Authors: Jenny Diski
The Sixties (2 page)
Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
, 1975
It was a black crêpe dress, implacably black was how I thought of it, cut like a skating dress, long-waisted, with a very
short skirt. It zipped from the small of the back to a high close-fitting turtle-neck that matched the tubelike, skin-tight
long black sleeves. The bodice outlined my small breasts and skimmed my torso, continuing smoothly down to my jutting hipbones
from where the dropped waist attached to a skirt that flared out very gently, just enough to fall loosely to the hem. It was
completely unadorned, no decoration, nothing to alleviate the dense, unreflective blackness. It might have been a dress for
mourning in, the most severe imaginable, except for the way it silhouetted my body and the fact that it stopped ten inches
and more above my knees. My legs were covered in sheer cobweb-grey tights and I wore a pair of chisel-toed black patent flat
shoes with a sharply squared brass buckle on the front. The buckle was the only colour or detail I wore apart from several
geometric silver rings on my fingers. My long hair was pulled tightly back and twisted into the nape of my neck, like a ballerina.
I wore my usual make-up: deathly pale foundation, white lipstick, white eyeshadow, my lids thickly outlined in painted black,
with several layers of mascara emphasising my upper and lower lashes. Under my lower eyelids I had painted extra fine, vertical
black lines, sunray style. I, like my dress, looked implacable.
When I checked myself in the mirror before going out, what I saw was the reincarnation of a girl I had spoken to once when
I was a child at the skating rink my mother took me to every day. The girl and I practised spins and figures in the more or
less empty centre, while less constrained skaters whizzed round and round us at the edges of the rink. She was at least fourteen
or fifteen, and I was just six or seven. To me, she was a goddess, skating like a champion, spinning on the spot, her head
dropped back looking up at her fingertips just touching each other to form an arch over herself. She was the most perfect
age I could imagine, and all the more worthy of worship because she was dressed incomprehensibly from head to foot in black
– her hair-enclosing snood, short dress, thick tights, skating boots and gloves were all relentlessly black. It was a colour
only old ladies wore in those days. I finally got up courage to ask her at the end of one of her spins why she was all in
black. She looked down at me for a moment with a wonderfully melancholic expression, and told me solemn-faced, ‘I am in mourning
for my life.’ I was far too young to recognise the adolescent melodrama of her dress or the existentially induced world-weary
self-description. She was the most magnificent, most mysteriously glamorous creature I had ever seen.
My version of her dress fourteen years on had come from Biba in Kensington Church Street. Swirly art deco, black and gold
interior, dim lights, loud psychedelic pop music, feather boas, wild hats, floaty garments for drifting around in at home
or at parties, slick mini-dresses to snap about the streets in, everything hung from wooden coatstands – oh, and another memorable
treasure on which I spent all my money one week: a silver and black striped, Regency-cut trouser suit for £7. The black crêpe
dress wasn’t a very typical Biba dress, except in its shortness (and I may well have taken it up a bit myself). Biba clothes
were usually coloured, patterned even, though only in sludgy tones, plums, earthy browns, dusty blues, never anything bright.
I found this utterly black dress hanging on one of the coatstands, grabbed the size eight (I’m not sure Biba made anything
above a size ten – I couldn’t then imagine anyone being above a size ten), and as I stepped into it and watched, as one of
my fellow shoppers zipped up the back for me in the multi-mirrored communal dressing room, the floor of which was ankle-deep
with discarded items, I saw the image of my marvellous skating girl appear in the icy glass.
Growing up is partly about trying on superficial looks to match how you want people to see you, and how you want to see yourself.
Controlling how people literally view you is a way of learning to construct a sense of self, until you become confident enough
to proceed the other way around. Everyone does it, from the moment they look into a mirror and realise that they can see themselves
and therefore other people can see them, and that they have a body which, with a bit of effort, can be brought under the mind’s
control. It is in the nature of youth to play with style in an effort to come to terms with substance. Easy enough, too, to
get stuck there. Narcissism meets the mirror stage and neither condition actually stops in infancy, especially when the times
collude. Though there has probably never been a period when young men and women did not look sideways at themselves to catch
a glimpse of how they looked to others, the Sixties catered for the concern with the self and how it was to be seen better
than most eras, because they coincided with the post-war, post-austerity Western world: a rare island of perceived well-being
and a belief in the future as progress, after a long, dark hiatus when no one could be quite sure that the future would not
be unimaginably bleak. A time, then, to indulge the children – for a while. A time also for peacetime capitalism to consolidate.
The personal is the political
, people began to say, although not until quite a long way into that period designated as the Sixties. But from the start
to their end and well beyond, it is truer to say that more than anything for the post-war bulge generation
the personal was the personal
. If the body was to become increasingly regarded as merely the superficial layer outside an infinitely questing mind and
spreading social conscience, it was nonetheless, throughout the Sixties, wrapped and tied with the utmost care and attention
to detail.
After the war and the austerity years, the means to control how you were seen were newly available to the young. And so was
the ability to distinguish yourself visually from your parents. From the Teddy Boys in the Fifties to the Mods and Rockers
who took over, and on to the mini-skirted dollybirds of the mid-Sixties and the diaphanous hippies of the later Sixties, many
more young people than ever before had, for various reasons, enough money to pay for dramatic self-definition. If they left
school at fifteen without qualifications, they found jobs, lost them, found them again, easily earning money while often still
living at home. At any rate, there was enough surplus after paying the parents for your keep to buy a long, velvet-collared
jacket and drainpipes, a sharp Italian-styled suit, a tiny scrap of a frock from Biba, Bus Stop or even, if you saved up,
Bazaar, though only the genuinely well-off could afford any of the painted silks and velvets from Granny Takes A Trip. Those
who stayed on at school and went to university were rewarded with enough pocket money or a decent local authority student
grant that was designed to be lived on. Even being broke, unemployed and living in a damp bedsitter didn’t present an impossible
bar to style. The easy availability of social security and the dole are a forgotten but vital factor during the whole of the
Sixties, and well into the Seventies. Unconsciously, as it might have been, the welfare system that the newly elected government
brought in after the war in order to ensure a fair and just society was also the way in which the older generation were to
indulge their post-war children. The Forties turned to the Fifties, the Fifties became the Sixties, and the Sixties seemed
to go on for ever, but even then, as the old ones gnashed their teeth and tore out their hair at the goings-on of their wild,
rebellious young, they continued to pay them a state stipend, unemployment benefit or a generous student grant, underwriting,
as it were, their worst fears. There was always a way to get something you really wanted. Or so it seemed. One trick (with
clothes then and relationships later) was to jettison the notion our parents had of the well-made, the built-to-last, the
long-term, the good investment. Clothes that were made badly and cheaply didn’t last, sometimes not more than a few weeks
without coming apart at the seams, but if they had style and wit, it was of no consequence; it was a new way to have what
you wanted when you wanted it, and then to have the repeated satisfaction of finding the next new thing. Older people of all
classes were horrified at the waste and lack of quality, but that was part of the pleasure for us: to see the shock and disapproval
and bafflement in the eyes of the generation who had scraped by and lost all kinds of treasures during the war, and discovered
when it was over that they still had to make do and mend: a generation who genuinely valued the patina of age.
If in fact we really only began to develop new kinds of uniform, they were at least dictated by our own generation. The static
fashion of our elders was dreary and camouflaging. When we put on the clothes they approved of we automatically looked middle-aged.
We rejected the neat pleats and the matching suits, battled against twinsets and pearls, refused in various ways to look
respectable – and thereby developed the freedom to look like everyone else under twenty-five. You really couldn’t be seen
wearing a skirt that was a couple of inches too long. It made you feel wretched. On a camping holiday in Assisi I was persuaded
to be sensible and to lower my hem two inches, still short enough for me to be refused entry to the Basilica of St Francis,
and felt for the entire two weeks like an old woman shuffling about in widow’s weeds. As far as I was concerned, only a properly
minuscule skirt could distinguish me from the nuns queuing up to see the Grotto.
I knew well enough my extraordinary good fortune in having a Biba size eight body
*
and that life was miserable for those who didn’t. I knew this because of my hair. After the backcombed beehives of the Fifties
and very early Sixties had deflated, only Vidal Sassoon’s new geometrically precise version of the 1920s bob – dead straight
hair that fell to a knife edge at the jawline – would do. My hair was thick and curly: I ironed it straight, I spent hours
rolling it, pulling it painfully as it dried to achieve only a half-hearted version of the desired look that immediately sprang
back to catastrophe at the first sign of rain. I was well aware of the dismalness of the never-quite-right. Finally, I gave
up and dragged it tightly back so that it was at least sort of invisible and made me look severe enough to seem not to care.
My hair caused me misery and shame. Self-presentation didn’t diminish as we turned down the legacy of our parents’ wardrobes.
Very little mattered more than how you looked. Social approval was quite as powerful as it ever had been and has remained.
We simply readjusted the idea of whose approval we were after.
And if that was, in retrospect, no different from any other youth cohort, neither was the means by which our style became
available to us. All those ground-breaking, cheap and cheerful garments were made in order to fulfil and incite demand, by
the same old system that has since the end of feudalism specialised in generating and then granting the wishes of human beings
and thereby ruling the world. The clothes were designed and initially made by the young, but they were sold in shops – renamed
boutiques: tiny spaces, sometimes, with a handful of dresses or trousers
–
whose rents had to be paid, where turnover was required, and profits were taken or the shops closed. A new market in boutiques,
opening and closing within weeks sometimes, played out a speeded-up capitalism, which proceeded as it had always done. Youthful
entrepreneurs, their vision in sync with their generation, their ambition the same as generations before them, offered their
contemporaries clothes, music, information and other things to want at the price they could afford. Richard Branson with the
sexily named Virgin record shops, Felix Dennis at the radical
Oz
magazine and Tony Elliott’s cool listings magazine
Time Out
sold the young packages that looked like amateurish rejections of the old way, and seeded their later conventional media empires.
John Stephen opened a little shop called His Clothes, selling Mod suits in an alley behind Regent Street in the late Fifties,
and to this day tourists wander down Carnaby Street, soaking up the ‘atmosphere’. The tiny boutique Biba, in Abingdon Road,
thrived in 1964 and moved to a much more visible and larger site in Kensington Church Street, then, bigger still, to Kensington
High Street, until it finally over-reached itself (with City funding), in a veritable parody of capitalism, by taking over
the huge department store Derry & Tom’s, selling bedsheets, paint, kitchenware and cocktails as well as frocks and maternity
dresses, and went bust within two years.
The economy was booming, finally, and in the first half of the 1960s, at least, there was no dissent from the young about
the conventionally capitalist manner in which their desired goods were made available to them. Nothing much radical was going
on here apart from cheapness and short-termism – hardly anathema to capitalism. The revolution was a long way off. We were
the first generation who could shop till we dropped without anxiety or much regard for the size of our income, and, just like
now, our desire for style was catered for by designers, manufacturers, retail outlets, advertisers, public relations companies,
photographers, celebrities, models, fashion magazines and financial backers. The taxman was paid, so the state received some
of the money. The same old system was operating in the same old manner, doing what it does best: taking advantage of whatever
circumstances exist. It is the way of the market. At that early stage we weren’t, for the most part, after a different way,
just different things. But because we were young, and being catered for so attentively, it felt brand new; and because we
were young and are now no longer, we are inclined to remember it as quite different from anything that has happened since.
