With hemlines rising, music pumping and haircuts that defined a generation, the Swinging Sixties remains a decade that continues to influence designers and artists to the current day. We revisit some of the best – and most enduring looks – to emerge in the exciting era of 1960s fashion.
Mod Make-up
Before she was dubbed “the face of the Swinging Sixties”, Twiggy was plain Lesley Hornby, a teenager from northwest London who would spend hours experimenting on a bold new make-up look which paired colourless lips with deeply dramatic eyes – a massive shift away from the soft pinks and powders that had defined the previous decade.
“Obviously I am very fond of that look,” Twiggy later said of the visage which would be adopted by a generation, then reinvented by others for generations to come. “What a lot of people don’t know is that I invented it at the tender age of 16, pre-modelling. It would take me one-and-a-half hours to apply, including three pairs of false eyelashes!”
With a bold cut crease and heavy liner, her bottom lashes, or ‘Twiggy lines’ as they became known, were made with a block of pigment, the model painstakingly painting on each lash. White liner would also be applied inside the lower lid, making the eyes ‘pop’ even more. And so a 1960s fashion icon was born.
The LBD
When Holly Golightly gazed through the windows at Tiffany’s, the audience’s eyes were not fixed upon the jewels. Instead it was the elegant and classic dress actress Audrey Hepburn was attired in.
The “little black dress” was sleeveless, high-necked at the front and with minimalist cuts on the back, and was the masterpiece of legendary designer Hubert de Givenchy. And while he made it with Audrey in mind, she was not his ultimate inspiration …
In 1926 French designer Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel was ditching straitlaced designs for looser, unencumbered looks made with non-traditional fabrics such as jersey. Chanel also took a stand against the bright colours rival designers were unveiling in hopes of an antidote to the Great Depression gloom. Instead Chanel favoured beige, navy blue and – bucking tradition – black.
“These colours are impossible,” she said at the time. “These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.”
When American Vogue released its October issue that same year, Chanel’s wish became a reality. Showcasing a sketch of a simple black dress in crepe de Chine, the fashion bible declared the very first little black dress (LBD) would become “a sort of uniform for women of all tastes”. And that it did.
The Chelsea Look
When Mary Quant opened her store on London’s King’s Road, passing local businessmen were shocked. “Immoral!” they would shout while knocking on the windows. “Disgusting!” For while the designer may not have invented the miniskirt, she certainly popularised it, her hems rising a scandalous six or seven inches above the knee.
As the decade wore on, Mary continued to flaunt the rules when it came to 1960s fashion. When she couldn’t find the boldly-coloured tights she’d envisaged, she tasked theatrical companies with creating them. She took to deconstructing menswear.
“I bought men’s suiting from Harrods, pinstripe trouser stuff and shirtings, and had elongated shirts made, which I called dresses,” she said. And she also pioneered the use of industrial fabric PVC, introducing ‘wet look’ fashion that would land the designer her first – and far from last – Vogue cover.
The go-go boots
It was an anthem that reverberated around the globe: Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walkin’, the catchy 1966 tune about a girl who’s had enough of her lover’s roving eye and is finally ready to walk away in her white patent leather go-go boots.
Prior to 1960s fashion, boots were considered workwear. But as the age of the Mod dawned, with its shortened hems and flipped hairdos, fashion designers began experimenting with the previously utilitarian footwear. A fascination with the space age saw French couturier André Courrèges unveil his ‘Moon Girl’ collection in 1964, the A-line dresses matched with calf-length, flat-heeled white leather boots. They were a sensation and soon other designers followed suit with their own versions.
At the same time televised dance shows were all the rage, with ‘go-go’ dancers gyrating to pop songs on an elevated plinth. Heels were not the most comfortable things to spend hours on your feet in, and so the newly coined ‘go-go boots’ became the footwear of choice for fashion lovers both on and off screen.
The Bond Suit
Director Terence Young was in something of a pickle. He was due to start shooting Dr. No (1962), the first James Bond film to hit the silver screen. His star, Scottish newcomer Sean Connery, was certainly handsome enough to play the elegant spy but he was, in Terence’s eyes, a little rough around the edges. With a limited budget for wardrobe, the director took Sean to his personal tailor, Anthony Sinclair, and tasked him with creating a capsule of clothing that could “take a gentleman anywhere”.
Anthony specialised in what he called the “conduit cut,” a fitted hourglass shape to the jacket that was at odds with the boxy fashion suits worn at the time. And the resulting three lounge suits he made – one in grey flannel, one in light grey mohair and one in grey glen check – along with a tuxedo that was added later would become the James Bond ‘look’.
Elegant, expensive and refined, the suits were never worn with a belt or braces and always paired with shirts with ‘cocktail cuffs’ – a hybrid style designed to be worn with a button rather than cufflinks. As Dr. No hit screens in 1962, many more men were inspired to dress to kill.
The beehive
In 1960, Chicago-based hairstylist Margaret Vinci Heldt was commissioned by Modern Beauty Shop magazine to create something new for their cover. “They called me and they said, ‘Margaret, hairstyling has gone dead, there’s nothing exciting,’” she later recalled. “‘We have the pageboy, the flip, the upsweep like the French twist, but nothing is happening around the top of the head.’ [So I said] ‘I’ll get out of the box and see what I can do.’”
She was inspired, she said, by her favourite fez hat, wanting something that could sit unnoticed underneath it before being unveiled in all its glory. The hat came with a bee-shaped pin which she put in the model’s hair for the resulting photograph. “It looks just like a beehive!” the delighted editor declared. And so a 1960s fashion icon was born.
While the original was towering in height, a less voluminous version was soon doing the rounds in Hollywood, with an early adopter being Brigitte Bardot. The French beauty was synonymous with the do which, according to Margaret, was also popular because it was so easy to maintain.
“It stayed in good,” she said. “You could recomb the style and it would come right back. I used to tell my clients, ‘I don’t care what your husband does from the neck down, but I don’t want them to touch you from the neck up.’”
The Motown Gown
When the classic heartbreak hit Where Did Our Love Go rocketed to number one in 1964, it wasn’t just the Motown sound that caused a sensation. “The music was one thing, but the gowns became almost as important,” The Supremes member Mary Wilson would later recall.
Motown Records boss Berry Gordy Jr had long favoured synchronised outfits for his acts, which included The Temptations and the Four Tops. And when he signed the new trio from Detroit, he found a girl band equally enamoured of all things glamorous.
It was the dawn of the television age and for the group to stand out, they needed to sparkle – their onstage outfits becoming increasingly glittery and elaborate so as to best catch the light. With hit after hit coming, the girls were “fashionably attired, nicely made-up and in full Supremes mode 24/7,” Mary revealed, adding that during their tours local stores would shut down exclusively for their visits. “Fortunately, we all adored clothes and loved to shop.”
The Collarless Suit
When The Beatles formed in 1960, the Four were far from Fab in their fashion choices – that was, until their manager Brian Epstein had a vision.
“I encouraged them, at first, to get out of the leather jackets and jeans, and I wouldn’t allow them to appear in jeans after a short time, and then, after that step, I got them to wear sweaters on stage, and then, very reluctantly, eventually suits,” he later recounted of how he would influence 1960s fashion.
Brian enlisted London tailor Dougie Millings. Based in Soho, Dougie would produce a multitude of matching suits, the most famous of which remains his Pierre Cardin-inspired collarless version. With their rounded necks, skinny ties and slim-fit flat-front trousers, they synchronised the band and better suited their music that was starting to take over the world. Just add matching mop tops and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Angular Bob
“My idea was to cut shape into the hair, to use it like fabric and take away everything that was superfluous,” Vidal Sassoon would say of his innovative approach to hairdressing, which saw him invent “wash and wear” cuts which fell effortlessly into place in addition to shorter, sleeker styles and defined 1960s fashion.
The “Nancy Kwan” was named after the Hong Kong-born American actress who debuted the modernised bob cut in 1963. Vidal had cut four feet from Nancy’s hair in front of a stunned audience.
“All the press came to watch and this marvellous hair tumbled to the ground,” he later chuckled. “It felt as though my scissors were making love to her hair.”
In the mid-1960s he created many more signature styles, including the five-point cut (which took him nine years to perfect), the Mary Quant bob (above), the geometric perm, the Mia Farrow pixie cut and more. As his fame grew, so too did his range of salons and products, which once bore the slogan: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.”
The Model Maker
While his subjects were – or would become – household names, arguably the greatest star in the room was the man behind the camera: David Bailey.
The dyslexic son of a tailor from London’s rough and tumble East End, David had defied societal expectations to become 1960s fashion’s next big thing. After landing a gig at British Vogue in 1960,the smooth-talking, sharply-dressed high school dropout made waves thanks to his incredible ability to both spot and draw out talent, finding the essence of his subjects in his portraits. Thanks to David, Jean Shrimpton became the model of the moment.
“I photographed women the way I saw them on the streets,” he said of his work. “People could identify with Jean because I didn’t make her look like a stuffed shop mannequin. Suddenly she was someone you could touch, or maybe even take to bed.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
