Nostalgia and reality

Now: lovely, quaint nostalgia. Then: dull bloody normality. (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Imagine you had a time machine, and could select any era to visit. Top of the list would surely be the sixties. Who wouldn’t want to witness first-hand the decade that produced the Beatles, and so many other pop cultural icons, not only in the arena of music, but in film, television, art, literature, you name it. Quite apart from being witness to such epoch-making endeavours would be the ineffably strange experience of witnessing life on the streets as it was lived: the cars, the clothes, the sights long since vanished from the urban landscape. How cool is that? Very. But only to the modern observer. 

Living in the 1960s, or for that matter, the 70s was, in many important respects, cooler than inhabiting the modern world. People were less selfish, not as rude, in less of a hurry, less obsessed with possessions (materialism was certainly a fact of life, but in a form so scaled-back as to be almost unrecognisable by contemporary standards). But here comes the point: back then, it didn’t feel cool to be surrounded by so much good design. It just felt like the norm. Exactly like now, in other words.

Check out any old newsreel film of the 60s, and you’ll see exactly what life was like. But at the same time, you won’t. Because you’re viewing it through the filter of intervening years, coloured by the knowledge of what’s changed, and how modern life is different. Those lovely old cars didn’t look lovely to us at the time: they were just the unremarkable baseline of what everyday life looked like.

I didn’t think very much of British cars during the 1960s. Many of them epitomised a kind of dreary suburbanism, class-conscious in their use of design features, many of which had been scaled-down from more expensive, desirable models, American cars even. The humble Ford Anglia, in its circa 1960 incarnation, took its inward-raking rear window from the far more stylish American Lincoln Continental. But as cars went, the Anglia was stuffily middle-class, a real middle-management machine. Back in the days when Anglias were pretty well ubiquitous on Britain’s roads, I hardly gave them a second look. My perceptions had been skewed by the knowledge that far cooler cars were available, mostly from toy shops, but also via the medium of television.

For Anglia, 1959-68 model. Typical suburban car, typical suburban driveway. Not cool, just very, very ordinary.

Most of my toy cars were American models, like the Ford Thunderbird or Cadillac Eldorado. Some of these late 50s and early 60s American models took their atom-age styling cues from outer space, but in Britain, car makers knew that the nation’s motorists weren’t that adventurous. In any event, the average American saloon was far too big for British roads. Instead, we got scaled-down, ‘suburbanised’ versions of American styles where chrome and fins were certainly present, but in a much more restrained manner. Although I was entirely unaware of the thinking behind the look of a car like Ford’s Zephyr or Zodiac, I found them more aesthetically pleasing than, say, the pipe-and-slippers styling of the Morris Minor, which in its ‘half-timbered’ estate form vaguely resembled a typical mock-tudor suburban villa. To me, the ‘Moggie Minor’ was a ludicrous car, the kind of car your elderly relatives might drive. Equally unsatisfactory was the Austin/Morris 1100, whose styling straddled a deeply uncomfortable line between tradition and modernity. I still hate it, yet at the time it felt so typically British in appearance that its silhouette became the standard shape used to represent cars on the new generation of roadsigns, phased in from the mid-60 onwards (and still in use today).

Old film of Britain’s roads looks to us today like a cavalcade of motoring nostalgia. Back then, it was mere traffic. Noisy, dirty, mostly unlovely, something you wouldn’t take a second look at, unless an E-Type Jag happened by. That’s the difference between how things were and how they seem in retrospect. Nostagia makes us see what was once dreary normality as though it were the creation of some retro-stylist production designer on a period movie. And what holds good for cars also holds good for clothes: even more so, in fact.

Modern Britain is, without doubt, the worst-dressed nation on earth. The day sportswear began to be adopted for everyday use (shopping, going to the pub, etc) was the beginning of the end for anything approaching sartorial elegance in this country, and the average Brit of 2018, regardless of age, gender or social standing is in general, a badly-dressed scruffbag. Baggy, ill-fitting rubbish abounds. Trainers, once the preserve of athletes only, are ubiquitous. And anyone donning a baseball cap without intent to step out onto the diamond in the shoes of Joe DiMaggio should be offered counselling.

As a nation, we were better tailored in the 1960s. Men, on the whole, wore a suit and tie, whether going to work or for a drink down the local. Your typical casual top (weekends in the garden or on the golf course) was either a roll-neck or a Fred Perry-style shirt with three buttons at the neck. Jeans were for students, beatniks and wannabe Rolling Stones. Nobody else would think twice of donning a pair, even as workwear. Women wore skirts, dresses, sometimes slacks (trouser suits had yet to put in an appearance). Children, meanwhile, had the choice of dressing like either a Tiny Tears doll or Just William.

People just wearing whatever they put on this morning: Birmingham street scene, circa 1959 (Phyllis Nicklin collection)

Yet I would argue that, to live for a day or two as an average citizen of 1960s Britain, unburdened by modern perceptions of retro and cool, would be a mostly dismal experience, asethetically speaking. We were, then as now, generally badly-dressed. Suits rarely fitted well, and were mostly cut from cheap, unattractive cloth. Forget about what Roger Moore is wearing in your average Saint episode: the typical bloke on the street got his clothes off the peg. Having said which, made-to-measure wasn’t the exotic rarity it’s become today; but even a good quality, tailored Hepworth’s suit wasn’t likely to get you nominated as Britain’s best-dressed man. Women’s fashions were just as bad, in their own way. Again, the high-fashion styles sported by characters in film and television were a world away from the dowdy floral prints worn by your auntie or the lady next door. Cheap clothes have always looked cheap, and in an era when most people’s idea of style meant simply trying to look ‘smart’ (however that might be achieved), the net effect was, on the whole, drearily conformist. Of course to modern eyes it all looks quaint and appealingly retro, but back then, it was, once again, the norm, the baseline, something nobody noticed.

Our homes were pretty much the same. Mid-century furnishings continue to have considerable appeal, and many modern items look back to the era of Eames and Ercol, when ergonomics and stylistic restraint began to replace the excesses and fancies of earlier eras. But aside from the super-rich, very few could afford to completely restyle their homes in one fell swoop. A scenario: your typical middle-income family decides to replace their three-piece suite, circa 1965. There are bold, modern styles available, in bright colours like orange, mauve and teal green. The bold, modern suite is duly ordered and takes its place alongside a gate-leg table from the 1930s, a sideboard of similar vintage, floral curtains and carpets of a decade earlier, and a clutter of assorted table lamps, nick-nacks and God-knows-what-else, inherited or acquired over the years with no consideration of style, colour scheme, etc. The net effect is a random patchwork of decades, and this is how pretty well all ‘normal’ homes looked like for a very long time. Many still do.

Living rooms really did look like this in the 1960s... but only in furniture catalogues.

Confusing the issue still further was the fact that not all new furniture sold during the 1960s epitomised what we’d now think of as ‘classic’ mid-century styling, and traditional items still held sway. Even today, a browse around any typical furniture showroom will reveal the stolidly old-fashioned alongside the determinedly retro-futuristic.

Thus were our homes furnished in the 50s, 60s, 70s... it’s a nuance that mostly escapes the attention of production designers in film and television who tend to adhere slavishly to one-decade styling when called upon to dress a set for, say, a 1960s lounge-dining room.

My point is this: the notion of being able to live again in the 1960s or 70s may seem like an appealing nostalgia trip, but to have been there at the time was to have no perception of how aesthetically pleasing life actually was. Despite what you see online and in magazines, the tide of fashion tends to move pretty slowly, so that it takes many years for a new look to establish itself as the ‘norm.’ Seen in purely stylistic terms, the 1960s seems, in retrospect, to be an evolution destined to reach its purest form of expression in the following decade. There was, of course, no pivotal moment when, to the average observer, the sixties looked like the sixties and nothing else, much as that may appear in retrospect to have been the case. Cars from the 1950s and even earlier were still to be found on Britain’s roads, and only celebrities or the very wealthy could afford to stay abreast of ‘the latest fads and trends’, assuming they even chose to do so.

We can’t see what’s around us when we’re part of it. None of history makes any sense until it is actually history. Only then do the forms, the themes, the shifting tectonic plates of fate, coincidence and collective experience acquire meaning. Only then do we truly appreciate nostalgia for what it is... or rather, what it was.