Mod (subculture)

The term mod derives from modernist, a term used in the 1950s to describe modern jazz musicians and fans. That usage contrasted with the term trad, which described traditional jazz players and fans. The 1959 novel Absolute Beginners describes modernists as young modern jazz fans who dress in sharp modern Italian clothes. The novel may be one of the earliest examples of the term being written to describe young British style-conscious modern jazz fans. That use of the word modernist should not be confused with modernism in the context of literature, art, design and architecture. From the mid-to-late 1960s onwards, the mass media often used the term mod in a wider sense, to describe anything that was believed to be popular, fashionable or modern. Paul Jobling and David Crowley argued that the definition of mod could be difficult to pin down because, throughout the subculture's original era, it was "prone to continuous reinvention". They claim that, since the mod scene was so pluralist, the word mod was an umbrella term that covered several distinct sub-scenes. Terry Rawlings argued that mods were difficult to define because the subculture started out as a "mysterious semi-secret world", which the Who's manager Peter Meaden summarised as "clean living under difficult circumstances". ==1958–1970: Original movement==

George Melly wrote that mods were initially a small group of clothes-focused young English working class men, insisting on clothes and shoes tailored to their style, who emerged during the modern jazz boom of the late 1950s. Early mods watched French and Italian art films and read Italian magazines to look for style ideas. Early 1960s '' exhibit at the Cotswold Motor Museum in Bourton-on-the-Water in 2007 According to Hebdige, by around 1963, the mod subculture had gradually accumulated the identifying symbols that later came to be associated with the scene, such as scooters, amphetamine pills and R&B music. Mary Anne Long argued that "first hand accounts and contemporary theorists point to the Jewish upper-working or middle-class of London's East End and suburbs." Simon Frith asserted that the mod subculture had its roots in the 1950s beatnik coffee bar culture, which catered to art school students in the radical Bohemian scene in London. Steve Sparks, whose claim is to be one of the original mods, agrees that before mod became commercialised, it was essentially an extension of the beatnik culture: "It comes from 'modernist', it was to do with modern jazz and to do with Sartre" and existentialism. At those venues, which Frith called the "first sign of the youth movement", young people met collectors of R&B and blues records. As the mod subculture grew in London during the early-to-mid-1960s, tensions arose between the mods, often riding highly decorated motor scooters, and their main rivals, the rockers, a British subculture who favoured rockabilly, early rock'n'roll, motorcycles and leather jackets, and considered the mods effeminate because of their interest in fashion. There were some violent clashes between the two groups. After 1964, clashes between the two groups largely subsided, as mod expanded and came to be accepted by the youth generation throughout the UK as a symbol of all that was new. During that time, London became a mecca for pop music, with popular bands such as The Who and Small Faces appealing to a largely mod audience, as well as the preponderance of hip fashions, in a period often referred to as Swinging London. Mid-late 1960s Swinging London in "Swinging London" As numerous British pop bands of the mid-1960s began to adopt a mod look and following, this was due to members of some of these bands originally being mods, United States and elsewhere , 1966 As the mod lifestyle was going through decline in England, its influence became all the rage in the United States and around the world, as many young people adopted its look. American musicians, in the aftermath of the British Invasion, adopted the look of the dandy which was popular in London, with peacock revolution clothes, longer hairstyles, and Beatle boots. The exploitation documentary Mondo Mod provides a glimpse into mod and dandy influence on the Sunset Strip and West Hollywood scene of late 1966. Mod increasingly became associated with psychedelic rock and the early hippie movement and, by 1967, more exotic looks had come into vogue, such as Nehru jackets and love beads. Its trappings were reflected on popular American TV shows such as Laugh-In and The Mod Squad. Commercialisation Dick Hebdige argued that the subculture lost its vitality when it became commercialised and stylised to the point that mod clothing styles were being created "from above" by clothing companies and by TV shows like Ready Steady Go!, rather than being developed by young people customising their clothes and combining different fashions. ==1970–present: Later developments==

Mod and psychedelia dissipated after 1970, as tastes began to favor a more casual look, along with a decreased interest in nightlife. Bands such as the Who and Small Faces began to change and, by the early 1970s, moved away from mod to a more hard rock style. Other mods such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan (of T. Rex) adopted a glam rock style. Additionally, the original mods of the late 1950s and early 1960s were coming to the age of marriage and child-rearing, which meant many of them no longer had the time or money for their youthful pastimes of club-going, record-shopping, and buying clothes. Offshoots Some street-oriented mods, usually of lesser means, sometimes referred to as hard mods, remained active well into the late 1960s, but tended to become increasingly detached from the Swinging London scene and the burgeoning hippie movement. By 1967, they considered most of the people in the Swinging London scene to be "soft mods" or "peacock mods", as styles there became increasingly extravagant, often featuring highly ruffled, brocaded, or laced fabrics in Day-Glo colours. These Mods listened to Jamaican ska and mingled with black rude boys at West Indian nightclubs like Ram Jam, A-Train and Sloopy's. Hebdige claimed that the hard mods were drawn to black culture and ska music in part because the educated, middle-class hippie movement's drug-orientated and intellectual music did not have any relevance for them. He argued that the hard mods were attracted to ska because it was a secret, underground, non-commercialised music that was disseminated through informal channels such as house parties and clubs. By the end of the 1960s, the hard mods had become known as skinheads, who, in their early days, would be known for the same love of soul, rocksteady and early reggae. Because of their fascination with black culture, the early skinheads were, except in isolated situations, largely devoid of the overt racism and fascism that would later become associated with whole wings of the movement in the mid to late 1970s. The early skinheads retained basic elements of mod fashion—such as Fred Perry and Ben Sherman shirts, Sta-Prest trousers and Levi's jeans—but mixed them with working class-orientated accessories such as braces and Dr. Martens work boots. Hebdige claimed that as early as the Margate and Brighton brawls between mods and rockers, some mods were seen wearing boots and braces and sporting close cropped haircuts (for practical reasons, as long hair was a liability in industrial jobs and street fights). Mods and ex-mods were also part of the early northern soul scene, a subculture based on obscure 1960s and 1970s American soul records. Some mods evolved into, or merged with, subcultures such as individualists, stylists, and scooterboys. and Jake Bugg are also followers of the mod subculture. ==Characteristics==

Dick Hebdige argued that when trying to understand 1960s mod culture, one has to try and "penetrate and decipher the mythology of the mods". Terry Rawlings argued that the mod scene developed when British teenagers began to reject the "dull, timid, old-fashioned, and uninspired" British culture around them, with its repressed and class-obsessed mentality and its "naffness". In doing so, the mods "mocked the class system that had gotten their fathers nowhere" and created a "rebellion based on consuming pleasures". The influence of British newspapers on creating the public perception of mods as having a leisure-filled club-going lifestyle can be seen in a 1964 article in The Sunday Times. The paper interviewed a 17-year-old mod who went out clubbing seven nights a week and spent Saturday afternoons shopping for clothes and records. However, few British teens and young adults would have had the time and money to spend this much time going to nightclubs. Paul Jobling and David Crowley argued that most young mods worked 9 to 5 at semi-skilled jobs, which meant that they had much less leisure time and only a modest income to spend during their time off. The streets' names became symbols of, one magazine later stated, "an endless frieze of mini-skirted, booted, fair-haired angular angels". Newspaper accounts from the mid-1960s focused on the mod obsession with clothes, often detailing the prices of the expensive suits worn by young mods, and seeking out extreme cases such as a young mod who claimed that he would "go without food to buy clothes". Two youth subcultures helped pave the way for mod fashion by breaking new ground: the beatniks, with their Bohemian image of berets and black turtlenecks, and the Teddy Boys, from whom mod fashion inherited its "narcissistic and fastidious [fashion] tendencies" and the immaculate dandy look. The Teddy Boys paved the way for making male interest in fashion socially acceptable. Prior to the Teddy Boys, male interest in fashion in Britain was often associated with underground homosexuals' subculture and dressing style. , a mod symbol Jobling and Crowley argued that for working class mods, the subculture's focus on fashion and music was a release from the "humdrum of daily existence" at their jobs. A big part of the Mod look was borrowed from the Ivy League collegiate style from the United States. A few male mods went against gender norms by using eye shadow, eye-pencil or even lipstick. British fashion designer Mary Quant, who helped popularize the miniskirt, is credited for popularizing mod subculture. Miniskirts became progressively shorter between the early and mid-1960s. As female mod fashion became more mainstream, slender models like Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy began to exemplify the mod look. Maverick fashion designers emerged, such as Quant, who was known for her miniskirt designs, and John Stephen, who sold a line named "His Clothes" and whose clients included bands such as Small Faces. Terry Rawlings wrote that mods became "dedicated to R&B and their own dances." Starting around 1960, mods embraced the off-beat, Jamaican ska music of artists such as the Skatalites, Owen Gray, Derrick Morgan and Prince Buster on record labels such as Melodisc, Starlite and Bluebeat. The original mods gathered at all-night clubs such as The Flamingo and The Marquee in London to hear the latest records and show off their dance moves. As the mod subculture spread across the United Kingdom, other clubs became popular, including Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester. The British R&B/rock bands the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and the Kinks all had mod followings, and other bands emerged that were specifically mod-oriented. Amphetamines A notable part of the mod subculture was recreational amphetamine use, which was used to fuel all-night dances at clubs. Newspaper reports described dancers emerging from clubs at 5 a.m. with dilated pupils. Due to this association with amphetamines, Pete Meaden's "clean living" aphorism about the mod subculture may seem contradictory, but the drug was still legal in Britain in the early 1960s, and mods used the drug for stimulation and alertness, which they viewed as different from the intoxication caused by alcohol and other drugs. Scooters Many mods drove motor scooters, usually Vespas or Lambrettas. Scooters were a practical and affordable form of transportation for 1960s teens, since until the early 1970s, public transport stopped relatively early in the night. For teens with low-paying jobs, scooters were cheaper and easier to park than cars, and they could be bought through newly available hire purchase plans. Mods also treated scooters as a fashion accessory. Italian scooters were preferred due to their clean-lined, curving shapes and gleaming chrome, with sales driven by close associations between dealerships and clubs, such as the Ace of Herts. For young mods, Italian scooters were the "embodiment of continental style and a way to escape the working-class row houses of their upbringing". Mods customised their scooters by painting them in "two-tone and candyflake and overaccessorized [them] with luggage racks, crash bars, and scores of mirrors and fog lights". Lambrettas were cutdown to the bare frame, and the unibody (monocoque)-design Vespas had their body panels slimmed down or reshaped. After the seaside resort brawls, the media began to associate Italian scooters with violent mods. Much later, writers described groups of mods riding scooters together as a "menacing symbol of group solidarity" that was "converted into a weapon". With events like the 6 November 1966, "scooter charge" on Buckingham Palace, the scooter, along with the mods' short hair and suits, began to be seen as a symbol of subversion. Gender roles Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson argued in 1993 that compared to other youth subcultures, the mod scene gave young women high visibility and relative autonomy. They wrote that this status may have been related both to the attitudes of the mod young men, who accepted the idea that a young woman did not have to be attached to a man, and to the development of new occupations for young women, which gave them an income and made them more independent. Hall and Jefferson noted the increasing number of jobs in boutiques and women's clothing stores, which, while poorly paid and lacking opportunities for advancement, gave young women disposable income, status and a glamorous sense of dressing up and going into town to work. Hall and Jefferson argued that the presentable image of female mod fashions meant it was easier for young mod women to integrate with the non-subculture aspects of their lives (home, school and work) than for members of other subcultures. Dick Hebdige claimed in 2006 that the "mods rejected the rocker's crude conception of masculinity, the transparency of his motivations, his clumsiness"; the rockers viewed the vanity and obsession with clothes of the mods as immasculine. John Covach wrote that in the United Kingdom, rockers were often engaged in brawls with mods. The "mods and rockers" conflict was explored as an instance of "moral panic" by sociologist Stanley Cohen in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Newspapers of the time were eager to describe the mod and rocker clashes as being of "disastrous proportions", and labelled mods and rockers as "sawdust Caesars", "vermin" and "louts". Newspaper editorials fanned the flames of hysteria, such as a Birmingham Post editorial in May 1964 which warned that mods and rockers were "internal enemies" in the United Kingdom who would "bring about disintegration of a nation's character". The magazine Police Review argued that the mods and rockers' purported lack of respect for law and order could cause violence to "surge and flame like a forest fire". As a result of this media coverage, two British members of parliament travelled to the seaside areas to survey the damage, and MP Harold Gurden called for a resolution for intensified measures to control youth hooliganism. One of the prosecutors in the trial of some of the Clacton brawlers argued that mods and rockers were youths with no serious views, who lacked respect for law and order. ==See also==