Swinging Sixties

This collection of essays was produced to accompany the V&A exhibition ‘Sixties Fashion’ (June 2006-Feb 2007), the key public output of the ‘Cultures of Consumption’ project ‘Shopping Routes: Networks of Fashion Consumption in London’s West End 1945-1979’.

While previous studies of British fashion in the 1960s had chosen to focus on designer-centered accounts of innovation or subcultural responses to shifting social and economic circumstances, the exhibition and the book offered a new reading of the design, production, promotion, retailing and wearing of clothing in London during the period that emphasized the importance of place and the persistence of a number of design, manufacturing and selling traditions that affected local ecologies of fashion in significant ways.

Through harnessing the cross-disciplinary expertise of a geographer, design historians, a dress curator, an architectural historian and a media theorist, the project opened up the examination of fashion to a wider range of methods and benefited from an analysis of sources that included surviving dress, planning and touristic literatures, newly commissioned oral histories, film and magazines, offering a richness of interpretation that is rare in fashion centered displays and publications aimed at a broad general-interest audience.