Before Ken Russell became the Oscar nominated director of such classic  movies such as  Women in Love, The Devils and The Who’s rock-opera Tommy,  he was a young photographer in the mid-fifties working for British newspapers and magazines such as Picture Post.

For one of his assignments in 1955 he was commissioned to take photographs of a new breed of British working class girls in neo-Edwardian clothing who called themselves Teddy Girls.  The male equivalent …Teddy Boys…. have been well-documented and are well-established in pop-culture history if the time, but this series of photos by Russell provide a unique and rare glimpse of a little recognized and under-documented subculture of austere post-war Britain.