Eugene Vernier and Vogue Models in Early "Swinging London": Creating the Fashionable Look of the 1960s

Abstract

From start of 1960s, photographer Eugene Vernier, along with models like Tania Mallet and Ros Watkins, began charting and creating new fashionable representations, featuring cool, youthful looks. Virtually forgotten today, these individuals were kinds of meteors journalist Jonathan Aitken identified mid-decade, who ushered in much of visual language and symbolic shorthand that we now take for granted as hallmarks of London's Sixties. The fashion models did not just parade latest styles. They were key players - on and off street - in formation of as a global creative center, as well as in new modes of self-presentation that were essential to this 1960s cultural revolution.In spring of 1966 Tim e magazine ran a feature on London, announcing it with headline: London: The Swinging City on its cover. (Halasz, 1966) Time's rather belated discovery of city's revolutionary style was accompanied by Geoffrey Dickinson's pop art. Dickinson represented at night, in images of Big Ben, a red Routemaster bus, Welsh Guards, a Morris Mini, a discotheque, and a cinema marquee announcing year's hit, Alfie, in which Michael Caine played a Cockney ladies' man. The pipe-smoking Prime Minister Harold Wilson, famous for announcing to British population that they had never had it so good, lurks in background. Mini-dressed models jostle with a long-haired singer wearing Union Jack sunglasses and a Who T-shirt, as well as gents in a Rolls Royce and an older casino-going couple in black-tie. Time told its readers that Dickinson had prowled from Carnaby Street to King's Road, slipping in and out of boutiques and coffeehouses in order to sum up scene in a collage technique (Halasz 1966).Also in 1966, Mary Quant at age of thirty- two, published her autobiography, in which she rendered period one of a radical break, set in train twenty years earlier by World War II: Once only Rich, Establishment set fashion. Now it is inexpensive little dress seen on girls in High Street. These girls . . . are alive . . . looking, listening, ready to try anything new. . . . They may be dukes' daughters, doctors' daughters, dockers' daughters. They don't worry about accents or class They represent whole new spirit that is present day Britain - a classless spirit that has grown up out of Second World War. . . . They are mods. (Quant 1966, 75). Writing at time and published following year, young Jonathan Aitken, then a twenty-four-year- old reporter for London's Evening Standard, interviewed young people he believed were making an impact in city in fields of fashion, design, music, photography, politics, business, art, television, and even gambling and prostitution. He called his interviewees, over two hundred in all, the young meteors, which was also title of his resulting book. There he wrote:The changes in tastes, behaviour and attitudes of younger generation over last few years have at least to a small extent influenced lives of every Londoner under age of 35. Whether these changes have anything to do with swinging is a matter of semantics, but fact remains that without these changes today's younger generation would be imperceptibly different from their youthful parents, whereas in fact they are enormously different. Therefore it seems to me that inflated ballyhoo about Swinging does have some serious relevance to generation of which I am writing, particularly through its indirect influence on advertising and communications, so I make no apology for giving so many pages over to what may seem essentially frivolous people. (1967, 10)As many critics have pointed out, Time's now-iconic article was far from first. There had been Weekend Telegraph's London - Most Exciting City, of April 30, 1965, and more than three years earlier, on February 4, 1962, Sunday Times Colour Magazine had featured Jean Shrimpton, David Bailey, Peter Blake, Mary Quant, and Alexander Plunket-Greene (Gilbert 2006, 13). …