Origins

The date of the first appearance of a distinct youth style or culture 
     in post-war Britain was in the early fifties. At that time, some working
     class youths in London adopted as their uniform the long "Edwardian"      
     coats and tight trousers which had previously been worn by young 
     men-about-town at the time of the New Look. They were known as teddy 
     boys or teds. They were devoted to rock and roll, they wore curious 
     hairstyles with quiffs and DAs painstakingly greased into place. They 
     behaved as a group separate from conventional life. In the early 
     sixties, the teddy boys were succeeded b y the mods, and their 
     counterparts the rockers. Skinheads could be identified as a separate group      
     in 1968 because of their distinctive dress and appearance, the type of music 
     which they liked and the tough, aggressive behavior which they displayed. The 
     facts that a new youth style had emerged was not surprising. What was 
     new was that skinheads appeared not to be a continuation of a trend, 
     but a change of emphasis or even a reversal in the development of 
     style. The sixties had seen a glamorization of youth, with all its 
     attendant absurdities, and the emergence of the skinhead style 
     represented a counter-revolution. The revolution took place amongst 
     the working class youth of London and other cities. This movement 
     appeared more or less spontaneously and its emergence shows how this 
     section of society still possessed its own individualism and 
     independence.
     The teds of the fifties had been replaced by the mods, which at 
     first had been very exclusive, almost secret, underground working 
     class movement. They wore immaculate clothes, regarded themselves as 
     ite and behaved like gods. They bought the finest Italian suits and 
     rode on Vespas and Lambrettas. They decorated the scooters with 
     artificial fur fabric and as many accessories as possible. 
     Contrasting with, and in opposition to, the mods, were the rockers 
     or greasers, who with their leather jackets and heavy motor bikes 
     were a diluted version of the American Hell's Angels. Separate from these      
     groups was the large mass of youth whose clothes were chain store versions      
     of traditional styles. Attention 
     on fashion for most of the public was concentrated on women's clothes,
     with mini-skirts and boots emphasizing the rapid change in attitudes. 
     While the mini-skirts and The Beatles made the news, the mods, which 
     were only newsworthy when they rioted at seaside towns, developed 
     their own independent styles of dress relatively uninfluenced by 
     popular fashion. Each successive age group wishes to establish itself as being      
     different from its predecessors. You share your identity with your 
     mates at work or with your own age group at school, not with your 
     elder brother. In establishing their own style, the younger brothers 
     of the mods adopted certain elements of the mod style, combined them 
     with items from traditional working clothes, borrowed some influences 
     from the West Indian blacks and became skinheads.