Covered: Mod, fashion
he origins of Mod lay in two countries whose political revolutions in the 18th Century the British had violently rejected: America and France. And the midwife that slapped it into life was not rock ’n’ roll but jazz. The movement got its name from a nucleus of around two hundred founding ‘faces’ who emerged in Soho around the summer of 1958, calling themselves ‘Modernists’ after their love of modern jazz, or bebop. Led by saxophonist Charlie Parker, bebop fizzed in New York just after the war then exploded at the same time that Elvis Presley took to the stage, with the release of Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool in 1957. The term ‘cool’, now so often a lazy expression of approval, originally meant a taught state of mind in which you harnessed your anger against injustice. It sprang from the earlier Jazz Age – coined, it is thought, by the Harlem Renaissance author Langston Hughes in the 1930s. “I play it cool,” Hughes wrote, “and dig all jive / That’s the reason / I stay alive.” Modern jazz was not just a musical reaction to the easier, more tuneful, sounds of traditional (‘trad’) jazz that had originated in New Orleans; it was also a political reaction to a segregated America in which black musicians were harassed by the police, exploited by the music industry and seen as entertainers rather than artists. “Beboppers refused to accept racism, poverty or economic exploitation,” explained drummer Kenny Clarke. “If America wouldn’t honour its constitution and respect us as men, we couldn’t give a shit about the American way.” Beboppers embraced Europe, performing and sojourning in continental cities where they were feted and found sanctuary from segregation. Paris was a favoured destination, as it had been for Americans in the 1920s and ’30s. But whereas performers of that era like Josephine Baker had often perpetuated stereotypes of black people in shows like the Revue Nègre, the stars of modern jazz rejected caricature in favour of a creative dialogue with Europe. The French Existentialist movement influenced some. Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum that “one must act to be free” appealed to the more educated and politicised generation of black musicians that emerged after the Second World War – a generation personified by Miles Davis, who met Sartre when he and Charlie Parker played the Paris Jazz Festival in 1949. At that time, Davis also fell in love with the singer Juliette Greco, beginning a passionate three-year relationship that has been called “the marriage of bebop and existentialism”. Greco was the epitome of Left Bank cool: tall, with straight black hair, she wore a black beret and raincoat with the collar turned up, singing the songs of her husband, the poet Boris Vian, in Paris jazz clubs with studied ennui. Bebop stars soon adopted elements of Left Bank style. Pianist Thelonious Monk and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie took to wearing berets, goatee beards, horn-rimmed glasses and plenty of black, while Davis made sharp Italian suits one of his early trademarks. His favoured make, adopted by jazz fans on both continents, was Brioni, founded in Rome in 1945 then launched in Britain and America in 1954. The first retailer to import Brioni to the UK was Cecil Gee’s shop in Charing Cross Road, which became an early Mod haunt. Modernists fused this look with American style, especially the so-called Ivy League look, which was popular with middle- and upper class American youth from the mid-1950s
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to the mid-1960s, and which later enjoyed a revival thanks to the TV drama Mad Men about the advertising world in that period. The style is epitomised by the suits and shirts of the Brooks Brothers clothing company. Founded in New York in 1896, it had invented the button-down collar on dress shirts, after its owner had noticed English polo players using buttons to stop collars flapping in their faces. Brooks Brothers’ controversial use of colours like turquoise and mauve had livened up the urban American man’s wardrobe. To these were added Bass Weejun loafers, introduced by the Bass company of Maine in 1934 and based on moccasins worn by Norwegian farmers (hence the name ‘weejun’). A more casual version of the Ivy look included Sta-Prest trousers and desert boots, introduced by Clarks in 1949 and based on the comfortable suede boot worn by off-duty British army officers in the Second World War. This was complemented by the Baracuta G9 jacket with its distinctive tartan lining, popularly known as the ‘Harrington’ after the clothes retailer John Simons (the main importer of Ivy clothes in Britain) noticed the character Rodney Harrington wearing it in the TV series Peyton Place. The look was completed by the neatly cropped ‘college boy’ hairstyle made famous by John F. Kennedy. It all became known as ‘Jivy Ivy’ when jazz artists adapted the style, notably Miles Davis on the cover of Milestones and his 1959 release Kind of Blue, still the best-selling jazz album of all time. Like a number of black figureheads of the time, Miles Davis came from a middle-class background – he was a dentist’s son educated at the elite Juilliard School of Music – but that didn’t stop him getting almost beaten to death by police outside New York’s Birdland jazz club just after the release of Kind of Blue. At that time, fashion was not just a form of conspicuous consumption driven by vanity and a desire to conform; it could be a subtle political statement, designed to unnerve the powerful, and sometimes it succeeded with violent effect. The author and lifelong Mod, Paolo Hewitt believes that Davis’s “use of the Ivy League look remains one of the great fashion statements of all time. By dressing in the clothing of those who fiercely resent their culture, their music, the colour of their skin, Miles and his peers are playing the enemy beautifully, walking amongst them whilst changing the landscape forever. You think he’s a bank manager, in fact Miles is a revolutionary in silk and mohair.” Before the mass media and high street retailers noticed their style, Mods had to be devoted enough to seek out the small independent shops that sold their favourite clothes or records. Former Mod Nick Logan, who founded the influential British style magazines The Face and Arena in the 1980s, remembered how much harder it was in the early ’60s: “There were no style sections in newspapers to help you, just the obscure corners of the weekly music press at a time when the music editors were clueless as to what was really going on.” One of the ways that ‘Jivy Ivy’ was transmitted was by studying the album covers of bebop stars, especially those for the record company Blue Note. A pioneering independent jazz label, Blue Note was set up in 1939 by two Jewish refugees to the United States from Nazi Germany, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff. Committed to bebop even when it wasn’t making them much money, Blue Note did more to promote modern jazz than any other label; it also had a huge influence on fashion.
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