1960s Fashion Styles

1960s Fashion: A Decade When Style Found a New Voice

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When people think of 1960s fashion, the first images that usually come to mind are mini skirts, bold patterns, Carnaby Street and bright colours. They all belonged to the decade, but they tell only part of the story. Fashion did not suddenly reinvent itself on 1 January 1960. The early years still looked surprisingly familiar.

1965 Womens Tailored Suits

Women continued to wear beautifully tailored suits, fitted dresses, gloves and carefully chosen accessories. Men's wardrobes remained firmly rooted in traditional tailoring. Everything still reflected the elegance and polish that had defined the late 1950s. Yet beneath that smart exterior, attitudes were beginning to shift.

1960s, fitted for elegance, beauty, and comfort

A younger generation was questioning old ideas about work, relationships and politics, and those changes gradually found their way into people's wardrobes. Older fashions remained popular while newer ideas slowly appeared alongside them. A young woman might still wear her mother's tailored wool coat but pair it with brightly coloured tights or a daringly short skirt. Change often arrived in small steps before it became impossible to ignore.

60s coat with double breasted lapels

Fashion was only one part of a much bigger story. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, growing opposition to the Vietnam War and the rise of youth culture encouraged many people to challenge long-held assumptions. Music became just as influential as fashion magazines. Young men copied The Beatles' slim suits, narrow ties and Cuban-heeled Chelsea boots, while others looked to The Rolling Stones for a less polished style.

The Beatles wearing collarless suits

By the middle of the decade, attention was beginning to move away from Paris. For generations it had set the pace for fashion, but London suddenly felt fresher and far more exciting. Carnaby Street and King's Road were alive with new ideas. They were places where people went not only to shop but to see what everyone else was wearing.

One boutique captured this new mood especially well. Barbara Hulanicki's Biba began as a mail-order business before opening its famous Kensington store. Customers queued outside to buy affordable fashions displayed beneath dark lighting and Art Nouveau-inspired interiors. Shopping itself had become part of the experience.

Baby doll cotton mini dress by Biba 1967

Boutiques, photographers, musicians and designers all fed into that energy. Clothes no longer had to look formal to be stylish. Young women could buy fashionable clothing without saving for expensive couture, and a simple shift dress often looked every bit as contemporary as an elaborate designer outfit.

Mary Quant became one of the designers most closely associated with this new spirit. Although she is often remembered for the mini skirt, her influence stretched much further. She designed practical, youthful clothing for women whose lives were becoming busier. Shift dresses, colourful tights, playful prints and easy separates suited women who wanted clothes that worked just as well for shopping, driving or catching a bus as they did for meeting friends.

Shift dresses 

The mini skirt became one of the defining symbols of the decade, although it was never the whole story. Hemlines certainly rose, but women were also embracing trousers, flat shoes and practical separates. Clothes were becoming easier to wear, reflecting lives that were often more active than those of the previous generation.

Women 1960s Pants

The fabrics reflected this appetite for experimentation. Wool, cotton, silk and linen remained important, particularly for tailoring, but synthetic fibres became increasingly common. Nylon, polyester, acrylic and PVC introduced brighter colours, unusual textures and fabrics that were easier to wash and required less ironing. Crimplene became especially popular because it resisted creasing, although later generations often regarded it with less enthusiasm. Looking back, it is one of those fabrics that instantly evokes the 1960s.

Manufacturers became so enthusiastic about new materials that they even experimented with disposable paper dresses. Usually decorated with bold geometric or pop-art prints, they became a brief craze during the mid-1960s. Most survived only a handful of wears, which is why original examples are surprisingly scarce today.

A Paco Rabanne Paper Dress

Technology and the Space Race left their mark on fashion too. André Courrèges produced clean, geometric designs with crisp white tones, low-heeled white boots and futuristic details that perfectly captured the optimism of the era. Paco Rabanne pushed those ideas much further, experimenting with metal, plastic and other unconventional materials. Some of his creations looked more like wearable sculpture than everyday clothing, but they challenged long-held ideas about what clothes could be.

Yves Saint Laurent took a different approach. His work remained elegant while quietly redefining women's evening wear. His most famous contribution was Le Smoking in 1966. Inspired by the traditional tuxedo, it offered women a striking alternative to evening gowns and became one of the defining designs of the decade.

Le Smoking - Tuxedo

The women wearing these fashions became almost as influential as the designers themselves. Models were no longer anonymous faces in magazines. Twiggy, with her short haircut, large eyes and slight frame, became one of the best-known faces of the decade. Her famous geometric haircut was created by Vidal Sassoon, whose precision cuts transformed women's hairstyling. Instead of spending hours setting and lacquering their hair, many women could simply wash it and let the cut do the work. Jean Shrimpton represented a softer, more natural look and helped fashion photography move away from the carefully posed images that had dominated earlier years.

Jean Shrimpton

Hollywood continued to shape ideas of glamour. Audrey Hepburn remained admired for her effortless elegance, while Brigitte Bardot introduced a relaxed, youthful style that influenced hairstyles, cosmetics and casual clothing across much of Europe.

Brigitte Bardot in Rome, 1969 

It is easy to imagine every woman wearing a brightly coloured mini dress by the late 1960s, but wardrobes were far more varied than that. Tailored suits, elegant coats and slim trousers remained popular throughout the decade. Many women continued wearing styles that would not have looked out of place only a few years earlier. At the same time, the soft hourglass silhouette of the 1950s gradually gave way to straighter, simpler lines, particularly in the increasingly popular shift dress.

Towards the end of the decade, the counterculture movement began leaving its mark on fashion. Young people drawn to music festivals, alternative lifestyles and political activism embraced handmade clothing, ethnic influences, military surplus garments and natural fabrics. Flared trousers, embroidered blouses, Afghan coats, fringed suede jackets and loose-fitting clothes appeared alongside mainstream fashion, giving the closing years of the decade a very different look from its polished beginning.

1960s Shift Dress

Men's clothing evolved just as noticeably. The traditional suit remained important, but younger men increasingly looked to popular music for inspiration. The Beatles helped popularise slim-fitting suits, narrow ties and collarless jackets, while denim, suede, polo shirts and leather jackets became everyday favourites.

1960s Brimaco Leather Jacket

American youth culture also left its mark. Ivy League styles, including button-down shirts, chinos, loafers and knitted sweaters, became widely admired. Casual clothing steadily gained ground, and wardrobes became less formal than they had been during the 1950s.

Ivy Style! 

By 1969 there was no single fashionable look. On the same British high street you might have seen a bank clerk in a neat mohair suit, a secretary wearing a Mary Quant-inspired shift dress and a student in embroidered flared trousers and a fringed suede jacket. All looked perfectly at home in the same decade.

Looking back, the biggest difference between the 1950s and the 1960s was not simply shorter skirts or brighter colours. The rules had loosened. Elegance still mattered, but it was no longer the only measure of good style.

People mixed old favourites with the latest fashions in ways that would have seemed unusual only a few years earlier. A tailored jacket might be worn with a mini skirt, while a vintage coat could sit comfortably alongside brand-new boots from Carnaby Street. Few worried whether everything matched in the traditional sense.

1960's. Suits and mini skirts

Perhaps that is why original 1960s clothing still feels so distinctive today. A Courrèges coat, a tiny Mary Quant shift dress, a pair of white PVC boots or a hand-embroidered Afghan jacket each captures a different side of the decade. They rarely feel anonymous. Looking through a collection of original garments, you can almost see society changing one outfit at a time. Some pieces are elegant, others playful, and a few seem wonderfully impractical, but together they tell the story of a period when fashion became more varied than ever before. There was no single right way to dress, and that may be the decade's greatest legacy.