Eugene Vernier and Vogue Models in Early "Swinging London": Creating the Fashionable Look of the 1960s

From the start of the 1960s, photographer Eugene Vernier, along with models like Tania Mallet and Ros Watkins, began charting and creating new fashionable representations, featuring cool, youthful London looks. Virtually forgotten today, these individuals were the kinds of "young meteors" journalist Jonathan Aitken identified mid-decade, who ushered in much of the visual language and symbolic shorthand that we now take for granted as the hallmarks of London's "Swinging Sixties." The fashion models did not just parade the latest styles. They were key players—on and off the street—in the formation of London as a global creative center, as well as in the new modes of self-presentation that were essential to this 1960s "cultural revolution."

In the spring of 1966 Time magazine ran a feature on London, announcing it with the headline: "London: The Swinging City" on its cover. (Halasz, 1966) Time's rather belated discovery of the city's revolutionary style was accompanied by Geoffrey Dickinson's pop art. Dickinson represented London at night, in images of Big Ben, a red Routemaster bus, the Welsh Guards, a Morris Mini, a discotheque, and a cinema marquee announcing the year's hit, Alfie, in which Michael Caine played a Cockney ladies' man. The pipe-smoking Prime Minister Harold Wilson, famous for announcing to the British population that they had "never had it so good," lurks in the background. Mini-dressed models jostle with a long-haired singer wearing Union Jack sunglasses and a Who T-shirt, as well as gents in a Rolls Royce and an older casino-going couple in black-tie. Time told its readers that Dickinson had "prowled from Carnaby Street to the King's Road, slipping in and out of the boutiques and coffeehouses" in order to "sum up the scene in a collage technique" (Halasz 1966).

Also in 1966, Mary Quant at the age of thirty-two, published her autobiography, in which she rendered the period one of a radical break, set in train twenty years earlier by World War II: "Once only the Rich, the Establishment set the fashion. Now it is the inexpensive little dress seen on the girls in the High Street. These girls . . . are alive . . . looking, listening, ready to try anything new. . . . They may be dukes' daughters, doctors' daughters, dockers' daughters. They don't worry about accents or class. . . . They represent the whole new spirit that is present day Britain—a classless spirit that has grown up out of the Second World War. . . . They are the mods." (Quant 1966, 75). Writing at the time and published the following year, the young Jonathan Aitken, then a twenty-four-year-old reporter for London's Evening Standard, interviewed the young people he believed were "making an impact" in the city in the fields of fashion, design, music, photography, politics, business, art, television, and even gambling and prostitution. He called his interviewees, over two hundred in all, "the young meteors," which was also the title of his resulting book. There he wrote:

The changes in tastes, behaviour and attitudes of the younger generation over the last few years have at least to a small extent influenced the lives of every Londoner under the age of 35. Whether these changes have anything to do with "swinging" is a matter of semantics, but the fact remains that without these changes today's younger generation would be imperceptibly different from their youthful parents, whereas in fact they are enormously different. Therefore it seems to me that the inflated ballyhoo about Swinging London does have some serious relevance to the generation of which I am writing, particularly through its indirect influence on advertising and communications, so I make no apology for giving so many pages over to what may seem essentially frivolous people.

(1967, 10)

As many critics have pointed out, Time's now-iconic article was far from the first. There had been the Weekend Telegraph's "London—the Most Exciting City," of April 30, 1965, and more than three years earlier, on February 4, 1962, the Sunday Times Colour Magazine...