The 1960s saw a dramatic change in menswear - for the past 150 years, clothing for men had been tailor-made, and plain and sombre in appearance. Men's fashion was generally based on a conservative template people didn't question: a shirt and tie; a plain, handmade suit; a jumper hand-knitted by a relative. Young men dressed much the same way as their fathers did.
But in the late 1950s, the Mods (short for 'Modernists') signalled the birth of a confident new youth culture, demanding clothes that made a statement. In London, people began wearing clothes heavily influenced by Continental style, specifically Italian slimline suits, with their 'bumfreezer' short jackets, and the beatnik looks of the Parisian Left Bank. Designer John Stephen opened his first boutique in Carnaby Street in 1957, selling cheap, sharp and colourful suits to men who became an important influence on London's street style.
As the 1960s gathered pace, the standard template for a man's suit began to accommodate subtly daring new elements: the collarless jacket (a look popularised by The Beatles in 1963, the year they launched their first album) and slim-fitting trousers, matched with heeled boots rather than shoes. Boutiques selling off-the-peg menswear spread across London, while traditional tailors and shirt-makers began to embrace society's increasingly informal new mood. Flamboyant elements such as embroidery and vividly printed shirts became acceptable parts of the everyday male dress code. The frenetic energy of Swinging London found its way across the country with bright prints and colours for men – a striking change after such a long period of stagnation. Ties widened as the decade progressed, and shirts incorporated brighter colours and patterns, influenced more by rock stars replacing the movie stars who’d been the primary style icons for several decades.
By the mid-1960s, fashion-conscious young Londoners were challenging the staid rules of masculine etiquette that had persisted since Victorian times. Circulating in the overlapping worlds of fashion, music, the (newly influential) media and high society, a social group forged a bold new identity – the 'modern dandy', unashamed to wear frills, velvet and other elements previously judged to be too feminine for a man. A group of entrepreneurs capitalised on this shift in taste, setting up shops that married traditional tailoring techniques with the design flair of graduates from recently established Menswear courses. Around 1963, two distinct subcultures emerged: Mods and Rockers.
The Mods were driven by fashion and music, and many mods rode scooters. Mods wore suits and other cleancut outfits, and listened to music genres such as modern jazz, soul, Motown, ska and British blues-rooted bands like the Yardbirds, the Small Faces, and the Who. The Who wrote a portrait of the cultures with their 1973 album Quadrophenia. The Rockers’ life revolved around motorcycling. Rockers generally wore protective clothing such as black leather jackets and motorcycle boots or brothel creeper. The style was influenced by Marlon Brando in the 1953 film The Wild One. The common rocker hairstyle was a pompadour, while their music genre of choice was 1950s rock and roll and R&B, played by artists including Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Bo Diddley, as well as British rock and roll musicians such as Billy Fury and Johnny Kidd.
Men’s fashion was influenced by military elements, with many of the rock influences contributing to its popularity. In 1966, Mick Jagger wore a Victorian guardsman's jacket during a televised performance on Ready Steady Go! He and Jimi Hendrix both sported military jackets during performances, while The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band showed the band wearing neon versions of the styles. Partly thanks to this style, army-and-navy surplus clothing stores and second-hand stores became popular in the late 1960s. Like womenswear, menswear also saw an influence from space as Pierre Cardin designed futuristic clothing for men, too. Although his ‘Cosmos’ collection of 1966/7 was too extreme to enter the mainstream, elements of the look such as turtle-neck sweaters, and zipped tunics in bonded jersey, were taken up and worn with more accessible styles.
At the end of the decade, violence in Vietnam and student uprisings in France signalled newly aware times, and consumerist enthusiasm for 'the next new thing' began to feel inappropriate. A growing interest in historic revival and various cultures encouraged British people to trawl second-hand shops looking for vintage clothes – particularly the fashions of the 1930s and 1940s and men’s suits began to widen again. People sought garments with connections to other parts of the world to create looks through less consumerist means, rejecting the synthetic materials of the earlier part of the decade. Like women’s fashion, menswear turned to Eastern influences, and the boldly patterned suit jacket George Harrison wore in the mid-sixties foreshadowed the style to come.
Tie-dye, loose-fitting shirts, and velvet vests were all a part of the men’s hippie aesthetic in the later part of the 1960s while colour continued to remain front and centre. As the 1960s moved into the 1970s, taking inspiration from the 1930s and 1940s, lapels and trousers took on exaggeratedly wide dimensions for both men and women, and the traditional distinctions between menswear and womenswear became blurred. Blue denim jeans, at first a counter-cultural garment, were widely worn and promoted by global brands. Clothing became increasingly unisex and informal.
Massive credit to
https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-peacock-revolution-1960s-menswear and
https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1960-1969/ and the fabulous Bloshka for taking the legwork out of this for me.
