We Are the Mods: Youth Culture, Class and the Economy in 1960s Britain
We often think of the 1960s as a violent decade: the Kray twins, mods and rockers clashing on Brighton beach. Yet despite a doubling of violent crime during the decade, overall crime levels remained lower than in the 1980s or 1990s.
There are probably more films about the Krays — and mods and rockers scrapping in Brighton — than there were actual incidents.
The rising crime of the era was mostly economic. For the first time since WWII, Britain was a consumer society, and there were simply more things to steal.
The Real Baby Boomers
Popular imagination places the baby boomer generation at Woodstock or the Isle of Wight festival. In truth, that picture only fits middle-class boomers who stayed in education. Most working-class kids in 1960s Britain left school between 14 and 16. A tiny minority stayed on.
Those who left early entered a labour market crying out for workers. The post-war era saw pay rises regularly topping 7% a year. For context, the last 15 years have averaged 1.5%. Even with no qualifications, you could get a secure, decently paid job.
This was a golden age of trade unions, collective bargaining and a massive pay gap between skilled and unskilled workers. Satirised brilliantly in the Boulting Brothers' "I’m Alright Jack," this world was led by characters like Peter Sellers' Fred Kite — a proto Len McCluskey without the luxury flat.
Gender Roles and Economic Limits
Of course, this was also a world where men worked and women stayed home. High male wages acted as a breadwinner premium — paid in excess of productivity to keep women out of the workforce. This continued shockingly into the 21st century, often with union collusion.
Young people entering work in the early 60s benefited from a feedback loop: more youth jobs meant higher wages; higher wages meant more spending; more spending meant more businesses.
Someone leaving school when the Beatles' first LP came out would have seen a 35% wage increase by the time England lifted the 1966 World Cup. For those entering the new creative industries — advertising, TV, magazines, music — pay growth was even faster.
White-Collar Mods
New industries like advertising and journalism soaked up working-class talent that might have gone into factories. Most didn’t end up on Carnaby Street or behind a camera like David Bailey, but many found good work at places like Woman, Woman's Own, and Woman's Realm.
These mass-market weeklies sold millions and employed legions of journalists, illustrators, printers and distributors, who spread the mod aesthetic far and wide.
Retail responded too. Hepworths Tailors expanded to rival Montague Burton, launching the UK's first in-store credit scheme and even a designer diffusion line with Hardy Amies. The sharp-suited store managers? Mods from the early 60s.
Most mods didn’t work in fashion boutiques; they worked for the companies that defined mod fashion and media. They were white-collar workers with disposable income, defining a new consumer culture.
The Mod Soundtrack: RnB, Ska, and Cultural Exchange
Mod musical tastes reflected the new urban mix. Mods were the first generation to grow up in integrated classrooms, especially in cities like London and Birmingham. They adopted American RnB and Jamaican Ska from their West Indian classmates.
This wasn’t liberalism as we understand, but it was a kind of cultural fusion. Dick Hebdige famously quotes a 60s mod: "We’re hero-worshipping the Spades." Cringeworthy now, but revealing of the time.
The mod scene helped birth the UK's first mixed-race pop groups, and the crowds at Beatles gigs were more diverse than you'd expect.
Sex, Style and Subversion
The 60s youth were also the first to grow up with the Pill — available to all from 1966. Abortion was legalised in 1967. The birth rate dropped, and the 1968 birth cohort (your humble narrator included) was the smallest of the post-war era.
Feminism was easy to support when it mostly meant more sex, not job competition. If you were a sharp-suited 20-something with a good job and high disposable income, the sexual revolution was a windfall.
Attitudes to homosexuality were more complicated. Gay clubs like Le Duce and the Masquerade intersected with the mod scene. Gay tailors shaped mod fashion, and the dandyish style signalled queerness even when lyrics didn’t.
Gay representation in music was rare. The Tornados' Do You Come Here Often and The Kinks' Dedicated Follower of Fashion (inspired by gay tailor Tommy Nutter) are among the few. The Zombies’ Care of Cell 44 had veiled nods to the Leo Abse Act but was shelved by their label for over a year.
No surprise that Bowie and Bolan — mod veterans — became the androgynous icons of 70s pop.
And mod provided the first, tentative explorations of trans identities, years before Bowie. The Who's take was predictably intense, The Kinks more nudge and wink yet still affectionate.
Skinhead Moonstomp: The Backlash
Younger siblings of the mod generation had a rougher ride. After 1966, Wilson’s government slammed the brakes: inflation fears and a balance of payments crisis led to spending cuts, higher interest rates and a devaluation of the pound.
By 1968, wage growth had collapsed. If you entered work in 1966, you'd wait until 1973 to match the raises your elder siblings saw. Unemployment climbed. Discontent grew.
This was the breeding ground for the skinhead movement — the mod’s hard-edged, working-class cousin. Taking cues from Jamaican fashion and music, early skinheads were sharp, clean-cut, and musically tuned into ska and reggae. The original skin-head look is rightly iconic.
But with rising job competition and declining wages, tensions flared. While early skinheads had grown up with black classmates and admired Jamaican style, they were also more likely to view immigrants as economic rivals.
They also encountered a new wave of South Asian immigrants, many fleeing persecution in Uganda and Kenya. Racial violence followed.
As the decade ended, targets for "bashing" expanded to include homosexuals. And as Rastafarianism and dub replaced ska, white skinheads drifted from the music they once loved. The National Front swooped in, recruiting from football terraces and working-class estates. They left the best music behind.
Legacy: Mods vs Skins
Fifty years on, skinheads are an international archetype — braces, boots, shaved heads — linked with far-right politics from Charlottesville to Vladivostok.
Meanwhile, mod style morphed into high fashion. Where skinhead became streetwear for thugs, mod became the uniform of the stylish: Dior, Celine, Hedi Slimane.
This is the fishtail parka Slimane designed for Celine. A snip at £3k
Just because you're not dressed in Celine or Dior doesn't mean that you're not a mod, plenty of people find their own style. But too many men my age call themselves mods while carrying the sulky thuggishness of skinhead culture.
Mod style found expression in fine art through Pauline Boty and David Hockney, but it also shaped a whole aesthetic embracing furniture and product design, advertising and marketing. The contemporary obsession with mid century design is just mod by another name.
Economic conditions shaped both these subcultures. One emerged from prosperity, the other from decline. Mod, was, and is the democratisation of high fashion, the adaptation of high society styles into everyday life. And high fashion returned the compliment, copying mod style into haute couture. Skinhead style started off as working class sharp, but became debased, the uniform of the thug, the scruff and the bigot.
And that, more than the music or the tailoring, defines their legacy.
And surely no one wants to end up with a C21st mod scene that looks like this?
As a PS to this blog I wanted to reflect on the representation of Trans in mod culture as it was the first youth scene to acknowledge the existence of trans people. It may be that Elon Musk is right and the Woke Mind Virus is real, but if he is these then?