Mod to Suedehead

[roytonboy]

Now of course this is a remark by an outsider, who was 4 years old in 1969 and not English...

But, couldn't we had :

3) BD shirts, one obviously checked
4) Pocket Hanky most probably reddish
5) very short trousers
6) Boots

Or was these items already part of the mod staple ?

Clouseau - I'm exaggerating a little to make a point. Having said that, neither of them are wearing boots. Only one is wearing a checked shirt - all other items could be features of the mod wardrobe. In 1969/70 I didn't know any skinheads who dressed like this. By mid-late 1971 we looked much more like this but by that time we weren't considering ourselves to be skinheads.

 

[Clouseau]

Roytonboy, you make a point with the boots, still not sure with the lad on the right though. Difficult to see.

 

[roytonboy]

Roytonboy, you make a point with the boots, still not sure with the lad on the right though. Difficult to see.

You know me Clouseau, always happy to stimulate a little debate!

 

[Clouseau]

You know me Clouseau, always happy to stimulate a little debate!

Something missing on this thread for quite a long time now !

 

[Man-of-Mystery]



Maybe lots of London 'skinheads' were just wannabe Mods?

That link has been long-established on this thread, Bryan.

Sadly, it is this 'snobbery' that has caused a number of former originals to stop posting on this forum. 

But a number of the non-posting originals are actually from London.

 

[Man-of-Mystery]



3) BD shirts, one obviously checked
4) Pocket Hanky most probably reddish
5) very short trousers
6) Boots

Or was these items already part of the mod staple ?

3) I had seen b/d shirts on mods, amongst other types of shirt. I had a Madras cotton check shirt in 1967 in Blackpool that I was still wearing in 1969, sometimes, in London. I'm certain that I saw NW mods in 67 wearing Van Heusen (?) shirts that were button-down but not soft-roll - rather like spearpoints with collar buttons added - some of which were in Tattersall check.

4) A mod staple. My first one was blue, 'liberated' from a boutique in 1967.

5) Mod strides were typically cut so that they would stop at the shoe, i.e. not bag down on it. This has been mentioned before.

6) When I arrived in London, I found a lot of the totters (or whatever-you-would-call-them) wore boots to go down to the seaside, or to work, or to football, but they weren't the obvious signature item that the DMs became for skinheads. Yet.


Just a few more comments. Being a skinhead wasn't cheap. You could get your hands on a few basic items cheaply enough - jungle greens, a pair of cheap boots, braces - but items like a decent coat, a decent suit, shoes, Levis, etc. cost good money. So the idea that a skinhead was someone who couldn't afford to be a mod doesn't really cut it, especially as the two looks overlapped.

Notwithstanding I moved from the North of England to London in 1968, because I witnessed the 'birth' of skinhead down South I have been as bad as anyone else when claiming "It was a London thing," and "London had everything first," and "It had died out by late 1970." Now, there's more than a grain of truth in those statements, but I have learned to hold my tongue, because the phenomenon looked a lot different, at different times, in different parts of the country. The pic we have been discussing...

... just shouts 'skinhead' and '1969' to me. I would have recognised the look at once as being something I was familiar with. To roytonboy it isn't familiar at all. To us in London, the American influence was a bit more obvious*. To roytonboy, and to people through a lot of the UK, there was an (almost) different look and style, which was several degrees of connection removed from the American influence.

I want to make a very important point. The regional sniping would have been appropriate to the era. It's what we would have done - "The M6 is cobbled," "Rainbows in black and white," and so on. It isn't now. It's okay to report these differences, and to make sure that they are known about and acknowledged; bickering about them now, on this thread, isn't on. I learned that the hard way. I was as guilty of it as anyone else, even though I could have been expected to have had divided loyalty. Sometimes, I have to say, it's as though we are discussing two (or more) different youth phenomena, rather than the development and migration of the same one. I've learned that since I've been on here too.


*I still had that American sports shirt I bought at the Squire Shop in '69, when I moved back up North in 1975, although I didn't wear it. I remember that a couple of years later I lent the shirt and an old pair of Squire Shop wingtip brogues to someone from an Amateur Dramatic group who was playing an American character.

 

[roytonboy]

That link has been long-established on this thread, Bryan.
But a number of the non-posting originals are actually from London.

Funnily enough, I don't recall any snobbery from your good self, M-o-M even though we arrived at skinhead from different directions. I have made the same comment to Mr. Knightly. I think we all need to recognise that there were bound to be regional differences in what was worn and when (I wouldn't mind betting that is true even across Greater London) and therefore we can't say what is right and wrong - one man's truth is an other man's "total bollocks" (or "crap" as someone described one of my comments)

Whilst it may be true that some people were able to spend three weeks wages on a pair of shoes, that wasn't true of everyone. Earlier in the year I was chatting to a former skinhead in West Yorkshire who said he had to get his Mum to buy his Doc Matrtens out of the catalogue and pay her back, 10 shillings a week. Does that make him any less of a skinhead? For many, that was the reality and the world of John Simons was in a different universe - little wonder that they can't relate to it.

In terms of 'originals' not posting anymore I think there are a variety of reasons, the main one probably being that most stuff has already been said by now and, to a great degree we are simply repeating ourselves. This is helpful to anyone recently joining the forum but not particularly interesting to those who have been around a while

 

[Man-of-Mystery]



I can see big differences with the Marc Bolan picture :

Haircut
Tab collar shirt
Tie
Jacket length

MB's haircut isn't a million miles from a 'college boy', but yeah.

I remember seeing at least one bloke in 1968, in the Savoy Rooms, wearing a polka dot tie and hanky.

 

[Man-of-Mystery]



Funnily enough, I don't recall any snobbery from your good self, M-o-M even though we arrived at skinhead from different directions.

I'll hold my hands up to some, much earlier in the thread. I was very dogmatic about what the look had been, where it flourished, and when it died.

 

[roytonboy]

I'll hold my hands up to some, much earlier in the thread. I was very dogmatic about what the look had been, where it flourished, and when it died.

Must have been before I joined.....

Great stuff, Clouseau and M-o-M. Nice to finish the year on a bit of a high (and on topic!)

 

[Clouseau]

Clouseau - I'm exaggerating a little to make a point. Having said that, neither of them are wearing boots. Only one is wearing a checked shirt - all other items could be features of the mod wardrobe. In 1969/70 I didn't know any skinheads who dressed like this. By mid-late 1971 we looked much more like this but by that time we weren't considering ourselves to be skinheads.

You're right, shoes obviously.

London, Barons Court 1969



Strides stops well above the ankle. Skinhead style to me.

Shoes are Plains ?

 

[roytonboy]

You're right, shoes obviously.

London, Barons Court 1969



Strides stops well above the ankle. Skinhead style to me.

Shoes are Plains ?

It's funny, but from that angle more recognisably 'skinhead'. Take the jacket off and add a sleeveless v-neck and I would have had a similar look at times in 1970 (my trousers would have been light sta-prest and my shoes tan brogues but the style would have been much the same.)

 

[yankmod]

I would like to focus on this Bolan shot.Early Mod pics are rare.The Polka Dot numbers was somethin that went big in 1966.The Jacket is interesting as it appears to be a "Bumfreezer"but with more Ivy League style pockets(the likes of which you would not find on the later Skinhead suit.)The collar,i'm guessing was popular til' the Brooks Bro.BD became more available.I would like to see more variations of Mod etc.represented today.As we all know,the items which were "Revived" are a narrow selection of what was worn.Maybe this thread could focus a bit more on Mod and then we could show the transition more accurately.

 

[covskin]

It doesn't exactly look like a great fit does it, or even constructed that well.

 

[Bob the Badger]

I always thought he was from Leicester.

A bit of snobbery - yes. Deservedly so - why? I don't think that the thousands of former skinheads up and down the country consider themselves any less so just because they didn't purchase stuff at a particular shop. We'd never even heard of it. Although living about a hundred miles away from the author I have to say that the drawings and descriptions in the book were fairly accurate (jeans were worn a bit longer than in the drawings) for our area. I'd been a skinhead for over 12 months before I even saw a Harrington. Naturally there were always some regional differences, but all over the north and midlands there was a pretty standard look. The fact is (and some won't like it) that far, far more of us wore styles depicted in the book than were walking around looking like a psuedo student from Princeton'.

If I had seen these two lads in 1970, I wouldn't have considered them skinheads at all!

Only two things would have suggested skinhead

1) Their girlfriends (clearly skinhead)
2) one of them is wearing braces.





To me, there is little difference in their look and this:



Marc Bolan, a Mod in 1963/64

Maybe lots of London 'skinheads' were just wannabe Mods?



Sadly, it is this 'snobbery' that has caused a number of former originals to stop posting on this forum.

Most of my mates dressed like the boys in the first photo in 1969. We were creating our own style and we weren't trying to be mods. But we looked up to mods who were our older brothers, cousins, the older boys at school. The term skinhead started off as an insult to us but we went with the flow and adopted it but were never entirety comfortable with the label.