by Jenny Diski
My version of her dress fourteen years on had come from Biba in Kensington Church Street. Swirly art deco, black and gold interior, dim lights, loud psychedelic pop music, feather boas, wild hats, floaty garments for drifting around in at home or at parties, slick mini-dresses to snap about the streets in, everything hung from wooden coatstands – oh, and another memorable treasure on which I spent all my money one week: a silver and black striped, Regency-cut trouser suit for £7. The black crêpe dress wasn’t a very typical Biba dress, except in its shortness (and I may well have taken it up a bit myself). Biba clothes were usually coloured, patterned even, though only in sludgy tones, plums, earthy browns, dusty blues, never anything bright. I found this utterly black dress hanging on one of the coatstands, grabbed the size eight (I’m not sure Biba made anything above a size ten – I couldn’t then imagine anyone being above a size ten), and as I stepped into it and watched, as one of my fellow shoppers zipped up the back for me in the multi-mirrored communal dressing room, the floor of which was ankle-deep with discarded items, I saw the image of my marvellous skating girl appear in the icy glass.
Growing up is partly about trying on superficial looks to match how you want people to see you, and how you want to see yourself. Controlling how people literally view you is a way of learning to construct a sense of self, until you become confident enough to proceed the other way around. Everyone does it, from the moment they look into a mirror and realise that they can see themselves and therefore other people can see them, and that they have a body which, with a bit of effort, can be brought under the mind’s control. It is in the nature of youth to play with style in an effort to come to terms with substance. Easy enough, too, to get stuck there. Narcissism meets the mirror stage and neither condition actually stops in infancy, especially when the times collude. Though there has probably never been a period when young men and women did not look sideways at themselves to catch a glimpse of how they looked to others, the Sixties catered for the concern with the self and how it was to be seen better than most eras, because they coincided with the post-war, post-austerity Western world: a rare island of perceived well-being and a belief in the future as progress, after a long, dark hiatus when no one could be quite sure that the future would not be unimaginably bleak. A time, then, to indulge the children – for a while. A time also for peacetime capitalism to consolidate.
The personal is the political, people began to say, although not until quite a long way into that period designated as the Sixties. But from the start to their end and well beyond, it is truer to say that more than anything for the post-war bulge generation the personal was the personal. If the body was to become increasingly regarded as merely the superficial layer outside an infinitely questing mind and spreading social conscience, it was nonetheless, throughout the Sixties, wrapped and tied with the utmost care and attention to detail.
After the war and the austerity years, the means to control how you were seen were newly available to the young. And so was the ability to distinguish yourself visually from your parents. From the Teddy Boys in the Fifties to the Mods and Rockers who took over, and on to the mini-skirted dollybirds of the mid-Sixties and the diaphanous hippies of the later Sixties, many more young people than ever before had, for various reasons, enough money to pay for dramatic self-definition. If they left school at fifteen without qualifications, they found jobs, lost them, found them again, easily earning money while often still living at home. At any rate, there was enough surplus after paying the parents for your keep to buy a long, velvet-collared jacket and drainpipes, a sharp Italian-styled suit, a tiny scrap of a frock from Biba, Bus Stop or even, if you saved up, Bazaar, though only the genuinely well-off could afford any of the painted silks and velvets from Granny Takes A Trip. Those who stayed on at school and went to university were rewarded with enough pocket money or a decent local authority student grant that was designed to be lived on. Even being broke, unemployed and living in a damp bedsitter didn’t present an impossible bar to style. The easy availability of social security and the dole are a forgotten but vital factor during the whole of the Sixties, and well into the Seventies. Unconsciously, as it might have been, the welfare system that the newly elected government brought in after the war in order to ensure a fair and just society was also the way in which the older generation were to indulge their post-war children. The Forties turned to the Fifties, the Fifties became the Sixties, and the Sixties seemed to go on for ever, but even then, as the old ones gnashed their teeth and tore out their hair at the goings-on of their wild, rebellious young, they continued to pay them a state stipend, unemployment benefit or a generous student grant, underwriting, as it were, their worst fears. There was always a way to get something you really wanted. Or so it seemed. One trick (with clothes then and relationships later) was to jettison the notion our parents had of the well-made, the built-to-last, the long-term, the good investment. Clothes that were made badly and cheaply didn’t last, sometimes not more than a few weeks without coming apart at the seams, but if they had style and wit, it was of no consequence; it was a new way to have what you wanted when you wanted it, and then to have the repeated satisfaction of finding the next new thing. Older people of all classes were horrified at the waste and lack of quality, but that was part of the pleasure for us: to see the shock and disapproval and bafflement in the eyes of the generation who had scraped by and lost all kinds of treasures during the war, and discovered when it was over that they still had to make do and mend: a generation who genuinely valued the patina of age.
If in fact we really only began to develop new kinds of uniform, they were at least dictated by our own generation. The static fashion of our elders was dreary and camouflaging. When we put on the clothes they approved of we automatically looked middle-aged. We rejected the neat pleats and the matching suits, battled against twinsets and pearls, refused in various ways to look respectable – and thereby developed the freedom to look like everyone else under twenty-five. You really couldn’t be seen wearing a skirt that was a couple of inches too long. It made you feel wretched. On a camping holiday in Assisi I was persuaded to be sensible and to lower my hem two inches, still short enough for me to be refused entry to the Basilica of St Francis, and felt for the entire two weeks like an old woman shuffling about in widow’s weeds. As far as I was concerned, only a properly minuscule skirt could distinguish me from the nuns queuing up to see the Grotto.
I knew well enough my extraordinary good fortune in having a Biba size eight body* and that life was miserable for those who didn’t. I knew this because of my hair. After the backcombed beehives of the Fifties and very early Sixties had deflated, only Vidal Sassoon’s new geometrically precise version of the 1920s bob – dead straight hair that fell to a knife edge at the jawline – would do. My hair was thick and curly: I ironed it straight, I spent hours rolling it, pulling it painfully as it dried to achieve only a half-hearted version of the desired look that immediately sprang back to catastrophe at the first sign of rain. I was well aware of the dismalness of the never-quite-right. Finally, I gave up and dragged it tightly back so that it was at least sort of invisible and made me look severe enough to seem not to care. My hair caused me misery and shame. Self-presentation didn’t diminish as we turned down the legacy of our parents’ wardrobes. Very little mattered more than how you looked. Social approval was quite as powerful as it ever had been and has remained. We simply readjusted the idea of whose approval we were after.
And if that was, in retrospect, no different from any other youth cohort, neither was the means by which our style became available to us. All those ground-breaking, cheap and cheerful garments were made in order to fulfil and incite demand, by the same old system that has since the end of feudalism specialised in generating and then granting the wishes of human beings and thereby ruling the world. The clothes were designed and initially made by the young, but they were sold in shops – renamed boutiques: tiny spaces, sometimes, with a handful of dresses or trousers – wh
ose rents had to be paid, where turnover was required, and profits were taken or the shops closed. A new market in boutiques, opening and closing within weeks sometimes, played out a speeded-up capitalism, which proceeded as it had always done. Youthful entrepreneurs, their vision in sync with their generation, their ambition the same as generations before them, offered their contemporaries clothes, music, information and other things to want at the price they could afford. Richard Branson with the sexily named Virgin record shops, Felix Dennis at the radical Oz magazine and Tony Elliott’s cool listings magazine Time Out sold the young packages that looked like amateurish rejections of the old way, and seeded their later conventional media empires. John Stephen opened a little shop called His Clothes, selling Mod suits in an alley behind Regent Street in the late Fifties, and to this day tourists wander down Carnaby Street, soaking up the ‘atmosphere’. The tiny boutique Biba, in Abingdon Road, thrived in 1964 and moved to a much more visible and larger site in Kensington Church Street, then, bigger still, to Kensington High Street, until it finally over-reached itself (with City funding), in a veritable parody of capitalism, by taking over the huge department store Derry & Tom’s, selling bedsheets, paint, kitchenware and cocktails as well as frocks and maternity dresses, and went bust within two years.
The economy was booming, finally, and in the first half of the 1960s, at least, there was no dissent from the young about the conventionally capitalist manner in which their desired goods were made available to them. Nothing much radical was going on here apart from cheapness and short-termism – hardly anathema to capitalism. The revolution was a long way off. We were the first generation who could shop till we dropped without anxiety or much regard for the size of our income, and, just like now, our desire for style was catered for by designers, manufacturers, retail outlets, advertisers, public relations companies, photographers, celebrities, models, fashion magazines and financial backers. The taxman was paid, so the state received some of the money. The same old system was operating in the same old manner, doing what it does best: taking advantage of whatever circumstances exist. It is the way of the market. At that early stage we weren’t, for the most part, after a different way, just different things. But because we were young, and being catered for so attentively, it felt brand new; and because we were young and are now no longer, we are inclined to remember it as quite different from anything that has happened since.
The art world (no shortage of art schools and grants to attend them for young people who didn’t fancy university) joined in the fun and called itself Pop. The word ‘popular’ in relation to the arts might conceivably have a twang of the radical about it; a bold rejection of the traditionalist understanding of it as meaning a loss of quality. But the diminutive ‘pop’ merely suggested ‘new’ and ‘fun’. And ‘throwaway’. It wasn’t confronting, only absorbing, and consuming. If occasionally some works commented on or liberated themselves from this apparent fact of life (Lichtenstein, Warhol, Hockney), they were soon enough reincorporated into commerce. Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup tins returned to advertising as advertising itself became the sexiest industry and took all the new talent it could find – photographers, designers, writers, artists, film-makers – to its bosom. Pop Art belonged to the same world as pop music in the early Sixties (the corporate-managed and decidedly unradical Sandie Shaw, Billy J. Kramer, Cilla Black and Dave Clark Five were topping the charts); it was as much about the market as clothes were, and as such became an essential part of our everyday life. Clothes were overprinted with motifs from pictures hanging in galleries, pictures and sculpture reflected passing style (advertising, comics, pornography) and the cheap, throwaway attitudes of fashion that felt so much like fresh air. Record covers became art, art became tea towels. Things got mixed up in a way that was original and amusing to us. Our parents kept things separate and appropriate: art in galleries, certain clothes for particular occasions, work marked off from play, private walled away from public, formal dissociated from casual. Their mores derived from the old rules, the strictures of Leviticus: Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.2 That ancient terror of mixing things up, of losing the order of things. One thing must be one thing, never another too. Pop Art, in its very shallowness, rejected the old way. Separated, actually, the young from their elders. The freedom to try new things, to play, to incorporate, extended to the arts and bounced back again to daily existence in a quite novel, non-Judaeo-Christian way.
Was it all only about style and its marketing? Was nothing to be taken seriously in those days up to the mid-Sixties, when London was deemed by Time magazine in 1966 to have started ‘swinging’? Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen I may have spent an inordinate amount of energy worrying about my hair and shortening my skirts (though not much has changed there, apart from the length of the skirts), but between visits to the mirror other things were impinging on my life. Most of it wasn’t quite so brand new, however, as the asymmetric Sassoon cut or a pair of Courrèges boots. Those more cerebral, less sartorial matters that gained my attention during this time were almost entirely developments or continuations of what had been happening in the 1950s and before. The recent war, immediately prior to my birth, I paid almost no attention to, since, being the most vivid years of my parents’ life, it was more archaic to me than the English Civil War. But I was powerfully aware of having missed out on the doings of the youthful generation just before mine. While I was still pushing a toy Coronation coach and horses across the living room floor, some very interesting things had been going on in the world outside the four enclosing walls of our small flat in Tottenham Court Road. There weren’t just the Teddy Boys ripping up cinema seats with their flick knives, and people sipping Brown Windsor soup in dismal English dining rooms, there were also the Beats, a Cold War in full frost, and a collapsing British Empire hanging on to its genteel skirts, the results of all of which were beginning to make the rest of the world, no longer merely to be dismissed as ‘abroad’, look very interesting.
I became aware of the Beats, jazz, poetry, cool, and muddled them properly with the existentialism of Sartre and Camus’ fiction while I was at boarding school, mixing with the wrong crowd from the local town who had designated a corporation bench near a roundabout just outside the centre the ‘Beat Seat’. There we sat while they, older than me – in their late teens while I was thirteen and fourteen – told me to read the books any self-respecting wannabe Beat had to know. Jude the Obscure, Ulysses, Crime and Punishment. Not bad reading recommendations as bad-friends go. I found Lolita for myself, listened to Red Bird, poetry and modern jazz from Christopher Logue via Pablo Neruda, and discovered that in America some, like Allen Ginsberg, were already howling most ungenteelly about the state of the world. If it was a little downbeat, that was fine by me. I was already angry and sullen – a gift from my dysfunctional family, as well as, doubtless, a dash of biochemistry – and ready to argue with any form of authority that came my way. Just before I was fifteen, I was expelled from the co-educational, progressive boarding school the local council had paid for me to attend in order to improve my character and absent me from my mother – not for reading those books, but for sniffing ether, and getting caught after attending an all-night party. In various ways, I was the Sixties waiting to happen.
After the Beat Seat and expulsion, my Sixties continued in a psychiatric hospital near Brighton, but in 1963 I went back to live in London, invited by the mother of a former fellow-pupil, who, the following year, sent me to another school, where the plan was to do my O and A levels and become, in spite of the educational blip, one of those of my generation who went to university. It seemed, after a somewhat turbulent childhood, fairly straightforward. But I took the book-and-poetry reading and the anger along with me to London. There was still an awful lot of reading to catch up on, some terrible poetry to write, and I also discover
ed, in the culturally rich atmosphere of the house I had fetched up in, a world of film. Not that films were new to me. My childhood block of flats was attached to a cinema. Movies were at my back door. I went to everything I could get into, as well as finding cunning, illegal routes into those I was forbidden by law to see. They were westerns, soupy romances, Fifties comedies and British B movies. Now I filled in the gaps of the past at the National Film Theatre, going to classic silents and Hollywood marvels of the Thirties and Forties. In addition, there was an entirely new cinema to me, from Europe and beyond, to discover. Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Kurosawa, Ozu, Ray, Truffaut, Malle, Pasolini, Polanski, Jiri Menzel. They mattered enough for me to take illicit afternoons off school in order to get to the first matinée showing of 8½ or The Silence at the crucial Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, where I’d sit in the smoky auditorium with fifteen or so other film fanatics, and one or two flashers, overwhelmed by the potent sexual narratives and social critiques, Marxist, psychoanalytic, libertarian or simply different and, to me, astonishing. I absorbed the complexities of relationship, and spiritual or cultural emptiness, played out in tones of grey, with echoes of poets, writers and philosophers. Godard’s intensely charming, hopeless and crazy about love film, Pierrot Le Fou, had me returning eight times during its run. I couldn’t take my eyes off a single frame, or miss one step of Monica Vitti’s slow, despairing walks through the blighted urban wasteland in Antonioni’s Red Desert. I wept sometimes with exaltation, sometimes rage, at the visions coming at me from the Academy screen. And, let me say, all this lived quite easily with my despair at my unsatisfactory hair and concern for the precise shortness of my skirt.