I Ride My GS Scooter: Mods, Their Rides, and Youthful Rebellion
It was June 2009, and I was in London for the first time as part of a six-week summer abroad program when I found myself exploring Carnaby Street. It’s a nook of London forever dedicated to followers of fashion and the posterity of Mod culture. Rather convenient to my interests, that particular weekend there was a ’60s celebration called Swinging Carnaby. Naturally, there was plenty of music, including a man at a rather colorful piano playing hits of the decade and a Small Faces cover group, Small Fakers, taking the stage. As expected, many of the patrons in the street that day looked the part of the typical Mod or Mod revivalist, with short, neat haircuts à la Paul Weller or Liam Gallagher, wartime coats despite the summer heat, drainpipe trousers, etc. But perhaps the most important accessory were the scooters of all makes and models lined up along the road, which somehow seemed to capture the mood and feel of Mod culture more than anything else.
At that same mini-festival, there was a gallery hosting photographs by Philip Townsend, perhaps most noted for snapping early photos of the Rolling Stones as well as the Beatles’ first interactions with the Maharishi, but who also photographed many of the ’60s up-and-coming models and stars and captured the general trendy vibes of London. The man himself was there signing postcards of his photos. I ultimately chose a Beatles one and a picture entitled “Harley Davidson 1963” which features “socialite Claire Pelly and painter Willie Fielding with their Harley.” And yet, I still wish I had chosen another card, one of Susannah York leaning casually against the back end of a scooter with a prepubescent boy effectively ignoring the pretty starlet, preoccupied with the vehicle he sat upon. That, I think might sum be more representative of the era, and perhaps more importantly, the allure of the scooter.
What is it about scooters, about Vespas and Lambrettas, that is so appealing and so iconic? Despite the fact that I live in the suburbs of New York and commute an hour both ways every day to Connecticut to work, I would absolutely love to have a nice little GS model Vespa. Would it do me any good? Probably not much. But owning one seems like the ultimate Mod-admirer’s dream. Like most everything Mod related, the allure lies in sleek simplicity, in foreign chic, and a in youth-culture inspired sense of independence.
Mod fashion required boldness disguised in minimalism. Young men wore Italian-styled, streamlined suits and their hair was sleek and close-cropped. Women’s hair was likewise sleek and straight, and clothing featured strong lines and blocks of color over intricate patterns. A motorcycle, so popular in the American mythos of the independent rebel, just doesn’t quite fit in with this aesthetic. They’re too complicated, too big, too industrial, and too dark. Vespas and Lambrettas, however, shared that sleek pop-art attractiveness that summed up the Mod look, and their Italian origins fit in with the clothing trends. They were simpler, more colorful, affordable, and less American; the attraction can be viewed as a subversive move against the quickly Americanizing of the post-war, globalized world culture.
Just as British music groups of the era reinvented American R&B and rock to suit their own need and exported them back into the world as something new, edgy, and dangerous, so too did they change the American pop-culture ideal of the independent youth. Rather than the motorcycle-driving, dirty, hypermasculinized Easy Rider bad boy image, they transformed the rebel into that of a sophisticated, groomed, and even androgynous Vespa rider. Something can also be said for a certain level of arrogance and self-involvement of the Mods in the way that they outfitted their precious scooters with multiple side-mirrors, less for personal safety and more for eclectic showiness and one-upmanship. They weren’t just a generation looking for their own way in the still shell-shocked island nation, but looking for confidence in themselves, even at the expense of perhaps coming off as too narcissistic and self-important. And like most youth cultures, the Mods were really just lost adolescents asserting their new-world philosophies and independence while still managing to be like everyone else.
The 1979 film adaptation of the same-titled Who album, Quadrophenia, portrayed the bitter rivalry between the Mods and Rockers, opposing youth cultures clashing for dominance in London and the beach-resort city of Brighton, based on actual events of the early 1960s. While the story focuses on the confused mental state of the antagonist, a young Mod named Jimmy and his complicated social life, the scooters that he and his friends ride in the film almost seem to become extensions of the characters themselves. This is perhaps best exemplified at the film’s conclusion, when Jimmy drives his scooter (actually stolen from trendsetter-turned-bellboy Ace Face) towards the cliff at Beachy Head in what appears to be suicide attempt. The scene cuts to the scooter flying off the cliff, riderless, plummeting to its destruction on the rocks below, Jimmy’s fate ambiguous. It was as if by letting the the scooter go, Jimmy was releasing himself from the Mod culture and all the pressures and expectations that come with it.
Mod culture petered as British rock become more prevalent; the hair grew longer, psychedelia took over, and the fashions became more colorful and complicated. But scooters and vespas remained a lasting symbol of what was perhaps the first “me” generation. Today, it’s hard not to find pop-art merchandise in London, Brighton, and elsewhere that doesn’t feature the iconic image of the scooters in the same respects as the adopted RAF roundels and green army parkas. And there are plenty of Mod revivalists keeping the look alive and the scooter as relevant as ever as a mode of transportation.
(Cover photo by Jen Cunningham.)
