Fashioning Mod Twiggy and the moped in ‘swinging’ London

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Acknowledgements

For research assistance, I thank Inga Fraser and Terence Pepper of the National Portrait Gallery in London. For Vogue picture research and rights clearance, I am grateful to Bonnie Robinson and Harriet Wilson of Condé Nast, UK. I also thank Vanessa Schwartz for her ever insightful and lucid comments on this piece.

Notes

1. See for example, Church Gibson, ‘Myths of the Swinging City,’ 90; and any number of websites and blogs devoted to the sixties and/or Twiggy, for example, http://ana-lee.livejournal.com/95156.html (accessed 27 February 2012).

2. ‘Young Idea’s Shorts Supply,’ 68–9.

3. See Hanlon, ‘The Lady Cyclist,’ 6–13; Queen, 3 April 1897, 671; and Wells, Wheels of Chance, 1896. See also, Garvey, ‘Reframing the Bicycle,’ 85 and 100.

4. Garvey, ‘Reframing the Bicycle,’ 68–9; Hanlon, ‘The Lady Cyclist,’ 6–11.

5. Biddle-Perry, ‘Fashioning Social Aspiration,’ ch. 2.4.

6. Ibid. See also Cunningham, Politics, Health and Art.

7. Garvey, ‘Reframing the Bicycle,’ 75.

8. On anti-cycling medical literature from the 1890s that claimed that women cyclists’ sexual health would be ruined due to the masturbatory nature of cycling, please see Garvey, ‘Reframing the Bicycle,’ 66 and 74–8.

9. Willis, ‘The Motorbike Within a Sub-cultural Group,’ 452.

10. On the skirmishes between the Mods and Rockers on the mid-May Bank Holiday of 1964, see for example BBC Home, ‘1964: Mods and Rockers Jailed after Seaside Riots.’

11. Whiteley, Pop Design, 83.

12. Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 77–115. In this book Hebdige did a fine reading of the early motor scooters in immediate post-WWI Europe and their marketing to ‘the imagined needs of the female motor cyclist,’ and how, even from the 1920s, ‘the scooter was interpreted as…a threat to the masculine culture of the road (p. 84).’ He also charted fashions that arose from the imagined needs of the female scooter rider, such as Pucci’s headscarf ‘to keep a pillion girl’s hair tidy at speed’ (‘A New Race of Girls,’ Picture Post, 5 September 1954, as quoted by Hebdige, Hiding in the Light, 85).

13. Garber and McRobbie, ‘Girls and Subcultures,’ 1–2. Willis had written on the young women: ‘What seemed to unite them was a common desire for an attachment to a male and a common inability to attract a man to a long-term relationship. They tended to be scruffier and less attractive than the attached girls.’ Willis, Profane Culture, as quoted by Garber and McRobbie, ‘Girls and Subcultures,’ 1–2.

14. Ibid., 8.

15. Ibid., 8.

16. Ibid., 8–9.

17. Church Gibson, ‘Myths of the Swinging City,’ 88; and Kirby, ‘Twiggy. This Year’s Model. Again.’

18. Time, ‘London: The Swinging City.’ For my assessment of how the young players in the ‘swinging’ London scene helped to create this myth at the time, please see Conekin, ‘From Haughty to Nice,’ 283–96.

19. Devlin, ‘Paris, Twiggy Haute Couture,’ 65 and 147. An older former model, Paulene Stone, nicknamed ‘Redbird’ in 1960s London, and who appeared on British Vogue’s cover in July and August of 1967, has written that by 1966 at ‘the height of swinging London’ ‘it was considered very smart…especially around fashion studios dominated by East End photographers, to affect a cockney accent’ (Stone, One Tear is Enough, 8).

20. Interestingly, in two of the six photographs in this fashion spread Twiggy rides a racing bicycle. On the Moulton Standard mini bicycle, please see architecture and design critic Reyner Banham’s 1960 article in which he argues that it should be ‘recognized as a minor cultural revolution,’ reprinted as ‘A Grid on Two Farthings,’ 119.

21. Alford and Ferriss, Motorocycle, 40.

22. Honda Worldwide, ‘Quality Products Have No International Boundaries.’

23. Alford and Ferriss, Motorcycle, 40.

24. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqKi_9p1zks; Barry Curtis, email correspondence with the author, 16 September 2011.

25. Pattle and Gobbett, ‘Raleigh Mopeds – A Spotter’s Guide.’