They worked at the lower end of the work force, usually nine to five jobs leaving time for clothes, music, and clubbing. They were known for the Modern Jazz they listened to as they showed their new styles off at local cafes. They formed their own way of life by creating television shows and magazines that focused directly on their lifestyle. As the Mods strongly influenced the fashion in London, 1960s fashion in general set the mode for the rest of the century as it became marketed mainly to young people. The Mods (short for Modernists) were characterized by their choice of style different from the 1950s and adopted new fads that would be imitated by many young people. Most importantly, in the early to mid-1960s, the London Modernists known as the Mods were shaping and defining popular fashion for young British men while the trends for both sexes changed more frequently than ever before in the history of fashion and would continue to do so throughout the decade. Laundering of delicates could still be a problem, but everything changed when mass produced synthetic garments arrived. When it was removed from the tissue, the footsteps that had pounded over the knit gave it a flat dry cleaned as new appearance. They put it to dry under a carpet for two days. Before the days of tumble dryers, many women lay their washed rung out knitwear in paper tissue and then brown paper. Pencil skirts were still worn with sweaters or even back to front cardigans that had been pressed super flat. Straight sweater dresses in lambswool or the synthetic acrylic variety called Orlon were worn belted with waists nipped in became fashionable. Straight skirts had front and back inverted pleats called kick pleats and were ideal for doing the twist dance craze as they allowed the knee to move freely. Pleated skirts set on a hip yoke basque were worn with short sleeved over blouses which were cut not unlike the shell tops of today. The fore runner of the mini dress, the straight shift, which had developed from the 1957 sack dress, was still well below the knee. Just as in the 1920s, for half a decade clothes still showed signs of belonging to the late fifties. It’s easy to associate all 1960s fashion with short skirts, but the short skirt was not really worn by many until 1966 and not nationwide until 1967. They led with new and radically innovative fashion styles, with little girl/woman androgynous looks for women that swept away the sophisticated sweater girls of the early sixties. Previously, fashion houses designed for the mature and elite members of society however, during the enormous social and political revolution that transpired in the mid-Sixties, the power of the teenage and young adult market was too great to ignore. It was a decade that broke many fashion traditions, mirroring social movements during the period. The 1960s was an important decade for fashion because it was the first time in history that clothing was geared towards the youth market and featured a wide number of diversified trends. While there is a tendency to think of the Sixties as a whole unified decade, in terms of fashion it must, in fact, be viewed as two separate and quite distinct parts (if not more), with the early years clinging doggedly on to modifications of Fifties styles and the later years exploding into the wild fashion frenzy for which the decade is possibly best remembered.
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