Postwar

international as a matter of definition. A trend (in music, or clothing) would begin in the English-speaking world, often in England itself, and would then move south and east: facilitated by an increasingly visual (and therefore cross-border) culture and only occasionally impeded by locally generated alternatives or, more often, by political intervention.[158]

The new fashions were perforce addressed to the more prosperous young: the children of Europe’s white middle-class, who could afford records, concerts, shoes, clothes, make-up and modish hair-styling. But the presentation of these wares cut ostentatiously athwart conventional lines. The most successful musicians of the time—the Beatles and their imitators—took the rhythms of American blues guitarists (most of them black) and paired them with material drawn directly from the language and experience of the British working class.[159] This highly original combination then became the indigenous, trans- national culture of European youth.

The content of popular music mattered quite a lot, but its form counted for more. In the 1960s people paid particular attention to style. This, it might be thought, was hardly new. But it was perhaps a peculiarity of the age that style could substitute so directly for substance. The popular music of the 1960s was insubordinate in tone, in the manner of its performance—whereas its lyrics were frequently anodyne and anyway at best half-understood by foreign audiences. In Austria, to perform or listen to British or American pop music was to cock a snoot at one’s shocked parents, the generation of Hitler; the same applied, mutatis mutandis, just across the border in Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The music, so to speak, protested on your behalf.

If much of the mainstream musical culture of the Sixties seemed to be about sex—at least until it shifted, briefly, into drugs and politics—this, too, was largely a matter of style. More young people lived away from their parents, and at a younger age than hitherto. And contraceptives were becoming safer, easier and legal.[160] Public displays of flesh and representations of unconstrained sexual abandon on film and in literature became more common, at least in north-west Europe. For all these reasons, the older generation was convinced that sexual restraints had completely collapsed—and it pleased their children to nourish the nightmare.

In fact, the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties was almost certainly a mirage for the overwhelming majority of people, young and old alike. So far as we can know, the sexual interests and practices of most young Europeans did not change nearly as rapidly or as radically as contemporaries liked to claim. On the evidence of contemporary surveys, even the sex lives of students were not very different from those of earlier generations. The liberated sexual style of the Sixties was typically contrasted with the Fifties, depicted (somewhat unfairly) as an age of moral rectitude and constipated emotional restraint. But when compared with the 1920s, or the European fin-de- siecle, or the demi-monde of 1860s Paris, the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were quite tame.

In keeping with the emphasis upon style, the generation of the Sixties placed unusual insistence upon looking different. Clothing, hair, make-up and what were still called ‘fashion accessories’ became vital generational and political identification tags. London was the source of such trends: European taste in clothing, music, photography, modeling, advertising and even mass-market magazines all took their cues from there. In view of the already-established British reputation for drab design and shoddy construction this was an unlikely development, a youthful inversion of the traditional order of such things, and it proved short-lived. But the false dawn of ‘Swinging London’—as Time magazine dubbed it in April 1966—cast a distinctive light upon the age.

By 1967 there were over 2,000 shops in the British capital describing themselves as ‘boutiques’. Most of them were shameless imitations of the clothing stores that had sprung up along Carnaby Street, a long-time haunt of male homosexuals now recycled as the epicentre of ‘mod’ fashion for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. In Paris the clothing boutique ‘New Man’, the first French intimation of the sartorial revolution, opened in the rue de l’Ancienne Comedie on April 13th 1965. Within a year it was followed by a trail of imitators, all of them dubbed with fashionably British-sounding names—‘Dean’, ‘Twenty’, ‘Cardiff ’, etc.

The Carnaby Street style—cloned all across Western Europe (though less markedly in Italy than elsewhere)—emphasized colorful, contoured outfits tending to the androgynous and deliberately mal-adapted to anyone over thirty. Tight red corduroy pants and fitted black shirts from ‘New Man’ became the staple uniform of Parisian street demonstrators for the next three years and were widely copied everywhere. Like everything else about the Sixties they were made by men, for men; but young women could wear them too and increasingly did so. Even the mainstream fashion houses of Paris were affected: from 1965, the city’s couturiers turned out more slacks than skirts.

They also cut back on their output of hats. It was symptomatic of the primacy of the juvenile market that hair replaced headgear as the ultimate self-expression, with traditional hats confined to formal occasions for the ‘elderly’.[161] Hats did not by any means disappear, though. In a second stage of the sartorial transition, the cheerful, primary colors of ‘mod gear’ (inherited from the late-Fifties) were displaced by more ‘serious’ outer garments, reflecting a similar shift in music. Young people’s clothing was now cut and marketed with more than half an eye to the ‘proletarian’ and ‘radical’ sources of its inspiration: not only blue jeans and ‘work shirts’, but also boots, dark jackets and leather ‘Lenin’ caps (or felt-covered variants, echoing the ‘Kossuth caps’ of 19th-century Hungarian insurgents). This more self-consciously political fashion never really caught on in Britain, but by the end of the decade it was quasi-official uniform for German and Italian radicals and their student followers.[162]

Overlapping with both sets of fashions were the gypsy-like drapes of the hippies. In contrast to the ‘Carnaby Street’ and ‘Street-fighting Man’ looks, which were indigenously European in origin, the hippie look—obscurely ‘utopian’ in its non-western, ‘counter-cultural’, asexual ethic of conspicuous under-consumption—was an American import. Its commercial utility was obvious, and many of the outlets that had sprung up to service the demand for skin-tight, sharply cut fashions in the mid-sixties were soon working hard to adapt their stock accordingly. They even tried, briefly, to market the ‘Mao look’. A shapeless jacket with a sharply tailored collar, paired with the ubiquitous ‘proletarian’ cap, the Mao look neatly combined aspects of all three styles, particularly when ‘accessorized’ by the Chinese dictator’s Little Red Book of revolutionary insights. But despite Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, in which a group of French students dutifully study Mao and try to follow his example, the ‘Mao look’ remained a minority taste—even among ‘Maoists’.

Counter-cultural politics and their symbols took on a harder edge after 1967, by association with romanticized accounts of ‘Third World’ guerrilla insurgents. But even so, they never fully caught on in Europe. We should not be misled by Che Guevara’s remarkable after-life as the martyred, Christ-like poster-boy for disaffected Western adolescents: the European Sixties were always Eurocentric. Even the ‘hippy revolution’ never quite crossed the Atlantic. At most it washed up on the shores of Great Britain and Holland, leaving behind some sedimentary evidence in the form of a more developed drug culture than elsewhere—and one spectacularly original long-playing record.

The frivolous side of the Sixties—fashion, pop culture, sex—should not be dismissed as mere froth and show. It was a new generation’s way of breaking with the age of the grandpas—the gerontocracy (Adenauer, De Gaulle, Macmillan—and Khrushchev) still running the continent’s affairs. To be sure, the attention-catching, poseur aspects of the Sixties—the narcissistic self-indulgence that will forever be associated with the era—ring false when taken all at once. But in their day, and to their constituency, they seemed new and fresh. Even the cold, harsh sheen of contemporary art, or the cynical films of the later Sixties, appeared refreshing and authentic after the cozy bourgeois artifice of the recent past. The solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by ‘doing their own thing’, ‘letting it all hang out’ and ‘making love, not war’— was always an illusion, and it has not worn well. But it was not the only illusion of the time, and by no means the most foolish.

The 1960s were the great age of Theory. It is important to be clear what this means: it certainly does not refer to the truly path-breaking work then being undertaken in biochemistry, astrophysics or genetics, since this was largely ignored by non-specialists. Nor does it describe a renaissance in European social thought: the mid- twentieth century produced no social theorists comparable to Hegel, Comte, Marx, Mill, Weber or Durkheim. ‘Theory’ did not mean philosophy, either: the best-known western European philosophers of the time—Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre—were either dead, old or otherwise engaged, and the leading thinkers of eastern Europe—Jan