‘scarred and dingy’ a vision of ‘rubble, greyness, smog, poverty’’ (Sandbrook, 2006a:105)[v] with its ‘drab empty pubs and miserable tea shops, the endless drizzle and tired threadbare hotels … worn down by austerity … damp and dark, the city was a symbol of exhaustion and decline’ (Sandbrook, 2006b: 239-40). If Britain appeared as if in the halftones of a poor black and white photograph throughout most of the Fifties, it wasn’t caused simply by poor weather and the ruined cities; the bleakness extended from the people’s psyche. The wartime spirit and camaraderie had gone, while all that remained was rationing and bombsites. No doubt the Festival of Britain had provided a splash of colour amidst this gloom to lift their spirits but the recovery of the British economy and the rebuilding of the country took almost ten years to get going (Gardiner, 1999). Accounts of the austerity years make pretty grim reading; everything was in short supply, clothing, housing, petrol, food, sweets – the list was endless. The Government hampered by the poor economy (of which 30% of spending went towards defence) made very slow progress in getting Britain back on its feet again. Gradually, bit by bit, the various necessities were de-regulated (removed from restriction). Little wonder then, that when meat – the last on the list - was taken off ration on 3rd July 1954, the whole country celebrated with a mass burning of rations books (Tarrant, 1990). Dominic Sandbrook (2006a) notes that this was the defining moment when austerity seemed to disappear almost overnight and affluence took its place. Terence Conran puts it rather nicely: ‘It doesn’t seem too fanciful to suggest that over the next twenty years [1945-1965], Britain would – like photography – change from black and white to colour’ (Gardiner, 1999: 6).
SLIDE: A nation of consumers
Harry Hopkins and other contemporary witnesses commented on the speed with which goods materialized in the shops; the meagre shelves were now stacked with every kind of comestible while shops stocked electrical appliances large and small with which to store and cook them. The advent of domestic electricity as a normal feature of the new housing going up around the country; the relaxation of hire-purchase restrictions, coupled with high employment and much better wages meant that for the first time since World War Two, people were able to buy what they had only been able to dream about.

In 1959 Queen magazine asked: When did you last hear the word austerity? This is the only time you will see it in this issue. At the moment there is more money in Britain than ever before. Nearly two thousand million pounds is pouring out of pockets and wallets and handbags and changing into air tickets and oysters, television sets and caviar, art treasures and vacuum cleaners, cigars and refrigerators. Britain has launched into an age of unparalleled lavish living. It came unobtrusively. But now you are living in a new world … Money doesn’t chink these days; it crackles louder than a forest fire. It is the age of BOOM. (‘Boom’ Queen 15 Sept 1959 cited in Gardiner, 1999:82)

The age of affluence according to the magazine had clearly arrived and while for some, this affluence was scaled down and slower to materialize, the history books show that the average household’s income and standard of living had risen quite dramatically. The average weekly wage had almost doubled from 1950 to 1959 and this was further helped by the drop in the standard income tax rate by approximately 30%. By 1956 most middle class families could easily afford items like new furniture, cameras and record players while the working classes found their homes now heated and lit with gas and electricity in which they could listen to the radio (powered by electricity) eat the new tinned and processed foods and regularly go to the cinema (Sandbrook, 2006a). Technology was certainly a major contributor to consumerism, giving rise to the increase in many home ‘gadgets’. With electricity being cheaper and now more readily available, the possibilities of using both large and small appliances around the home made the prospect of buying them ever more enticing. Finance too was another major factor in the ability to consume. If ready cash was the problem, then hire-purchase was the answer and this was taken up enthusiastically for large purchases. Hire-purchase with its attractive repayment schemes encouraged consumption and replaced the notion of shopping values of respectability with those of aspirational materialism (Sandbrook, 2006a). After years of having to wait, suddenly the British could have it all and sometimes have it immediately (depending on the waiting lists for certain products!). For the newly emergent ‘teenager’ who had money in his or her pocket to burn, the availability of a huge range of youth-oriented goods meant that they were able to create their own identity simply through buying the latest fashionable teenage asset in the shops. The teenage consumer was in the vanguard of consumerism. School leavers could have their pick of well-paid jobs and even those teenagers still at school could get Saturday jobs which paid well and afforded them little luxuries.

The Scene
SLIDE: Swinging London 1966
It is unlikely that if the consumer revolution and likewise the baby boom, which created a huge teenage group from the mid-1950s onwards had not happened, then Swinging London may not have been the phenomenon that it was set to be. Commentators of the time likened Swinging London to ‘[Prime Minister Harold] Wilson’s New Britain, a ‘new class’ forged in the white heat of popular culture and social mobility (Sandbrook, 2006b: 257). Clearly, Swinging London was a microcosmic version of this New Britain and the operative words in Wilson’s statement were ‘popular culture and social mobility’ which were fundamental to this notion of London. Swinging London was a concept - an imaginary City that existed in parallel with the real Capital - and has often been ‘described in terms of a particular group of people or a state of mind’ (Sandbrook, 2006b:246) but connected with specific sites and areas of London.
SLIDE: Kings Road Boutique and hairdressers 1960s
These were largely in the West End, most specifically Chelsea and the Kings Road. They consisted of four main types of establishment: boutiques; hair salons; discothèques and eateries (bistros and restaurants). At the heart of it was something known as ‘The Scene’. (In an interview with a graphic designer who was a young teenager at the time, he said that he was always looking for ‘the Scene’ but could never find it – it seemed always to disappear around the next corner before he could catch up with it!) The Scene had begun to take off as early as 1962 (Jackson, 1998)[vi] It was an intangible enigma to anyone who wasn’t a part of it, like an exclusive club with a small membership of a few hundred people (Booker, 1969)[vii]. These people have been described by various observers as a new class which was given the umbrella term of meritocracy, meaning that those who were part of it were included because they had demonstrated some merit. Jonathon Aitken defined it thus: A completely new class has been formed, running parallel to the existing system … This class, and it is a very small one, consists of people who compete in fields where although birth and breeding may accelerate progress, success nevertheless ultimately depends on merit and talent alone … The class includes actors and public performers of all kinds, authors and journalists, TV men, dress designers, photogenes, pop singers and money makers in open markets, to name a few. In short, all the people who are billed as belonging to the classless society or the new aristocracy belong in fact to this new group which, for want of a better terminology, can be called the ‘talent’ class. (Sandbrook, 2006b:257)

Dominic Sandbrook (2006b) says that the stars of Swinging London (those who inhabited this Scene) could be likened to the self made industrialists of the nineteenth century and to a certain extent this is true; however, it is clear that the diversity and range of the members of the new meritocracy was much broader than those industrialists and manufacturers of the previous century. According to Christopher Booker’s (1969) summary list of some of the leading figures who made up this group (of which he himself was one), there were no manufacturing industrialists at all, being comprised of largely arts and media figures together with politicians and the odd criminal (The Kray twins, East End gangsters and Bruce Reynolds, one of the Gt. Train robbers).
SLIDE: The Krays and Michael Caine
Oddly enough, Booker’s list has been neatly divided up into two groups: the Urban ‘Lower Classes’ and the products of Oxbridge – a very much ‘us and them’ division. Despite this, his list clearly shows that these people who came from a range of backgrounds from all over the country were now mingling together in a socio-professional way that would never have happened prior to this. The meritocracy was not classless as such, but it approached the status of people through something less traditionally hide-bound. A great proportion of the Scene’s members were popstars, The Beatles and the Stones naturally being the most prominent; photographers like Bailey and Donovan and designers/boutique owners such as Mary Quant and John Stephen; a good proportion were actors, actresses and comedians such as Michael Caine and Sean Connery, Rita Tushingham and the Goons.
SLIDE: Jagger, the Shrimp and Stamp
Surprising omissions were Terence Conran and Jean Shrimpton, although the latter – the top model of the Swinging Era – admitted later that she did not enjoy life in the swinging set, taking her knitting to nightclubs because she was so bored, making her then actor boyfriend, Terence Stamp furious (Sandbrook, 2006b). No doubt, Booker didn’t class knitting as a special talent! What is also strikingly interesting was that despite being the front-man of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger did not automatically qualify as a member of the swinging set; it was only through his connection with Chrissie Shrimpton did he meet and become friends with David Bailey and Mary Quant, thus allowing his entry into this elite club. Jagger, it seems, was a relatively ruthless social climber as was Terence Stamp, both delighting in their new found ability to mix with the upper classes, to a sycophantic degree. The Beatles did not seem to be phased by class; McCartney seemed quite at ease with them (living quite comfortably with his then upper class girlfriend’s family, the Ashers) and conversely Lennon’s contempt for them was thinly disguised. Jagger and McCartney’s friendship was heavily weighted towards the superiority of the Beatle, suggesting that there were even class hierarchies amongst the groups. Far from being classless, the Scene was riddled with it. However, as Sandbrook suggests, ‘this tight, incestuous world was an advantage, fostering a spirit of co-operation between say, Mary Quant, Terence Conran and Vidal Sassoon, or the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and thereby creating a sense of synthesis between the worlds of art, music and fashion’ (2006b: 259). Lesley Jackson has also noted the ‘integral relationship which existed at this moment in time between pop music, Pop Art, … pop fashion and pop design’ (1998:38), citing the examples of Quant described as ‘the Beatles of the fashion industry’ and Conran’s aspirations which were manifested through his shop Habitat as similar to Mary Quant, who became (along with the Beatles) an early and avid customer. The physical spaces of the Scene therefore, apart from the discothèques and restaurants were very often the professional shops and businesses owned by various Scene members, further perpetuating its incestuous nature. It is useful then to explore the examples of Quant, Sassoon and Conran, (which will be done further on) to discover how influential and important they were in ‘the look’.

The Look
The Look was a term coined by Mary Quant, as a diminutive of Dior’s New Look but updated to describe her style and that of the impending Sixties (Jackson, 1998). It also became a more generic term to describe a whole range of products and accessories which combined could determine a particular form of lifestyle. ‘The look’ gradually ousted the Contemporary style of the 1950s, it marginalised the Establishment and there was a clear shift in emphasis from maturity to youth. In contrast to the Contemporary style, the 60s look was modernist, geometric and angular, whether it was in clothes hair or furniture. It extended to the interiors and exteriors where these products were sold and their designs were calculated to catch the attention of a specific sector of the market.
SLIDE: Carnaby Street
Some of these establishments used the bright colours and graphics of Pop to attract a youthful clientele, epitomised in the image of Carnaby Street. White and orange were popular colours, especially in plastics. Quant’s New Bond Street shop featured space-age capsule shaped changing cubicles and Eero Aarnio’s Globe chairs while her Daisy Logo became the pattern of the carpet. Much of ‘the look’ in designed objects is recognisably linked to Space Age design (covered in that lecture) but there was also the notion of simplicity – in the Modernist sense of the word – and expendability, which led to the 60s being termed as ‘the throwaway society’.
SLIDE: Paper dress and spotty chair
Paper dresses and knickers, paper and cardboard furniture were designed not to last but to allow a more relaxed style of living which cost little and therefore could be changed every few months. The look was as much about image and attitude as it was of the content of design (whatever that might be) and a significant example of this would be the Beatles adoption of ‘the look’ which sent their career skyrocketing.
SLIDES: Beatles in Hannover and in Cardin Suits c.1963
The change from the rock ‘n’ roll image they had adopted in the late 1950s had been engineered by their manager Brian Epstein and German photographer Astrid Kirchherr. Their transformation by the look was total: gone were the greasy quaffs, the leather jackets and jeans, the American music and in came the mop tops, the Cardin clean-cut collarless suits and their own self-penned Liverpudlian pop tunes. This new incarnation of the Beatles, whose nickname ‘the Fab Four’ was also part of the look’s language, set them on the road to international fame through the matching of their dress to their music. Lesley Jackson states that they ‘continued to shape and be shaped by ‘the look’ until the middle of the decade, adding first television, then film and finally publishing to the list of media through which they communicated ‘the look’’ (1998:40).
SLIDE: Twiggy in Mary Quant
The look, in terms of fashionable young women between 1963-66, is ably described by Barbara Hulanicki, the founder of Biba as the ‘Biba dolly’ but a glance at Mary Quant’s design drawings demonstrates a similar physical type: She was pretty and young. She had an upturned nose, rose cheeks, and a skinny body with long asparagus legs and tiny feet. She was square-shouldered and quite flat-chested. Her head was perched on a long, swanlike neck. Her face was a perfect oval, her lids were heavy with long spiky lashes. She looked sweet but was hard as nails. (Hulanicki cited in Jackson 1998:44)

Hulanicki’s quote is an apt place to finish in determining elements of ‘the look’ because as she herself said, during the second half of the 60s the look of the Biba dolly girl changed to a softer dreamier woman, reflecting the changes happening in society through the advent of the hippy era. The Beatles LP Sgt Pepper released in1967, signalled a change in their style from playful Pop innocence to the quasi-mysticism and drug-fuelled surrealism of psychedelia. The Look can then quite categorically be said to have come to an end in 1966; completing a four year explosion of British cultural style.

Mary Quant
SLIDE: Mary Quant, 1963 by Terry Donovan and the Quant Daisy Logo
London had always been at a remove from the rest of the country; it had had its own unique culture which had an irresistible draw to many of those who lived outside it (White, 2008). However, in the Sixties, it did something extraordinary: it usurped Paris’ throne as the fashion capital of the world. Haute Couture was crumbling; Dior’s death in 1957 signalled the start of a gradual decline for Parisian fashion. The new teenagers in Britain did not want to follow what they saw as their parents’ style which followed the seasonal fashions of haute couture and appeared formal, stiff and matronly and they didn’t have to: a young designer had opened a boutique on the Kings Road whose clothes were exactly what they were looking for. Her name was Mary Quant. Quant opened her boutique Bazaar on the King’s Road in 1955 with her partner Alexander Plunket Greene to cater for the youth market and in this she was a pioneer, realising that teenage taste in clothing had not been catered for. Teenagers had always rebelled against their parents and one way to do this was through clothing. However there were some who did not necessarily want to rebel, just simply have a different and recognisably teenage style of their own. Quant set out with the idea that she would buy the clothes and accessories to sell in her boutique but instantly discovered a major problem: there was no suitable stock to buy. With the help of a dressmaker, she began designing clothes herself which would be made and sold the following day. Her clothes were so successful, that demand outstripped supply and the laborious amateurism of her production, soon changed as her original boutique gradually became a fashion empire. Quant’s clothes were mid-range in price so were out of the range of the purses of girls below a certain income bracket. She had always felt that she wanted her clothes to be available to all young women and it was only when her hand-made productions could be mass-produced that the prices dropped. She was keen for her clothing to follow this method but was bothered that her style might be watered down or become incoherent when the garments were made up in different sizes: the look demanded a thin, boyish, flat-chested physique. Mary Quant’s skill was in being able to develop from exclusive designer to mass-production by careful management of her designs.
SLIDES: Mary measuring miniskirt length in Chelsea studio 1965 + short video; Mary Quants shoes/boots + news reel
Apart from being responsible for promoting the cult of youth over middle-age, the most enduring symbol of her style is the mini-skirt. The debate about whether she invented it or not, is really immaterial; in her position as the most celebrated British designer of her generation and in an era when London was the world fashion capital, meant that she undoubtedly popularised it. Her clothes were democratic and therefore challenged establishment values, appealing to all classes. She wrote: ‘There was a time when clothes were a sure sign of a woman’s social position and income group. Not now. Snobbery has gone out of fashion and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dresses’ (Quant, cited in Jackson, 1998:43)

Vidal Sassoon
SLIDE: Vidal Sassoon in his Bond Street Salon in 1968 with business logo
Vidal Sassoon was Mary Quant’s contemporary, having opened his first hairdressing salon in New Bond Street (where Quant later opened her second boutique) in 1954. Sassoon, a working class Jewish boy who came from the East End of London had worked in a number of upmarket West End Salons prior to branching out on his own, but had felt that hair needed a radical overhaul. The complicated styles which needed considerable attention and lacquering to hold them in place were stiff and tiresome, needing the constant ministrations of a hairdresser. Sassoon’s idea was to change all that and to free women’s hair through revolutionary cutting. He believed that a haircut should be primarily based on the facial shape of the client and secondly, he was working towards styles that once cut, would need very little attention than a wash, falling back into shape when dried. It took Sassoon almost a decade before he achieved his dream cut but it turned him from a rising star into a celebrity crimper almost overnight.
SLIDE: Sassoon cutting the Quant Bob 1963
He first met Mary Quant when she came into his salon for a haircut. Sassoon had been experimenting with an old style – the 20s bob – but he was creating it for the 60s with a twist: by taking it higher at the back and cutting it to allow the front to fall forward into movement, leaving a heavy fringe trimmed just above the line of sight. The Quant Bob as it became known afterwards, caused a sensation when he secretly cut all the models’ hair in a variation on the Quant bob for her next show which was to be held at Bazaar. Sassoon states that he did something that nobody in (hair) fashion had previously done and that was to give these girls a completely new look – it completed and complemented what had come to be understood as the London look (Sassoon, 2010).[viii]
SLIDE: Five Point cut
Sassoon’s vision of geometric cuts perfectly coincided with ‘the look’ of the 60s. He went on to create if not his most famous, then the most iconic style of this era, which exemplified not only his intuitive fashionability, but demonstrated his astonishing design cutting. This came in the shape of the Five-Point Cut which was a further extension of his bob. The neck line was cut into three points while the hair in front of the ears was cut into two points. The precision of cutting such a style meant it was absolutely vital to understand the nature of the hair and the way it naturally fell from the roots. If it wasn’t cut correctly, it would spoil the clean line of the cut when washed or brushed. Aesthetically, the cut is pure Op Art.
SLIDE: Sassoon’s portrait in Bailey’s Box of Pin Ups 1965
Sassoon through his association with Quant quickly became part of the Scene, cutting many of the protagonists hair and had clearly ‘made it’ when he was included in Bailey’s Box of Pin-ups published in 1965.

Terence Conran
SLIDE: Terence Conran c.1964 and advertising image for Habitat
Terence Conran opened Habitat in 1964. At that time, the shop had a pioneering approach to design shopping through Conran’s revolutionary retail of homeware in Britain, by selling large pieces of furniture together with stylish accessories that when combined would complement one another in a tasteful setting. This method of selling became what was later known as ‘lifestyle shopping’. Conran also introduced products which were virtually unknown in Britain at the time, such as duvets and garlic presses (both items of continental origin) thus developing a reputation for innovation (www.habitatcontracts.co.uk).[ix] Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, Conran had been associated with the Chelsea set. Thhough he never appeared to be fully integrated into the Scene, he shared their love of the modernist look (particularly Scandinavian and American) and was entranced by both French and Italian style. Trained as a textile designer, he had begun to move into the area of interior design production by starting his companies, Conran Textiles and Furniture, and the Conran Design Group.
SLIDE: Conran Summa 1962
In 1962 he launched a new range of furniture based on Scandinavian style called ‘Summa’ but unlike Quant his problem was no outlet for it, rather than no stock. Only two furniture retailers in London were interested in stocking it, so following Quant’s lead, he looked for premises so that he could sell directly to customers. Conran’s astute location was based on targeting the right consumer for his wares: young, affluent and interested in looking ‘with-it’. So in 1964 he opened Habitat on the Fulham Road.
SLIDE: Habitat room setting
Habitat’s success lay in timing: the upturn in the economic climate and the rise in consumer spending, particularly in the area of home-ownership, coupled with changing values in art and design enabled him to fulfil his ambition. The close links forged between art, design and commerce meant that the similarity between different fields of production was striking – a form of collective identity which created the 60s look. Conran had quite definite ideas about the consumerism of the period which meant people had greater spending power and therefore, unlike the interwar generation did not need to buy ‘furniture for life’ but could replace it when they felt like change. He did not like the term ‘built-in obsolescence’ preferring ‘expendability and told an interviewer ‘Taste is constantly on the move … People have become enormously aware of colour and design, and they are prepared to have more exiting things provided they are less expensive and more expendable … Expendability is no longer a dirty word’ (Sandbrook 2006b:77). This might have jarred with the older generation but for the young consumer, shopping had become a dominant and pleasurable feature of post-war modernity. With steadily rising wages and virtually no unemployment, young affluent consumers started to use purchases and the act of shopping itself to create identities which were wholly different to their parents. Conran’s shop Habitat helped them do just that. He created a relaxed and informal interior with whitewashed brick walls, quarry tiled floors and ceiling spotlights; the customers who were in their twenties or early thirties were invited to take a basket and browse through the pine shelves laden with goods from Italy, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean whilst listening to jazz music and being attended to by shop assistants dressed in fashionable Quant clothes and sporting Sassoon haircuts (Sandbrook, 2006b). Dominic Sandbrook states that Conran, more than any other entrepreneur personified the cultural and economic trends of the 60s. The huge success of Habitat was that it has endured and expanded around the country and that its products have been endlessly copied so that regardless of their origin, Habitat’s style has gradually seeped into most consumers’ domestic identities. More than any of the futuristic designs in architecture, Habitat was the epitome of the better tomorrow that Harold Wilson conceptualised in his vision of New Britain (Sandbrook, 2006b).

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[i] Sandbrook, Dominic (2006b) White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 1964-70 London: Little Brown
[ii] Banham, Mary & Hillier, Bevis (eds.) (1976) A Tonic To The Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951 London: Thames and Hudson
[iii] Akhtar, M and Humphries, S (2001) The Fifties and Sixties: A Lifestyle Revolution London: Boxtree
Kynaston, David (2008) Austerity Britain 1945-51 London: Bloomsbury
Marr, Andrew (2007) A History of Modern Britain London:MacMillan
Tarrant, Chris (1990) Ready Steady Go! Growing Up in the Fifties and Sixties: from the Coronation to World Cup Willie London: Pyramid
White, Jerry (2001/2008) London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People London: Vintage (Amazon) [Kindle]
[iv] Gardiner, Juliet (1999) From the Bomb to the Beatles: the changing face of post-war Britain 1945-1965 London: Collins & Brown
[v] Sandbrook, Dominic (2006a) Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles 1956-63 London: Abacus
[vi] Jackson, Lesley (1998) The Sixties: decade of design revolution London: Phaidon
[vii] Booker, Christopher (1969) The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties London: Collins
[viii] Sassoon, Vidal (2010) Vidal: The Autobiography London: MacMillan (Amazon) [Kindle]
[ix] www.habitatcontracts.co.uk/en/site/#/our-heritage