As a follow-up to Queerguru’s recent review of the Beautiful People: The Boutique in the 1960s Counter Culture Exhibit in London, we were sent this wonderful wee 8-minute video from 1967.

Although this may seem like the distant past before many of you were not even born, the significance and the major global impact of that time greatly affected  and help shape art, music and fashions of today 

The Swinging Sixties was the first-ever youth-driven cultural revolution and it focused on modernity and fun-loving hedonism.  It took place in London where surprisingly even 15 years after WW2 had ended, there was still an element of official rationing in place.  The new youth were desperate to escape the confines and old-fashioned tastes and attitudes of their parents and were very quick to embrace ideas and styles that were the total opposite.

It was all symbolized by The Beatles in music, Mary Quant and Biba in clothes with iconic figureheads such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton in style. Plus fashion was no longer ‘a girls thing’ and the most fashionable boys became Mods.

However It wasn’t all about how the new generation looked, it was also about how they thought.  This  was the time for the political activism of the anti-nuclear movement, and sexual liberation which would eventually lead to the decriminalization  of homosexuality in 1969 

The video has no real narrative but is so worth watching as it shows that in London at least the Swinging Sixties affected more than a few.  It was a great class leveler when shop girls wore the same new fashions as debutantes which made it a very rare class leveler.