Golden Brown…
Texture like sun... more historical musings today.
Lately, this song is popping up everywhere in my feeds. It’s not your typical eighties chune; it features a synth piano, but it’s not, say, Depeche Mode. It’s a revival, a throwback to the Baroque Pop genre of the early 60s, when electric pianos and harpsichords were all the rage. Back then you had the The Lefte Bank, with Walk Away, Renee (1967), and before that, or Five O’clock World (1966) by the Vogues and the Zombies, She’s Not There, (1964) It’s fun stuff even now. ‘Golden Brown’ makes you feel like you’re tripping the light fantastic down Carnaby Street in a Mary Quant mini-skirt and square-toed flats or a black suit and skinny tie. It’s not a cliché if you’re too young to remember any of this. It’s just retro.
This song, whose title is a reference to heroin and some girl Colin Blunstone was dating at the time, is now firmly stuck in my head, so I’m thinking of other things from the early 60s. I find it fascinating how time makes these cultural artifacts so appealing that we have trouble putting them to rest.
The Mod aesthetic went back into rotation in the UK and the US when punk was alive and well and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan or in Kings Road in Chelsea. Punk styles were mostly Mod-based; the patterns and colors, the attitude came straight out of the 60s. Kids then were taking a page out of the book of these guys:
And that seems strange to me, vaguely disappointing somehow, and predictable in the sense that we are always commenting on, updating, expanding on, or reacting to trends/products from the past. We look for models to build upon, and then cast the spirit of our own times upon them, or at least, that’s what we’ve been doing for the longest time. It still seems like a case of faulty distillation when derivations are so easily identifiable.
You could say that the origins of Mod style, while being a fresh reaction to the way society was changing at that time, owes something to the Bauhaus of the Weimar Republic era…
… and its spirit animal: Dada.
The women artists pictured above could be waiting to be coifed in Mayfair in 1966, or your neighbors on Avenue B on the Lower East Side of Manhattan c.1982.
But when many English-speaking people began investigating meditation by actually traveling to India, the country was thrust into the spotlight of world attention, the fashion industry was watching, and Neru jackets came into vogue. It seems silly now, doesn’t it? Yet, it was the other strong trend of the late sixties. For Americans, it was the two competing ethea: New York (Heroin, The Velvet Underground) vs. California (California Dreamin’, The Mamas and the Papas). Designers were not throwing back to anything in this case. They were reacting to the times and their immediate environment.
The Mod aesthetic has come back twice since the sixties. It’s got nothing to do with the Beatnik subculture which flourished at the same time, and if you think about how that attitude extrapolated to the Hipster subculture of the 2000-10s, it makes sense. They latched on to it coming out of, or mixing with, Grunge. Mod style has a different origin.
It was a reaction to "dull, timid, old-fashioned, and uninspired" fashions of the time. Women started to have different ideals and different role models. The goodie-two-shoes/sex bomb looks of the 50s were giving way to something else. The Mod look favored whatever seemed "cool, neat, sharp, hip, and smart". Cool and neat are important descriptors because the silhouettes are indeed, clean. In art, Minimalism was peaking at this time. Pop Art was giving us very hard-edge, highly saturated1 colors. There was something very unequivocal about the lines, cuts and exposed thighs.
To be honest, there hasn’t been all that much to rival its distinctiveness since. When Prince wrote we were going ‘to party like it’s 1999’ he had no fucking idea how true and how ironic those words would turn out to be.
Somehow, these streetwear looks—Chanel, no less—from the 2010s:
Just can’t compete with this:
The Siren Suit, which is itself, a throwback to the iconography of The Wild One, (1953) wouldn’t look so out of place right now—the hat, maybe—not everyone can carry off hats.
My point is that we have not surpassed most of the trends of this very potent aesthetic.
As for reflecting the times, you have two new trends: ‘Poverty Chic’ and ‘Old Money’, what I’ll call the ‘Knock-off look’.
The ‘Old Money’ style features a more understated, classic and tradition-rooted fashion and has as its references things like country club tennis and equestrian dressage. It’s Succession, and soon, perhaps you can buy reasonable facsimiles of it at Primark. This, strangely enough, bypasses the dialogue between new and old entirely, since we are living a tension between the ultra-rich and the super-poor that Robespierre would have understood. If not, Mod carries on as if Blow up had premiered last week.
“Sometimes reality is the stranges fantasy of all.”2
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extremely bright
Tagline from Blow up by Michelangelo Antonioni