Article by Holly Harland, illustration by Libby Scott for segments of fashion

Fashion is a system that privileges the present. It evokes a need to distance itself from the past.

Ultimately, fashion is an archetype of modernity; fashion is change. For a generation of collective youth that endeavour to dissent from the social and cultural shackles of their contemporaries, what better social mechanism to use than sartorial experimentation?

The emergence of youth culture as a distinct segmentation of British society has its roots in the 1950s. Around bomb sites and back alleys, working class teenagers began to crop up donning tapered trousers and a reconfiguration of the long, draped Edwardian jacket. As the style spread, a name was coined for those who wore it: Teddy Boys.

Teddy Boys multiplied in unofficial membership and subsequently grew into a youth subculture…