Teen Fashions Swing into London, 1968

The idea of “swinging London” nestled into every area of American media and every level of American fashion in the 1960s—its influence felt at every magazine and every department store, mass market retailer, and designer (even if they loudly rejected it.) Since the Beatles (and their teenage fans) were the ones to help break the British youth movement, it is unsurprising that teenage magazines were some of the publications most vocal about it. They cultivated the idea of London as this mythical city of cool, where everyone was young, vibrant and well-dressed. Continually revisiting “swinging London” in articles and editorials filled column inches while publicizing their advertisers’ new London-centric products—from records to inexpensive dress collections by British designers to Union Jack paraphernalia.

The March 1968 issue of Co-Ed magazine was devoted to this imagined London. Published by Scholastic between 1959 and 1985, Co-Ed’s original tagline was “The High School Magazine For Homemakers and Career Girls. They had dropped it by 1968 yet were still seemingly caught between these two differing ideas of womanhood—with the added confusion of newer Dollybird and hippie identities. As an academic publisher, Scholastic was unsure of how to position the magazine. By 1968, Co-Ed wanted to fit alongside Seventeen on the newsstand, but schools most commonly purchased it for their home ec rooms. Most issues feel very much like what an elderly person imagines a teen is interested in based on a few news reports comingled with their own members of 60 years earlier. It’s an odd mix—one countered by the generally higher quality of the fashion shoots. For this story, they sent Gene Laurents, a regular Vogue photographer, to London and Brighton. With the clothes all from mass-market brands, the fashions themselves are all primarily still drawing from the sleeker mod aesthetic (with nods to psychedelia and Victoriana)—these are looks that a teen could find at the local department store and feel fashionable and pulled together in. The hippie movement—whose “Summer of Love” the previous year had ignited a moral panic about teen runaways—was then really at the forefront of the fashion conversation, yet Co-Ed only glanced at it with a headline on the previous issue broadcasting floral fashion: “Flower Power: the bloomin’ best in fashion.”