Swinging London Research Articles

Through a glass darkly: How Goth reflected and reimagined the Sixties

When Goth emerged as a post-punk music genre and subcultural style in the late 1970s and early 1980s, its references to the past included nineteenth-century Gothic literature and classic Hollywood ‘monster movies’ such as 1931’s Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. Less discussed, however, is Goth’s inclusion of 1960s culture into its repertoire. While the 1960s are often synonymous with the Mod joys of ‘Swinging London’ and the cheerful flower power of San Francisco, it was also a period marked by the popular Hammer Horror films and the real-life terrors of the Moors and Manson Murders. As children of the 1960s, Goth’s originators could not help but reference the sights and sounds that shaped their childhoods. In this light, the music produced by bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy conjure a darker side of that decade. This article assesses how the original wave of Goth musicians drew upon the 1960s to invent a dark psychedelia for a new generation of youth.

Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher, by John Davis

The London of the 1950s was a city the late Victorians would have recognised. By the 1970s, John Davis writes in his idiosyncratic and wide-ranging history of post-war London, the city’s driving economic, social and cultural forces had shifted in ways that would have confounded a Victorian observer. Davis examines this process of urban transformation in sixteen chapters that cover, among other things, the life and death of ‘the Sixties’, changing patterns in home ownership, the rise of the conservation movement, and the Notting Hill riots. Ultimately, he argues, these changes laid the groundwork for a political environment in which the ideology of Thatcherism could take root. In lieu of an introduction, Chapter One examines how the capital’s increasingly visible youth culture and a trend-hungry media converged to create ‘Swinging London’, a public relations exercise that nonetheless captured the city’s post-war optimism. So why did the party end? Davis highlights the obvious factors, notably deindustrialisation and the erosion of manufacturing jobs, paired with economic headwinds after the Wilson government’s deflationary measures in 1966–7. But the book also identifies a growing, if inchoate, resistance to the paternalism of the Beveridge welfare state. Chapters Six and Seven detail the backlash against urban modernism, as expressed in protests against motorway construction and a renewed impulse to conserve the Victorian cityscape. Chapters Nine, Ten, and Twelve chart the emergence of new, oppositional identities among groups as varied as East End cab drivers, suburban home-owners, and Black British youth. Chapters Eight, Thirteen, and Fourteen sketch the reorientation of municipal politics, from the demise of the consensus around the East End’s subsidised post-war prosperity to the emergence of grass-roots voluntary action groups that sought to redefine the imperatives of the welfare state, to the breakdown of local Labour Party hierarchies in the 1960s and 1970s.

Just Like the King's Road, Only Nearer: Scotland's Boutique Bonanza, 1965–1970

The fashion entrepreneurs of so-called ‘Swinging London’ — John Stephen on Carnaby Street or Mary Quant on the King's Road, for example — fundamentally changed British fashion in the 1960s: from old to young, dull to vibrant and, crucially, from shop to boutique. But while the impact of ‘Swinging London’ is well recorded in the historiography of English fashion and retail, less is known about its effects further afield. This article considers the impact of ‘Swinging London’ boutique culture in Scotland between 1965 and 1970. Taking the example of the Glasgow fashion design and manufacturing business Marion Donaldson as its main case study, it draws on a variety of oral history, archival and media evidence to trace the dissemination of boutique fashion culture in Scotland across multiple retail contexts. From the urban centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh to the towns and regions beyond, it offers new analyses of the opportunities boutique retailing afforded Marion Donaldson and the Scottish fashion industry more generally, and thus provides new insight into the impact of the so-called ‘boutique boom’ of the 1960s on Scottish fashion and enterprise culture.

Did Britain rule the world again? The international fashion market and the continental look in 1960s London

ABSTRACT Fashion does not just reflect, but also shapes the life of people. Thus, fashion is a useful way of studying social, cultural and economic change. In the decade known as ‘the Sixties’, it paved the way for a new social, cultural and political climate. This article shows that Britain underwent a profound Europeanisation in fashion in a decade characterised by the global marketing success of British culture. It argues that the popularity of British boutiques, designers and youth cultures epitomised a new idea of Britishness in the 1960s because they were profoundly influenced by Continental fashion. The article reconstructs the creation, image and influence of the so-called ‘Continental Look’ in men’s and women’s clothing in Britain in the 1960s and shows to what extent the British fashion revolution associated with the term ‘Swinging London’ was based on the import of and references to Continental fashion design.

Film, Fashion, and the 1960s ed. by Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, Louise Wallenberg

Reviewed by: Film, Fashion, and the 1960s ed. by Eugenia Paulicelli, Drake Stutesman, Louise Wallenberg Hilary Radner Paulicelli, Eugenia, Drake Stutesman, andLouise Wallenberg, eds. Film, Fashion, and the 1960s. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2017. Pp. x+231. $80.00 US hardcover, $35.00 US paperback, $34.99 US ebook. The last decade has greeted a wealth of new research on film and fashion, a relatively neglected area throughout the twentieth century, its increasing importance in the twenty-first signaled by the inauguration of the journal Film, Fashion, and Consumption under the editorship of Pamela Church Gibson, the first issue of which appeared in January 2011. Film, Fashion, and the 1960s constitutes a welcome addition to this growing body of published work and includes a number of authors whose names will be familiar to scholars in the field such as Pamela Church Gibson herself, Stella Bruzzi, Drake Stutesman, and Nick Rees-Roberts, among others. The chapters are loosely grouped according to topics, into three sections that suggest the scope of the project: “1960s: Youth Culture and Sexual Liberation”; “Cities, Nations, and Fashion”; and “Gender: Modernity/Tradition.” An epilogue by the costume designer Adriana Berselli, noted for her work on Michelangelo Antonio’s L’Avventura (1960), with a preface by the lead editor Eugenia Paulicelli concludes the volume. In the introduction to the volume, the editors ambitiously proclaim that “[t]he chapters in this volume demonstrate the conscious relationship that cinema of the 1960s had with fashion as an industry, as spectacle and aesthetic, and as a means of performing gender” (5). To a greater or lesser degree, the chapters touch on these crucial issues, with Ronald Gregg’s opening chapter, “Sanitizing the Beatles for the Revolution,” and Pamela Church Gibson’s chapter tucked away in Section Three, “The Fashioning of Julie Christie and the Mythologizing of ‘Swinging London’: Changing Images in 1960s Britain,” highlighting the nexus of influences that determined the leading role accorded to fashion in this period. Nick Ree-Roberts’s “Single Men: Sixties Aesthetics and Vintage Style in Contemporary Cinema,” the final chapter in the section “Gender: Modernity and Tradition,” appropriately argues that we consider the ongoing influence of the developments that originated in this crucial decade, especially with regard to “heritage, masculinity, and style in contemporary European cinema” (207). As the above chapters suggest, scholars in fashion studies, popular culture studies, [End Page 182] and cinema studies will find a wide range of material from which to cull readings that might usefully augment their current course readers, from Anupama Kapse on Bombay cinema to Louise Wallenberg on the costume designer Mago (Max Goldstein), who contributed to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s distinctive style. Both of these appear in the volume’s final section, following Pamela Church Gibson’s chapter on Julie Christie. In addition to Gregg’s chapter on the Beatles, Section One, “The 1960s: Youth, Culture, and Sexual Liberation” boasts Amy Herzog discussing the relations between Andy Warhol’s portrait film and 1960s pornographic peep show loops with regard to what she calls the “art of undressing,” and Stella Bruzzi looking at Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema [Theorem] (1968) and its use of costume “to introduce a different sartorial sensibility altogether, one very much rooted in the sixties” (57). In the same section, Drake Stutesman adumbrates the use of the hat in A New Kind of Love (1963) and Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970). Astrid Söderburgh Widding’s chapter opens Section Two, “Cities, Nations, and Fashion,” focusing on the French New Wave and how changes in cinema and fashion heralded a reformulation of urban space. Also in this section, Eugenia Paulicelli’s chapter “Fashion, Film, and Rome,” which explores how post-World War Two Italy regenerated its film and fashion industries as synergistic cultural attractions that contributed to a burgeoning tourist industry, is especially welcome. Pat Kirkham and Marilyn Cohen’s chapter closes this section, offering an analysis of the intersections between fashion and costume in two American films, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and That Touch of Mink (1962), that exemplify the complicated relations between American culture and French fashion that mark the post-War period. Notwithstanding...

Gerald McCann: The Rediscovery of a Fashion Designer

This article was prompted by the discovery of the archive of international fashion designer Gerald McCann, hidden in a garage in Fleetwood, Lancashire, UK. The contents of the archive revealed a treasure trove of press cuttings, photographs, fashion drawings and interviews as well as designs and costings from a once well-known designer, whose significance to the global fashion industry is sparsely documented and largely forgotten. The article reveals the history of the designer, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in the 1950s, during the tenure of Professor Madge Garland, and forged a career at the heart of ‘Swinging London’ in the 1960s. He was lured to the USA in the 1970s, returning to the UK in the 1990s as a designer for House of Fraser and Harrods. The research offers the first significant assessment of McCann's position in global fashion and the value and relevance of his legacy, as well as exploring the rationale for documenting the history of forgotten fashion designers.

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

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). …

The Mad, Madness and Chaos in Lessing’s The Sweetest Dream

Set in Swinging London in the Sixties Doris Lessing’s novel titled The Sweetest Dream 1 presents a chaotic environment amidst the moral and psychical rubble of World War I and World War II. The Sixties is a transitional era sandwiched between the aftermath of wars and the effort to rebuild the country, full of socially and politically chaotic situations. On the social front, delinquent acts such as stealing become a common practice and initiation into groups among teenagers. Social chaos is also marked by broken families and insanity. Political chaos is marked among other things by The Revolution, meetings and street rallies. This paper looks at the portrayal of “inflated consciousness” in relation to chaos, the mad and madness in the novel using Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology’s lens in order to understand how the psyche negotiates itself out of chaos to restore balance and order. This paper limits its discussion to the first half of the novel, focussing on “Swinging London.” 2

“Steeped in Tradition, Seized By Change”: “Swinging London” and the American Reception of Tom Jones (1963)

“Steeped in Tradition, Seized By Change”: “Swinging London” and the American Reception of <i>Tom Jones</i> (1963)

&lt;i&gt;Tonite Let's All Make Love in London&lt;/i&gt; Review, &lt;i&gt;Films and Filming&lt;/i&gt;, 1968

Tonite Let's All Make Love in LondonReview, Films and Filming, 1968 Raymond Durgnat Tonite Let's All Make Love in London Review, Films and Filming, 1968. Raymond Durgnat Directed, produced, photographed and edited by Peter Whitehead. A Lorrimer Film production. British. Colour. Cert A. 78 mins. With Julie Christie; Michael Caine; Lee Marvin; The Rolling Stones; The Animals; Edna O'brien; Alan Aldridge and David Hockney. Marx denounced religion as the opium of the people. But more and more it's less the pulpit than the mass media that stupefy us with myths which we don't really believe but which colour our thinking and dim our sense of our own reality. In every myth there's a grain of truth—the bigger the better; exaggeration is always more plausible than invention. If the old myths stressed eternity, austerity, duty, pain and gloom, the new ones stress ephemerality, indulgence, liberty, plea sure and optimism. Swinging London, by now, is such a myth—a welcome, disturbing minority way of life falsified into a city's brand-image by journalists, advertisers and everyone's daydreams. The economic trampoline beneath it is probably that for the first time working-class adolescents had money and freedom; the upper classes had no empire to be sent out to; the middle classes had lost their dynamism and their self-confidence. But such shifts have left most people, and institutions, untouched, so far. As Michael Caine tells his interviewer here, a capital city whose pubs shut at eleven is about as swinging as Highgate Cemetery, and, as David Hockney observes, London is to New York as Bradford is to London. Near the beginning of Peter Whitehead's reportage his characteristically nimble camera roams over magazine covers and headlines—as if to stress [End Page 315]that "Swinging London" is as much an image as a reality. (A friend of mine always calls it "Swingling London," to suggest "swindling.") The camera catches Donyale Luna off guard, and, as she nervously laughs, "looking like a rag" (but a fascinating rag) in the Portobello Road—the myth comes to earth, and there's still no contact. 1At a light show a girl dances with her own shadow; beatnik buskers avert their faces. Lee Marvin, in his Dirty Dozenoutfit, represents the typical, amiable American tourist, obliging with a few vapid remarks about mini-skirts. The inevitable Playboysmoothie is, sickeningly, there (it's surely the Playboy club that David Hockney describes as "a sort of rhythm-and-blues Angus Steak House, where the seats are so small it's like a children's tea-party"). The camera watches, as smooth, as critical, as a cat, waiting for the people to give themselves away, to come alive. The criticism is carried out on a moral plane also. Eric Burdon records "When I Was Young," whose words are cut in with stockshots of the 1939-45 air war, and the gruelling purpose dominating the older generation's youth. 2A dollygirl, on a Big Wheel, talks about her freedom, and the camera zooms back to show her, high, alone and perilous, in her lofty cage, while the soundtrack twice repeats the last two words of her last sentence: "You can do what ever you like and no-one cares." David Hockney emerges from behind his "Zoom" spectacles to discuss the way we live now with a blend of Bradford accents, Oxford high table mannerisms, and flip thoughts which in itself is a splendid commentary on our new social mobility. Some of the other interviewers are less enlightening (Andrew Oldham, Mick Jagger, Julie Christie) not because their thought isn't sensible, but because the easy English use of words is rooted in social and moral outlooks which no longer apply. Thus Alan Aldridge, shown painting flower and butterfly patterns on a girl's nude body, is asked if he doesn't think it's "psychic masturbation," and can respond only with a sceptical shrug. 3The best accounts of themselves are given by the artists. David Hockney is almost the star of the film—apart, of course, from the camera—and Edna O'Brien is quite interesting—though not more...

Standing in the Shadow: Peter Whitehead, Swinging London's Insider/Outsider

Standing in the Shadow:Peter Whitehead, Swinging London's Insider/Outsider Steve Chibnall (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Vanessa Redgrave, Title card for Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, 1967 [End Page 244] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Michael Caine, Tonite, 1967 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. David Hockney, Tonite, 1967 [End Page 245] The fate that awaits the creator, after being ignored, neglected, despised, is, luckily or unluckily according to point of view, to be discovered by the non-creative. R. D. Laing, Politics of Experience (1967)1 I certainly don't feel easy-going about all the fun everyone is supposed to be having. Is it really happening? Do they stop and screw all the time on the march to Aldermaston? Peter Whitehead's alter ego Patrick Walker in Tonite (1999)2 The London Eye The name of Peter Lorrimer Whitehead, the London eye of the mid-1960s, has been one of the strangest omissions among the chronicles of those "strange days." In spite of his tireless efforts to document and deconstruct his times, he failed to be identified by Jonathan Aitken as one of The Young Meteors, and you will not find him mentioned in key memoirs of London's underground scene, by hipsters such as Richard Neville, Jim Haynes or Jeff Nuttall.3 He is equally absent from the leading popular histories of sixties culture in Britain: Shawn Levy's mod chronicle Ready, Steady, Go! and Dominic Sandbrook's weighty synthesis of writing on the era White Heat.4 Whitehead does rate an occasional mention in Jonathon Green's painstaking re-creations of the period, Days in the Life and All Dressed Up, but only in connection with his filming of the poetry "emanation" at the Albert Hall in 1965.5 True, in those heady days of pot, pranksters, poseurs, and protest, the introverted [End Page 246] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Left to right: Peter Whitehead, Marianne Faithfull, and Mick Jagger during the "We Love You" promo shoot, 1967 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Michael Caine reading Whitehead's Wholly Communion, 1967 [End Page 247] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Brian Jones (left) and Mick Jagger onstage, as seen in Charlie Is My Darling, 1966 Whitehead seemed to prefer the company of Egyptian mummies in the British Museum and the daughters of Sweden in bed to the heads at the UFO Club or the fashionistas in boutiqueland, but he was never far from "the scene." His cine-camera alone (a rarity in an age before mass visual recording) should have attracted attention as he moved around the few square miles of London's West End from his Gothic garret in Soho; but in recalling his prominence at that time, he continues to assert that "nobody knew who I was."6 "Have you seen your brother, baby, standing in the shadow," sang Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones, in Whitehead's notorious cross-dressing film promoting their single Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby (August 1966); and the shadows is where the filmmaker stood—at least until the rediscovery of his work in the 1990s. It is also where this skeptical "outsider with insider access" seems to have been most comfortable, protected by the mediation of his camera from the destructive glare of the sixties' white heat: "Because I can film," says his alter ego, Patrick Walker, in Whitehead's novel Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (published in 1999), "I can hold the black mirror up to keep the light from burning out my face."7 When Whitehead eventually began to emerge from the shadows, he was recognized as a documentarist. However, this is not a description with which he is comfortable because it imposes severe limitations on his vision [End Page 248] and practice. Moreover, he devoted only four or five years of a long career to shooting actuality footage, and much of this was reworked in imaginative, nonnarrative ways. Whitehead is, and always was, an artist. Influenced by the topsy-turvy psychosocial theories of...

Whitehead's London: Pop and the Ascendant Celebrity

Whitehead's London:Pop and the Ascendant Celebrity Kevin M. Flanagan (bio) London offers the best and the worst in the world. Michelangelo Antonioni Swinging London: the psychedelic gibbet. A colour-supplement commission dressed up as a movie. Photographers shooting photographers. Iain Sinclair The most influential written document in the export of London circa 1966 is Piri Halasz's controversial article "You Can Walk across It in the Grass," the April 15 cover story of Time magazine. A tribute to the movers and shakers perceived to be responsible for bringing Britain to the forefront of contemporary popular culture, it dwelled heavily on the icons, lingo, and attitudes that have since become recognizable cliché. In the words of Shawn Levy, the article "was part social analysis, part cultural exposé, part travelogue."1 The tone is carefree throughout, with substantial sections written as imagined sequences for an unmade Richard Lester film. Halasz's praise of new fashions, glamorous coteries and personal happiness through consumption spoke directly to the young, but this vision of London had its detractors. Historian Dominic Sandbrook suggests that Time's largely conservative, generally middle-aged readership hated the article, with one respondent claiming that the "turned-on young men and women will burn out as quickly as a light bulb of British manufacture."2 Halasz's view of the city and its vibrant young residents was so glowing that it could scarcely be outdone by an official tourist bureau. "In this century, every decade has had its city," she begins, [End Page 278] Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 1-7. London Moods (Ken Russell, UK, 1961) [End Page 279] Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 8-11. Nice Time (Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner, UK, 1957) "and in a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings; it is the scene."3 She continues: This spring, as never before in modern times, London is switched on. Ancient elegance and new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur of op and pop. The city is alive with birds (girls) and beatles [sic], buzzing with minicars and tellystars, pulsing with half a dozen separate veins of excitement. The guards now change at Buckingham Palace to a Lennon and McCartney tune, and Prince Charles is firmly in the longhair set. . . . In a once sedate world of faded splendor, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life.4 The language itself is indicative of the degree to which youth outside of the United Kingdom, including Halasz, had already assimilated the habitus of London's creative elite. Halasz, who would later write a guidebook called A Swinger's Guide to London (1967), had pitched her article directly to American tourists—Time's sixteen million readers, despite their generational misgivings, potentially had the affluence, spending power, and curiosity to make the city a favored destination.5 Though the London of the immediate postwar era had thrived on cultural imports—American music, movies, and [End Page 280] books—the terms were reported to have been reversed. London was importing tourists and expatriate transplants, while simultaneously "exporting its plays, its films, its fads, its styles, its people."6 Peter Whitehead's film Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (UK, 1967) contains a shot of the cover of this fabled issue of Time. Whitehead's film was in production in the immediate aftermath of this article and features some of the same key personnel.7 In the documentary In the Beginning Was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead (Paul Cronin, UK, 2006), Whitehead explains his creative standpoint as having been borne out of an attempt to come to terms with the great shibboleths of 1960s American cultural imperialism. His early films, even Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, are about a transnational flow of ideas—youthful ideas relating to truth, personal freedom, artistic integrity—in which the United States is a key participant. Unlike Halasz and other apologists for London's sudden "swinging" label, Whitehead does not seek American approval. Even though Halasz's article and Whitehead's film both interrogate the cultural fabric of the city, Whitehead...

From Haughty to Nice: How British Fashion Images Changed from the 1950s to the 1960s

Along with rock ‘n’ roll, fashion and its visual representations epitomize 1960s “Swinging London.” The 1950s look of aristocratic, haughty grandeur—where the models looked 30, even if they were 20—gave way to the demotic, nice, young look of the 1960s. The models ride, run, jump, and climb in the 1960s photographs, whereas the top British fashion photographer of the 1950s, John French, required a handful of static poses of his models. Yet, the idea of a radical break in the late 1960s is simplistic and unhelpful as a way of thinking about the history of fashion, photography, the media, and society in postwar Britain. Drawing on oral history interviews with fashion models, photographers, and editors, this article argues that the stars of the Swinging Sixties, such as Bailey, Shrimpton and Twiggy, were able to build on innovations from the late 1950s made by John French and Norman Parkinson, along with their models, and the “Young Idea” section of British Vogue. This article draws on research funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, for Conekin's next book, Pretty Hard Work: A History of Fashion Modelling in PostWar London and Paris .

Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (review)

Reviewed by: Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s Michael DeAngelis (bio) Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s, by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Continuum 2007. $95.00 hardcover; $24.95 paper. 229 pages “I have tried on the whole to position myself inside of this cinema rather than outside or above it,” explains Geoffrey Nowell-Smith at the start of Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s, “and to recreate the world of the new cinemas as it appeared to participants in that world rather than view it with conscious or critical distance.”1 Although this position is difficult to sustain at times, the focus on analysis from a contemporary perspective serves the author well in his attempt to foreground both commonalities and distinctions in a set of cinemas that is primarily European, but that also encompasses movements in Latin American cinema. The structure of the book is elegant and the work itself engaging, tracing a path that begins with more general pronouncements and broadscale observations on cinema’s interactions with the politics and culture of the decade, and that concludes with a critically sharp set of analyses of major movements and filmmakers that includes Antonioni, Pasolini, and Godard. In the book’s introductory chapter, Nowell-Smith argues that the primary common element across the cinemas in question is rebellion—a dissatisfaction with and turning away from both the formulas and strategies of the classical Hollywood Cinema and from national cinematic traditions that had become stale or outworn. Tied to this notion of rebellion is the author’s assertion that a “narrative of liberation” was developing on several fronts, from increasingly permissive cultural [End Page 167] attitudes about sex and sexuality, to political and politicized representations of human experience, to the rejection of capitalistic excess, to the largely failed attempt by Eastern European countries to free themselves from the constraints of Soviet communism. Nowell-Smith provides a workable context for his discussion through a brief historical overview of cultural and institutional perspectives in cinema during the 1950s, focusing first upon the inception of a new audience and target market for international cinema, and then upon the Cahiers du cinéma critics’ development of a “realist matrix” context for the 1960s.2 The core middle chapters of the book then correlate political, social, and cultural developments of the decade with changes in formal, stylistic, and institutional practices of cinema. Especially enlightening among these are the author’s discussion of how Western imperialist expansion and Soviet communist oppression led to resistance movements that can ultimately be correlated with radical practices in both narrative and documentary film. Nowell-Smith also includes a remarkable chapter on the development of portable, versatile, and more affordable camera and sound recording technologies, explaining how such advancements supported the political and stylistic practices of the cinema verité movement, Direct Cinema, and the French New Wave, permitting new filmmakers to work outside of the expenses and politically unwelcoming confines of studio production. The author also effectively illustrates how narrative filmmakers of the decade adopted documentary stylistics to question the subject’s access to such absolutes as truth and the real. Nowell-Smith situates these developments alongside a discussion of the aesthetic and political implications of such technological innovations as color film production, wide-screen image formats, and the zoom lens. A shared concern of these cinematic movements, Nowell-Smith argues, “is that they set out to rectify something false or misleading in the way life in their country was portrayed and in so doing came up with an alternative image which they hoped was more accurate or relevant to modern life as they understood it.”3 And in “Movements,” the third section of the book, he focuses upon the intricacies of cinema’s role in both the formation and transformation of national identity. Aside from his praise for the work of Joseph Losey, in his discussion of the “Kitchen Sink and Swinging London” movements, Nowell-Smith is highly critical of British cinema’s general failure to engage with contemporary political and cultural problems. He finds the prospect of a more politically confrontational cinema in the French New Wave, discussing this cinema in light of a new generation’s reaction...

Nick Waterlow 1941–2009

The first time Nick Waterlow encountered dynamic Australian art was at the exhibition Recent Australian Painting, held at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1961. He was twenty years old and had just completed a course on French history and visual art at the University of Grenoble. Having read Patrick White, his appetite had been whetted for Australian artists' images of place. At this exhibition curated by the Whitechapel director, Bryan Robertson Nick saw the 'Antipodeans' hung alongside Ralph Balson, Lawrence Daws, Fred Williams, and Brett Whiteley. 'The work[s], particularly those of Nolan and Boyd, as well as the younger Whiteley', he recalled, 'left an indelible impression on those of us fortunate to see the exhibition.'1 While working at the Alfred Brod Gallery, Nick met these artists in 'Swinging London', as well as Colin and Kay Lanceley, Robert Hughes, and Germaine Greer. He also became a devotee of the Barry McKenzie strip cartoon in Private Eye. For Arts Review, he wrote about Jasper Johns, Edward Keinholz, Julio Ramis, Bruce Lacey's Charing Cross basement of Better Books, and Hermann Nitsch's performance in which live fowls were beheaded and a piano thrown out of a window.

Making waves: new cinemas of the 1960s

Acknowledgements A Note on Names and Film Titles Preface to the 2013 Edition Introduction: What Were the Sixties? Part I: Before the Revolution 1. World Cinema in the 1950s 2. Criticism and Culture Part II: The New Cinemas 3. New Cinemas, New Politics 4. Sex and Censorship 5. Outside the Studio 6. Documentary, Cinema Verite, and the 'New American Cinema' 7. Technological Innovations: Colour, Wide Screen, the Zoom Lens 8. Narrative 9. New Cinemas, National Cinemas Part III: Movements 10. Britain: From Kitchen Sink to Swinging London 11. France: From Nouvelle Vague to May '68 12. Italy 13. From Polish School to Czech New Wave and Beyond 14. Latin America Part IV: Four Auteurs 15. Young Godard 16. Antonioni 17. Pasolini 18. Oshima Conclusion Fifty Films Bibliography Index of Film Titles Index

London à la mod: Fashion, Genre, and Historical Space in Performance

Since the success of the continuing Austin Powers franchise in the late 90s, the notion of 1960s “Swinging London” has been a familiar trope. And in fact, a number of films from 1964–1968 conscious...

Welcome to the Robbiedome

Welcome to the Robbiedome