In modern usage, the term "Bohemian

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...

" is applied to people who live unconventional, usually artistic, lives. The adherents of the "Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...

", which formed around the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury group, and the sister of Virginia Woolf.- Biography and art :...

 and Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 in the early 20th century, are among the best-known examples. The original "Bohemians" were travelers or refugees from central Europe (hence, the French bohémien, for "gypsy").

Reflecting on the fashion style of "boho-chic

Boho-chic

Boho-chic is a style of female fashion drawing on various bohemian and hippie influences, which, at its height in 2004-5, was associated particularly with actress Sienna Miller and model Kate Moss in the United Kingdom and actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and Nicole Richie in the United States...

" in the early years of the 21st century, the Sunday Times thought it ironic that "fashionable girls wore ruffly floral skirts in the hope of looking bohemian, nomadic, spirited and non-bourgeois", whereas "gypsy girls themselves ... are sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a hoot for fashion". By contrast, in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th, aspects of Bohemian fashion reflected the lifestyle itself.

Pre-Raphaelites

In 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.-Biography:...

 used the word bohemianism in his novel Vanity Fair. In 1862, the Westminster Review described a Bohemian as "simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art". During the 1860s the term was associated in particular with the pre-Raphaelite movement, the group of artists and aesthetes of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 was the most prominent :

As the 1860s progressed, Rossetti would become the grand prince of bohemianism as his deviations from normal standards became more audacious. And as he became this epitome of the unconventional, his egocentric demands necessarily required his close friends to remodel their own lives around him. His bohemianism was like a web in which others became trapped – none more so than William

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

 and Jane Morris.

Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and pre-Raphaelite traits

Jane Morris, who was to become Rossetti's muse, epitomised, probably more than any of the women associated with the pre-Raphaelites, an unrestricted, flowing style of dress that, while unconventional at the time, would be highly influential at certain periods during the 20th century. She and others, including the much less outlandish Georgiana Burne-Jones (wife of Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...

, one of the later pre-Raphaelites), eschewed the corsets and crinoline

Crinoline

Crinoline was originally a stiff fabric with a weft of horse-hair and a warp of cotton or linen thread. The fabric first appeared around 1830, but by 1850 the word had come to mean a stiffened petticoat or rigid skirt-shaped structure of steel designed to support the skirts of a woman’s dress into...

s of the mid to late Victorian era, a feature that impressed the American writer Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

 when he wrote to his sister in 1869 of the bohemian atmosphere of the Morrises’ house in the Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury

-Places:* Bloomsbury is an area in central London.* Bloomsbury , related local government unit* Bloomsbury, New Jersey, New Jersey, USA* Bloomsbury , listed on the NRHP in Maryland...

 district of London and, in particular, the “dark silent medieval” presence of its chateleine:

It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made … whether she’s an original or a copy. In either case she’s a wonder. Imagine a tall lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else I should say) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples … a long neck, without any collar, and in lieu thereof some dozen strings of outlandish beads.

A 21st century biographer of Edward Burne-Jones (Fiona MacCarthy, 2011) has noted that, in the 1960s, when the influential Biba

Biba

Biba was an iconic and popular London fashion store of the 1960s and 1970s. It was started and primarily run by the Polish-born Barbara Hulanicki with help of her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon.-Early years:...

 store was opened in London

Swinging London

Swinging London is a catch-all term applied to the fashion and cultural scene that flourished in London, in the 1960s.It was a youth-oriented phenomenon that emphasised the new and modern. It was a period of optimism and hedonism, and a cultural revolution. One catalyst was the recovery of the...

 by Barbara Hulanicki

Barbara Hulanicki

Barbara Hulanicki is a Warsaw-born fashion designer, known for being the founder of the iconic clothes store Biba. Born in Warsaw, to Polish parents, after studying at Brighton School of Art, now the University of Brighton Faculty of Arts, Hulanicki won a London Evening Standard competition for...

, the "long drooping structureless clothes", though sexier than the dresses portrayed in such Burne-Jones paintings as The Golden Stairs or The Sirens, nevertheless resembled them. MacCarthy observed also that "the androgynous appearance of Burne-Jones's male figures reflected the sexually ambivalent feeling" of the late 1960s.

In his play Pygmalion

Pygmalion (play)

Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of...

(1912) Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw

Bernard Shaw may refer to:* George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright* Bernard Shaw , English footballer of the 1960-70s* Bernard Shaw , journalist and longtime CNN anchorman* Bernie Shaw, singer for the band Uriah Heep...

 unmistakably based the part of Mrs. Higgins on the then elderly Jane Morris. Describing Mrs. Higgins' drawing room, he referred to a portrait of her "when she defied the fashion of her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism [sic] in the eighteen-seventies".

Early flower power: Effie Millais

Effie Gray

Effie Gray

Euphemia Chalmers Millais, Lady Millais née Gray, known as Effie Gray, Effie Ruskin or Effie Millais was the wife of the critic John Ruskin, but left her husband without the marriage being consummated, and after the annulment of the marriage, married his protégé, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John...

, whose marriage to John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

 was annulled in 1854 prior to her marrying the pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais, is known to have used flowers as an adornment and probably also as an assertive "statement". While in Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 with Ruskin (still her husband) and Millais, she gathered foxgloves to place in her hair. She wore them at breakfast despite being asked by her husband not to do so, a gesture of defiance, at a time of growing crisis in their relationship, that came to the critical notice of Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale OM, RRC was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night...

 (who tended to regard others of her sex with "scarcely concealed scorn" and was generally unsympathetic to "women's rights").

In 1853 Millais painted Effie with Foxgloves which depicts her wearing the flowers while doing needlework. Other paintings of the mid to late 19th century, such as Frederick Sandys' Love's Shadow (1867) of a girl with a rose in her hair, sucking a sprig of blossom, which was described in 1970 as "a first rate PR

Public relations

Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....

 job for the Flower People", and Burne-Jones' The Heart of the Rose (1889), have been cited as foreshadowing the "flower power

Flower power

Flower power is a slogan used by the American counterculture movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and non-violence ideology. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in...

" of the mid to late 1960s.

Rational dress

The pre-Raphaelite look was still considered "advanced" in the late years of the 19th century, by when movements, such as the Rational Dress Society (1881), with which the Morrises and Georgiana Burne-Jones were involved, were beginning to exercise some influence on women's dress. However, it was not really until the First World War that "many working women ... embarked on a revolution in fashion that greatly reduced the weight and restrictions imposed on them by their clothing". Some women working in factories wore trousers and the brassiere

Brassiere

A brassiere is an undergarment that covers, supports, and elevates the breasts. Since the late 19th century, it has replaced the corset as the most widely accepted method for supporting breasts....

 (invented in 1889 by the feminist

Feminist movement

The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment and sexual violence...

 Herminie Cadolle

Herminie Cadolle

Herminie Cadolle was the inventor of the modern bra and founder of the Cadolle lingerie house.Herminie was a close friend of the French insurrectionist Louise Michel, and it was this connection that lead her to leave for the safety of Buenos Aires...

 and patented in America by Mary Phelps Jacob

Mary Phelps Jacob

Caresse Crosby , born Mary Phelps Jacob , was an American patron of the arts, poet, publisher, and peace activist...

 in 1914) began gradually to supersede the corset.

By the early 1920s, what had been a wartime expedient - the need to economise on material - had become a statement of freedom by young women, manifested by shorter hemlines (just above the knee by 1925-6) and boyish hairstyles, accompanied by what Robert Graves

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...

 and Alan Hodge described as "the new fantastic development of Jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

 music". The Penguin Social History of Britain noted that "by the 1920s newspapers were filled with advertisements for 'lingerie

Lingerie

Lingerie are fashionable and possibly alluring undergarments.Lingerie usually incorporates one or more flexible, stretchy materials like Lycra, nylon , polyester, satin, lace, silk and sheer fabric which are not typically used in more functional, basic cotton undergarments.The term in the French...

' and 'undies' which would have been classed as indecent a generation earlier". Thus, in Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...

's novel, The Seven Dials Mystery

The Seven Dials Mystery

The Seven Dials Mystery is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by William Collins & Sons on January 24, 1929 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year...

(1929), the aristocratic heroine, Lady "Bundle" Brent

Bundle Brent

Lady Eileen Brent, a fictional character known to her family and friends as "Bundle" Brent, was a spirited "It girl" in two novels of Agatha Christie , The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery...

, wore only "a negligible trifle" under her dress; like many real life "it girl

It girl

"It girl" is a term for a young woman who possess the quality "It", absolute attraction.The early usage of the concept "it" in this meaning may be seen in a story by Rudyard Kipling: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It'."...

s" of her class, she had been freed from the "genteel expectations" of earlier generations. In Hollywood

Cinema of the United States

The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...

 the actress Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard was an American actress. She was particularly noted for her comedic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s...

, who, in the 1930s, combined feistiness with sexual allure, never wore a brassière and "avoided panties

Panties

Panties are a form of underwear, usually light and snug-fitting, designed to be worn by women or girls in the area directly below the waist. Typical components include an elastic waistband, a crotch panel to cover the genital area , and a pair of leg openings which, like the waistband, are often...

". However, she famously declared that though "I live by a man's code designed to fit a man's world ... at the same time I never forget that that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick

Lipstick

Lipstick is a cosmetic product containing pigments, oils, waxes, and emollients that applies color, texture, and protection to the lips. Many varieties of lipstick are known. As with most other types of makeup, lipstick is typically, but not exclusively, worn by women...

" Coincidentally, sales of men's undershirts fell dramatically in the United States when Lombard's future husband, Clark Gable

Clark Gable

William Clark Gable , known as Clark Gable, was an American film actor most famous for his role as Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh...

, was revealed not to be wearing one in a famous motel bedroom scene with Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert was a French-born American-based actress of stage and film.Born in Paris, France and raised in New York City, Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures...

 in the film It Happened One Night

It Happened One Night

It Happened One Night is a 1934 American romantic comedy film with elements of screwball comedy directed by Frank Capra, in which a pampered socialite tries to get out from under her father's thumb, and falls in love with a roguish reporter . The plot was based on the story Night Bus by Samuel...

(1934).

Looking back at this period, Graves and Hodge noted the protracted course that "daring female fashions had always taken ... from brothel to stage, then on to Bohemia, to Society, to Society's maids, to the mill-girl and lastly to the suburban woman".

The "Dorelia" look

Among female Bohemians in the early 20th century, the "gypsy look" was a recurring theme, popularised by, among others, Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill

Dorelia McNeill

Dorothy McNeill was best known as a model for the Welsh artists Gwen John and Augustus John, was the common-law wife of the latter, and has been credited for inspiring "his first unequivocally personal work"...

 (1881–1969), muse

Muse

The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...

, lover and second wife of the painter Augustus John

Augustus John

Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....

 (1878–1961), whose full skirts and bright colours gave rise to the so-called "Dorelia look". Katherine Everett, née Olive, a former student of the Slade School of Art in London, has described McNeil's "tight fitting, hand-sewn, canary coloured bodice above a dark gathered flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasiz[ing] the long silver earrings which were her only adornment".

Everett recalled also the Johns' woods "with wild cherry trees in blossom, and ... a model with flying red hair, clad in white, being chased in and out of the trees by nude children". With similar lack of inhibition, as early as 1907 the American heiress Natalie Barney (1875–1972) was leading like-minded women in sapphic dances in her Parisian garden, photographs of which look little different from scenes at Woodstock in 1969 and other “pop” festivals of the late 1960s and early 70s.

Bobbed hair and cross-gender styles

By contrast, short bobbed hair

Bob cut

A "bob cut" is a short haircut for women in which the hair is typically cut straight around the head at about jaw-level, often with a fringe at the front.-The beginning:...

 was often a Bohemian trait, having originated in Paris c.1909 and been adopted by students at the Slade several years before American film actresses such as Colleen Moore

Colleen Moore

Colleen Moore was an American film actress, and one of the most fashionable stars of the silent film era.-Early life:...

 and Louise Brooks

Louise Brooks

Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...

 became associated with it in the mid 1920s. This style was plainly discernible on a woodblock self-portrait of 1916 by Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington

Dora de Houghton Carrington , known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey....

, who had entered the Slade in 1910. A shorter style, known as the "Eton crop

Eton crop

The Eton crop is a type of short, slicked-down crop hairstyle for women. It became popular during the 1920s because it was ideal to showcase the shape of cloche hats. It was worn by Josephine Baker, among others...

", became popular around 1926: on her arrival in Tilling

Tilling (Sussex)

Tilling is a fictional coastal town, based on Rye, East Sussex, in the Mapp and Lucia novels of Edward Frederic Benson .- Town in the novels of E F Benson :...

 (Rye) in E F Benson

Edward Frederic Benson

Edward Frederic Benson was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. His friends called him Fred.-Life:E.F...

's comic novel Mapp and Lucia

Mapp and Lucia

Mapp and Lucia is a collective name for a series of novels by E. F. Benson, and is also the name of a television series based on those novels.-The novels:...

(1931), Lucia described "Quaint" Irene as "a girl with no hat and an Eton crop. She was dressed in a fisherman's jersey

Jersey (clothing)

A jersey is an item of knitted clothing, traditionally in wool or cotton, with sleeves, worn as a pullover, as it does not open at the front, unlike a cardigan. It is usually close-fitting and machine knitted in contrast to a guernsey that is more often hand knit with a thicker yarn...

 and knickerbockers". For many years trite assumptions were often made about the sexuality of women with cropped hairstyles; an historian of the 1980s wrote of the Greenham Common

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was a peace camp established to protest at nuclear weapons being sited at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. The camp began in September 1981 after a Welsh group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived at Greenham to protest against the decision of the British...

 "peace camp" in England that it "brought public awareness to feminist separation and even to lesbianism, hitherto seen in the mass media - when acknowledged at all - either in terms of Eton-cropped androgyny

Androgyny

Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- and γυνή , referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics...

 or of pornographic fantasy".

One social historian has observed that "the innocuous woollen jersey, now known [in Britain] as the jumper

Sweater

A sweater, jumper, pullover, sweatshirt, jersey or guernsey is a garment intended to cover the torso and arms. It is often worn over a shirt, blouse, T-shirt, or other top, but may also be worn alone as a top...

 or the pullover, was the first item of clothing to become interchangeable between men and women and, as such, was seen as a dangerous symptom of gender confusion". Trousers for women, sometimes worn mannishly as an expression of sexuality (as by Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...

 in the 1930 film, Morocco

Morocco (1930 film)

Morocco is a 1930 film in which a Foreign Legionnaire meets and falls in love with a singer. It was directed by Josef von Sternberg and stars Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich and Adolphe Menjou. The story was adapted by Jules Furthman from the novel Amy Jolly by Benno Vigny...

) also became popular in the 1920s and 30s, as did aspects of what many years later would sometimes be referred to as "shabby chic

Shabby chic

Shabby chic is a form of interior design where furniture and furnishings are either chosen for their age and signs of wear and tear or new items are distressed to achieve the appearance of an antique...

". Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...

's niece Clarissa was among those who wore a tailored suit in the late 1930s.

Post-Liberation Paris

The "New Look"

After the Second World War Christian Dior

Christian Dior

Christian Dior , was a French fashion designer, best known as the founder of one of the world's top fashion houses, also called Christian Dior.-Life:...

's "New Look", launched in Paris in 1947, though drawing on styles that had begun to emerge in 1938-9, set the pattern for women's fashion generally until the 1960s. Harking back in some ways to the Belle Epoque

Belle Époque

The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period in European social history that began during the late 19th century and lasted until World War I. Occurring during the era of the French Third Republic and the German Empire, it was a period characterised by optimism and new technological and medical...

of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and thus not a "new" look as such (by early 1948, it was simply known as "The Look" in America) - it was criticised by some as excessively feminine and, with its accompanying corsets and rustle of frilled petticoat

Petticoat

A petticoat or underskirt is an article of clothing for women; specifically an undergarment to be worn under a skirt or a dress. The petticoat is a separate garment hanging from the waist ....

s, as setting back the "work of emancipation won through participation in two world wars". It also, for a while, bucked the trend towards boyish fashion that, as after the First World War, tended to follow major conflicts.

Rive Gauche

American influences had been discouraged during the Nazi occupation, but, notably in the form of be-bop and other types of jazz, were strong among intellectual café society

Café Society

Café society was the collective description for the so-called "Beautiful People" and "Bright Young Things" who gathered in fashionable cafes and restaurants in New York, Paris, and London beginning in the late 19th century...

 in the mid to late 1940s. In 1947, Samedi-Soir lifted the lid on what it called the "troglodytes

Caveman

A caveman or troglodyte is a stock character based upon widespread concepts of the way in which early prehistoric humans may have looked and behaved...

 of Saint-Germain", namely bohemians of the Parisian Left Bank (Rive Gauche) district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Saint-Germain-des-Prés is an area of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France, located around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés....

, who appeared to cluster around existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

. These included Roger Vadim

Roger Vadim

Roger Vadim was a French screenwriter, director, and producer as well as a journalist, author and actor, who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in the film And God Created Woman.-Early life:...

 (who married and launched the career of actress Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...

 in the 1950s), novelist Boris Vian

Boris Vian

Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their...

 (since described as "the epitome of Left Bank bohemia, standing at the center of its postwar rehabilitation") and singer Juliette Gréco

Juliette Gréco

Juliette Gréco, — also Michelle – is a French actress and popular chanson singer.-Early life and family:Juliette Gréco was born in Montpellier to a Corsican father and a mother who became active in the Résistance, in the Hérault département of southern France. She was raised by her maternal...

.

Juliette Gréco

In contrast to the "New Look" (which itself scandalised some Parisennes), the clothes of the post-war bohemians were predominantly black: when Gréco first performed outside Saint-Germain she affronted some of her audience by wearing "black trousers, her bare feet slipped into golden sandals". In old age she claimed that this style of dress arose from poverty:

When I was a teenager in Paris ... I only had one dress and one pair of shoes, so the boys in the house started dressing me in their old black coats and trousers. A fashion was shaped out of misery. When people copied me I found it a little ridiculous, but I didn't mind. It made me smile.

Performing in London over fifty years later, Gréco was described as "still ooz[ing] bohemian style".

Saint-Germain in retrospect

Capturing the spirit of the time, David Profumo

David Profumo

David John Profumo FRSL is an English novelist.He is the son of former British government minister John Profumo and actress Valerie Hobson. He succeeded his father as the 6th Baron Profumo, but like his father does not use the title, which is of Italian origin.He was educated at Eton College and...

 has written of how his mother, the actress Valerie Hobson

Valerie Hobson

Valerie Hobson was a British actress who appeared in a number of British films during the 1940s and 1950s...

, was entranced by Roger Vadim's flatmate, the director Marc Allégret

Marc Allégret

Marc Allégret was a French screenwriter and film director.Born in Basel, Basel-Stadt, Switzerland, he was the elder brother of Yves Allégret. Marc was educated to be a lawyer. Allégret became André Gide's lover when he was fifteen and Gide was forty-seven...

, while she was filming Blanche Fury in 1947:

Allégret's apparently bohemian lifestyle appealed sharply to her romantic side ... and she revelled in the Left Bank milieu to which he introduced her during script discussions in Paris. There were meals with André Gide

André Gide

André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...

, Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...

 and the long-legged Zizi Jeanmaire

Zizi Jeanmaire

Zizi Jeanmaire is a ballet dancer and widow of renowned dancer and choreographer Roland Petit. She became famous in the 1950s after playing the title role in the ballet version of Carmen, produced in London in 1949, and went on to appear in several Hollywood films.-Background:Born in Paris,...

. For an attractive British woman who felt deprived of attention ... this was an ideal situation for some sort of reawakening.

In 1953, when Hobson starred in the musical The King and I

The King and I

The King and I is a stage musical, the fifth by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The work is based on the 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon and derives from the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, who became governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in...

in London, it was apparent that she had retained a mix of chic

Chic (style)

Chic , meaning 'stylish' or 'smart', is an element of fashion.-Etymology:Chic is a French word, established in English since at least the 1870s...

and Boheminism. A Daily Mirror journalist described her "pale, ladylike looks, her well-bred clothes ... she likes embroidery and painting", while a young Etonian who visited her dressing room recalled that "it had been freshly painted pink and white for her, and was like entering a risqué French apartment". Ten years later, when Hobson's husband, the politician John Profumo

John Profumo

Brigadier John Dennis Profumo, 5th Baron Profumo CBE , informally known as Jack Profumo , was a British politician. His title, 5th Baron, which he did not use, was Italian. Although Profumo held an increasingly responsible series of political posts in the 1950s, he is best known today for his...

, was involved in a sex scandal

Profumo Affair

The Profumo Affair was a 1963 British political scandal named after John Profumo, Secretary of State for War. His affair with Christine Keeler, the reputed mistress of an alleged Russian spy, followed by lying in the House of Commons when he was questioned about it, forced the resignation of...

 that threatened to destabilize the British government, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan

Harold Macmillan

Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963....

 wrote that "his [Profumo's] wife is very nice and sensible. Of course, these people live in a raffish, theatrical, bohemian society where no one really knows anyone and everyone is "darling"".

Post-war Paris was recalled fondly in 2007 when France introduced a ban on smoking

Tobacco smoking

Tobacco smoking is the practice where tobacco is burned and the resulting smoke is inhaled. The practice may have begun as early as 5000–3000 BCE. Tobacco was introduced to Eurasia in the late 16th century where it followed common trade routes...

 in public places. The aroma of Gauloise

Gauloise

Gauloise may refer to:* The French name for someone from Gaul* Gauloises cigarettes* a range of Belgian beers, brewed by Brasserie Du Bocq...

s and Gitanes

Gitanes

Gitanes is a brand of French cigarettes, sold in many varieties of strengths and packages. It is currently owned by Imperial Tobacco following their acquisition of Altadis in January 2008, having been owned by SEITA before that. Originally rolled with darker or brun tobacco, in contrast to...

 was, for many years, thought to be an inseparable feature of Parisian café society, but the owner of Les Deux Magots

Les Deux Magots

Les Deux Magots is a famous café in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, France. It once had a reputation as the rendezvous of the literary and intellectual élite of the city. It is now a popular tourist destination...

, once frequented by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...

, Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...

 and other writers, observed that "things have changed. The writers of today are not so addicted to cigarettes". A British journalist who interviewed Juliette Gréco in 2010 described Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore as "now overpriced tourist hotspots" and noted that "chain stores and expensive restaurants have replaced the bookshops, cafés and revolutionary ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...

's Rive Gauche".

America: the beat generation and flower power

In the United States adherents of the "beat

Beat generation

The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

" counter-culture (probably best defined by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...

's novel, On the Road

On the Road

On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...

, set in the late 1940s, written in 1952 and published in 1957) were associated with black polo-neck

Polo neck

A polo neck or turtle neck or skivvy is a garment—usually a sweater—with a close-fitting, round, and high collar that folds over and covers the neck...

 (or turtle neck) sweaters, blue denim

Denim

Denim is a rugged cotton twill textile, in which the weft passes under two or more warp threads. This produces the familiar diagonal ribbing identifiable on the reverse of the fabric, which distinguishes denim from cotton duck. Denim has been in American usage since the late 18th century...

 jeans

Jeans

Jeans are trousers made from denim. Some of the earliest American blue jeans were made by Jacob Davis, Calvin Rogers, and Levi Strauss in 1873. Starting in the 1950s, jeans, originally designed for cowboys, became popular among teenagers. Historic brands include Levi's, Lee, and Wrangler...

 and sandals. The influence of this movement could be seen in the persona and songs of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...

 in the early to mid 1960s, "road" films like Easy Rider

Easy Rider

Easy Rider is a 1969 American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...

(1969) and the punk

Punk rock

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...

-oriented "New Wave" of the mid 1970s, which, among other things, produced a boho style icon in Deborah Harry

Debbie Harry

Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers...

 of the New York band Blondie

Blondie (band)

Blondie is an American rock band, founded by singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein. The band was a pioneer in the early American New Wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s...

, whom photographer David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle is a photographer and director who works in the fields of fashion, advertising, and fine art photography, and is noted for his surreal, unique, sexualized, and often humorous style.-Early life:...

 has described as "the definition of cool

Cool (aesthetic)

Something regarded as cool is an admired aesthetic of attitude, behavior, comportment, appearance and style, influenced by and a product of the Zeitgeist. Because of the varied and changing connotations of cool, as well its subjective nature, the word has no single meaning. It has associations of...

". (However, as with some American musicians of the mid 1960s, such as Sonny and Cher, Blondie came to international prominence only after a tour of Britain in 1978.)

Greenwich Village and West Coast

New York's Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...

 was a particular magnet for bohemians in the early sixties. Bob Dylan's girl-friend Suze Rotolo

Suze Rotolo

Susan Elizabeth Rotolo , known as Suze Rotolo , was an American artist, but is perhaps best known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend between 1961 and 1964 and a strong influence on his music...

, who appeared with him on the cover of his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in May 1963 by Columbia Records. Whereas his debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin initiated the process of writing contemporary words to traditional melodies....

(1963), recalled that the Village was "where people like me went - people who didn't belong where they came from .. where the writers I was reading and the artists I was looking at had lived or passed through". These "beatniks" (as they came to be known by the late 1950s) were, in many ways, the antecedents of the hippie movement that formed on the West Coast of the USA in the mid 1960s and came to the fore as the first post-war baby-boomers reached the age of majority in the "Summer of Love

Summer of Love

The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, creating a cultural and political rebellion...

" of 1967. The Monterey pop festival

Monterey Pop Festival

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California...

 was a major landmark of that year, which was associated with "flowerpower"

Flower power

Flower power is a slogan used by the American counterculture movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and non-violence ideology. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in...

, psychedelia, opposition to the Vietnam war

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

 and the inventive music and flowing, colourful fashions of, among others, Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter...

, The Mamas & the Papas

The Mamas & the Papas

The Mamas & the Papas were a Canadian/American vocal group of the 1960s . The group recorded and performed from 1965 to 1968 with a short reunion in 1971, releasing five albums and 11 Top 40 hit singles...

, Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane was an American rock band formed in San Francisco in 1965. A pioneer of the psychedelic rock movement, Jefferson Airplane was the first band from the San Francisco scene to achieve mainstream commercial and critical success....

 and the British group, The Beatles

The Beatles

The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...

, whose album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band The Beatles, released on 1 June 1967 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin...

, is said to have caused the guru of psychedelia, Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary

Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...

, to remark that "my work is finished".

Hippiedom and the Pre-Raphaelites

For men's fashion, the wearing of necktie

Necktie

A necktie is a long piece of cloth worn for decorative purposes around the neck or shoulders, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat. Variants include the ascot tie, bow tie, bolo tie, and the clip-on tie. The modern necktie, ascot, and bow tie are descended from the cravat. Neck...

s declined as muttonchop

Sideburns

Sideburns or sideboards are patches of facial hair grown on the sides of the face, extending from the hairline to below the ears and worn with an unbearded chin...

 whiskers and teashades

Sunglasses

Sunglasses or sun glasses are a form of protective eyewear designed primarily to prevent bright sunlight and high-energy visible light from damaging or discomforting the eyes. They can sometimes also function as a visual aid, as variously termed spectacles or glasses exist, featuring lenses that...

 (sunglasses) came in: by the time of the Chicago 7 trial (late 1969), hair over the collars had become so commonplace that it was beginning to transcend Bohemian style, taking on mass popularity in the 1970s. The London art dealer Jeremy Maas reflected in the mid 1980s that

there [was] no question that the Hippy [sic] movement and its repercussive influence in England owed much of its imagery, its manner, dress and personal appearance to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal ... It was observed by all of us who were involved with these exhibitions [of pre-Raphaelite paintings] that visitors included increasing numbers of the younger generation, who had begun to resemble the figures in the pictures they had come to see.

Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page

James Patrick "Jimmy" Page, OBE is an English multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin.Jimmy Page...

 of the British band Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Formed in 1968, they consisted of guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham...

, who collected Pre-Raphaelite paintings, observed of Edward Burne-Jones that "the romance of the Arthurian

King Arthur

King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...

 legends [captured in his paintings] and the bohemian life of the artists who were reworking these stories seemed very attuned to our time", while the author David Waller noted in 2011 that Burne-Jones' subjects "have much in common with the sixties rock chicks and their pop-star paladin

Paladin

The paladins, sometimes known as the Twelve Peers, were the foremost warriors of Charlemagne's court, according to the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. They first appear in the early chansons de geste such as The Song of Roland, where they represent Christian martial valor against the...

s".

London in the 1950s

Although the annual Saturday Book

The Saturday Book

The Saturday Book was an annual miscellany, published 1941-1975, reaching 34 volumes. It was edited initially by Leonard Russell and from 1952 by John Hadfield. A final compilation entitled The Best of the Saturday Book was published in 1981...

recorded in 1956 a view that "London's now nothing but flash coffee bars, with teddies and little bits of girls in jeans", the "Edwardian" ("teddy boy

Teddy Boy

The British Teddy Boy subculture is typified by young men wearing clothes that were partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period, styles which Savile Row tailors had attempted to re-introduce in Britain after World War II...

") look of the times did not coincide with Bohemian tastes. For women, the legacy of the "New Look" was still apparent, although hemlines had generally risen as, as one journalist put it in 1963, "photographs of those first bold bearers of the New Look make them seem strangely lost and bewildered, as though they had mistaken their cue and come on stage fifty years late". The Bohemian foci during this period were the jazz clubs and espresso

Espresso

Espresso is a concentrated beverage brewed by forcing a small amount of nearly boiling water under pressure through finely ground coffee. Espresso is widely known throughout the world....

 bars of Soho

Soho

Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...

 and Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia

Fitzrovia is a neighbourhood in central London, near London's West End lying partly in the London Borough of Camden and partly in the City of Westminster ; and situated between Marylebone and Bloomsbury and north of Soho. It is characterised by its mixed-use of residential, business, retail,...

. Their habitués usually wore polo necks; in the words of one social historian, “thousands of pale, duffel-coat

Duffle Coat

A duffle coat, or duffel coat, is a coat made from duffle, a coarse, thick, woollen material. The name derives from Duffel, a town in the province of Antwerp in Belgium where the material originates...

-clad students were hunched in coffee bars over their copies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac”. As with the literary phenomenon of the so-called "Angry Young Men

Angry young men

The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John...

" from 1956 onwards, the image was more a male, than a female, one. However, when the singer Alma Cogan

Alma Cogan

Alma Cogan was an English singer of traditional pop music in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dubbed "The Girl With the Laugh/Giggle/Chuckle In Her Voice", she was the highest paid British female entertainer of her era...

 wished to mark her success by buying mink

Mink

There are two living species referred to as "mink": the European Mink and the American Mink. The extinct Sea Mink is related to the American Mink, but was much larger. All three species are dark-colored, semi-aquatic, carnivorous mammals of the family Mustelidae, which also includes the weasels and...

 coats for her mother and sister, the actress Sandra Caron, the latter asked for a duffel-coat instead because she wanted to be regarded as a serious actress and "a sort of a beatnik".

Continental influences

In Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious...

's novel, The Bell (1958), an art student named Dora Greenfield bought "big multi-coloured skirts and jazz records and sandals". However, as Britain emerged from post-war austerity

Austerity

In economics, austerity is a policy of deficit-cutting, lower spending, and a reduction in the amount of benefits and public services provided. Austerity policies are often used by governments to reduce their deficit spending while sometimes coupled with increases in taxes to pay back creditors to...

, some Bohemian women found influences from continental Europe, adopting, for example, the "gamine

Gamine

Gamine is a French word, the feminine form of gamin, originally meaning urchin, waif or playful, naughty child.The word was used in English from about the mid-19th century , but, in the 20th century, came to be applied in its more modern sense of a slim, often boyish, wide-eyed young woman who...

 look", with its black jersies and short, almost boyish hairstyles associated with film actresses Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century...

 (Sabrina

Sabrina (1954 film)

Sabrina is a 1954 comedy-romance film directed by Billy Wilder, adapted for the screen by Wilder, Samuel A. Taylor, and Ernest Lehman from Taylor's play Sabrina Fair...

, 1954, and as a "Gréco beatnik" in Funny Face

Funny Face

Funny Face is an American musical film released in 1957 in VistaVision Technicolor, with assorted songs by George and Ira Gershwin. The film was written by Leonard Gershe and directed by Stanley Donen. It stars Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Kay Thompson...

, 1957) and Jean Seberg

Jean Seberg

Jean Dorothy Seberg was an American actress. She starred in 37 films in Hollywood and in France, including Breathless , the musical Paint Your Wagon and the disaster film Airport ....

 (Bonjour Tristesse

Bonjour Tristesse

Bonjour Tristesse is a novel by Françoise Sagan. Published in 1954, when the author was only 18, it was an overnight sensation...

, 1957 and A bout de souffle, 1960), as well as the French novelist Françoise Sagan

Françoise Sagan

Françoise Sagan – real name Françoise Quoirez – was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Hailed as "a charming little monster" by François Mauriac on the front page of Le Figaro, Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois...

, who, as one critic put it, "was celebrated for the variety of her partners and for driving fast sports cars in bare feet as an example of the free life". In 1961 Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding

Fenella Fielding — "England's first lady of the double entendre" — is an English actress, popular in the 1950s and 1960s. She is known for her seductive image and distinctively husky voice.-Family:...

 played "a mascara

Mascara

Mascara is a cosmetic commonly used to enhance the eyes. It may darken, thicken, lengthen, and/or define the eyelashes. Normally in one of three forms—liquid, cake, or cream—the modern mascara product has various formulas; however, all contain the same basic components of pigments, oils, waxes, and...

-clad Gréco-alike" in The Rebel

The Rebel (1961 film)

The film The Rebel is a satirical comedy starring the British comedian Tony Hancock, and written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.-Plot:...

with comedian Tony Hancock

Tony Hancock

Anthony John "Tony" Hancock was an English actor and comedian.-Early life and career:Hancock was born in Southam Road, Hall Green, Birmingham, England, but from the age of three was brought up in Bournemouth, where his father, John Hancock, who ran the Railway Hotel in...

.

Others favoured the lower-cut, tighter styles of continental stars such as Bardot or Gina Lollobrigida

Gina Lollobrigida

Gina Lollobrigida is an Italian actress, photojournalist and sculptress. She was one of the most popular European actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s. She was also an iconic sex symbol of the 1950s. Today, she remains an active supporter of Italian and Italian American causes, particularly the...

. More generally, European tastes - including the Lambretta motor scooter and Italian and French cuisine, which the widely travelled cookery writer Elizabeth David

Elizabeth David

Elizabeth David CBE was a British cookery writer who, in the mid-20th century, strongly influenced the revitalisation of the art of home cookery with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes.Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the...

, herself a bit of a Bohemian, did much to promote - not only began to pervade Bohemian circles, but offered a contrast, from 1955 onwards, with the brasher Americanism of rock 'n' roll, with its predominantly teenage associations.

Hamburg and Beatlemania

In 1960, when the Beatles (then an obscure Liverpudlian combo with five, as opposed to their eventual "fab" four, members) were working in Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, West Germany, they were influenced by a Bohemian "art school" set known as Exis (for "existentialists"). The Exis were roughly equivalent to what in France became known as les beats and included photographer Astrid Kirchherr

Astrid Kirchherr

Astrid Kirchherr is a German photographer and artist and is well known for her association with The Beatles and her photographs of The Beatles during their Hamburg days....

 (for whom the "fifth Beatle

Fifth Beatle

The Fifth Beatle is an informal title that various commentators in the press and entertainment industry have applied to persons who were at one point a member of The Beatles, or who had a strong association with the "Fab Four" during the group's existence...

" Stuart Sutcliffe

Stuart Sutcliffe

Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe was a Scottish artist and musician, best known as the original bass player of The Beatles. Sutcliffe left the band to pursue a career as an artist, having previously attended the Liverpool College of Art...

 left the group) and artist and musician Klaus Voormann

Klaus Voormann

Klaus Voormann is a German Grammy Award-winning artist, noted musician, and record producer. He designed artwork for many bands including The Beatles, The Bee Gees, Wet Wet Wet and Turbonegro. His most notable work as a producer was his work with the band Trio, including their worldwide hit "Da Da...

 (who designed the cover for the Beatles' album Revolver

Revolver (album)

Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock group The Beatles, released on 5 August 1966 on the Parlophone label and produced by George Martin. Many of the tracks on Revolver are marked by an electric guitar-rock sound, in contrast with their previous LP, the folk rock inspired Rubber...

in 1966).

John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

's wife Cynthia

Cynthia Lennon

Cynthia Lillian Lennon is the former wife of musician John Lennon, and mother of Julian Lennon. She grew up in the middle-class section of Hoylake, on the Wirral Peninsula in North West England. At the age of twelve, she was accepted into the Junior Art School, and was later enrolled in the...

 recalled that Kirchherr was fascinated by the Beatles' "teddy-boy style", but that they, in turn, were "bowled over by her hip black clothes, her avant garde way of life, her photography and her sense of style". As a result the group acquired black leather jackets, as well as fringed hairstyles

Eponymous hairstyles

An eponymous hairstyle is a particular style of hair that has become fashionable during a certain period of time through its association with a prominent individual.- The "wannabe" effect :...

 that were the prototype of the "mop-top" cuts associated with "Beatlemania

Beatlemania

Beatlemania is a term that originated during the 1960s to describe the intense fan frenzy directed toward The Beatles during the early years of their success...

" in 1963-4. The latter coincided with the revival of the bobbed style for women (as adopted, for example, by singers Cilla Black

Cilla Black

Cilla Black OBE is an English singer, actress, entertainer and media personality, who has been consistently popular as a light entertainment figure since 1963. She is most famous for her singles Anyone Who Had A Heart, You're My World, and Alfie...

, Billie Davis

Billie Davis

Billie Davis is an English female singer who had hits in the 1960s, and is best remembered for the UK hit version of the song, "Tell Him" and "I Want You to Be My Baby" ....

 and, in America, Bev Bivens of We Five

We Five

We Five was a 1960s folk rock musical group based in San Francisco, California. Their best-known hit was their 1965 remake of Ian and Sylvia's "You Were on My Mind", which reached #1 on the Cashbox chart, #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, and #1 on the Adult Contemporary chart...

, and fashion designers Mary Quant

Mary Quant

Mary Quant OBE FCSD is a British] fashion designer and British fashion icon, who was instrumental in the mod fashion movement. She was one of the designers who took credit for inventing the miniskirt and hot pants. Born in Blackheath, London, to Welsh parents, Quant brought fun and fantasy to...

 and Jean Muir

Jean Muir

Jean Elizabeth Muir, CBE, FCSD was an English fashion designer .-History and early career:...

). However, when longer blonde hair (associated with, among many others, Julie Christie

Julie Christie

Julie Frances Christie is a British actress. Born in British India to English parents, at the age of six Christie moved to England, where she attended boarding school....

, Samantha Juste

Samantha Juste

Samantha Juste , became known on British television in the mid-1960s as the “disc girl” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. In 1968 she married Micky Dolenz of the Monkees. Their daughter is the actress Ami Dolenz....

 and a fashion model named Lorna McDonald

Lorna McDonald

Lorna McDonald was a blonde fashion model from the Lucy Clayton agency who, in the 1960s, became famous, though anonymously, as the young woman who jumped into Simon Dee’s white open-top E-type Jaguar car at the end of each edition of BBC television's chat show, Dee Time .-Dee Time closing...

, who, at the end of each edition of the BBC's Dee Time, jumped into Simon Dee

Simon Dee

Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd , better known by his stage name Simon Dee, was a British television interviewer and radio disc jockey who hosted a twice-weekly BBC TV chat show, Dee Time in the late 1960s...

's open E-type Jaguar ) came to typify the "sixties" look, advertisers turned to the Bohemian world for inspiration: through its use of herbs, Sunsilk

Sunsilk

Sunsilk is a hair care brand, primarily aimed at women, produced by the Unilever group, which is now considered the world's leading company in hair conditioning and the second largest in shampoo. Sunsilk is Unilever’s leading hair care brand, and ranks as one of the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate's...

 shampoo

Shampoo

Shampoo is a hair care product used for the removal of oils, dirt, skin particles, dandruff, environmental pollutants and other contaminant particles that gradually build up in hair...

 was said to have "stolen something from the gypsies".

Swinging London

By the mid 1960s, British pop music had stimulated the fashion boom of what Time called “swinging London

Swinging London

Swinging London is a catch-all term applied to the fashion and cultural scene that flourished in London, in the 1960s.It was a youth-oriented phenomenon that emphasised the new and modern. It was a period of optimism and hedonism, and a cultural revolution. One catalyst was the recovery of the...

”. Associated initially with such "mod" designs as Quant’s mini-skirt, this soon embraced a range of essentially Bohemian styles. These included the military and Victorian fashions popularised by stars who frequented boutiques such as Granny Takes a Trip

Granny Takes a Trip

Granny Takes a Trip was a boutique opened in February 1966 at 488 Kings Road, Chelsea, London, by Nigel Waymouth, his girlfriend Sheila Cohen and John Pearse...

, the "fusion of fashion, art and lifestyle" opened by Nigel Waymouth

Nigel Waymouth

Nigel Waymouth is a designer and artist, a co-partner in the boutique, Granny Takes a Trip, and one of the two-man team, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, which designed psychedelic posters in the 1960s. He has since had a solo career, including portrait painting.-Life and work:Nigel Waymouth was...

 in the King's Road

Kings Road

King's Road or Kings Road, known popularly as The King's Road or The KR, is a major, well-known street stretching through Chelsea and Fulham, both in west London, England...

, Chelsea

Chelsea, London

Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...

 in January 1966, and, by 1967, the hippie look largely imported from America (although, as noted, London stores such as Biba

Biba

Biba was an iconic and popular London fashion store of the 1960s and 1970s. It was started and primarily run by the Polish-born Barbara Hulanicki with help of her husband Stephen Fitz-Simon.-Early years:...

 (1964) had, for some time, displayed dresses that drew on Pre-Raphaelite imagery). The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards

Keith Richards

Keith Richards is an English musician, songwriter, and founding member of the Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone magazine said Richards had created "rock's greatest single body of riffs", and placed him as the "10th greatest guitarist of all time." Fourteen songs written by Richards and songwriting...

, whose early girl friend, Linda Keith, had, in her late teens, been a bohemian force in West Hampstead

West Hampstead

West Hampstead is an area in northwest London, England, situated between Childs Hill to the north, Frognal and Hampstead to the north-east, Swiss Cottage to the east, and South Hampstead to the south. Until the late 19th century, the locale was a small village called West End...

, noted on the Stones' return from an American tour in 1967 how quickly hippiedom had transformed the London scene.

Victorian imagery

This fusion of influences was discernible in two black-and-white productions for BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 television in 1966: the series Adam Adamant Lives!

Adam Adamant Lives!

Adam Adamant Lives! is a British television series which ran from 1966 to 1967 on the BBC. Proposing that an adventurer born in 1867 had been revived from hibernation in 1966, the show was a comedy adventure that took a satirical look at life in the 1960s through the eyes of an Edwardian .- Character...

, starring Gerald Harper

Gerald Harper

Gerald Harper is an actor, best known for his work on television, having played the title roles in Adam Adamant Lives! and Hadleigh ....

 as an Edwardian adventurer who had been cryopreserved

Cryopreservation

Cryopreservation is a process where cells or whole tissues are preserved by cooling to low sub-zero temperatures, such as 77 K or −196 °C . At these low temperatures, any biological activity, including the biochemical reactions that would lead to cell death, is effectively stopped...

 in time and Juliet Harmer

Juliet Harmer

Juliet Harmer is an English actress who was best known in the role of Georgina Jones in the BBC TV series Adam Adamant Lives! .-Early career:...

 as Georgina Jones

Georgina Jones

Miss Georgina Jones was a fictional modish young woman living in the Soho area of London in the mid 1960s. Played by Juliet Harmer , she was the main supporting character in the BBC television adventure series, Adam Adamant Lives! which starred Gerald Harper as Adam Adamant.-Genesis of the...

, a stylish "mod" who befriended him, and Jonathan Miller

Jonathan Miller

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE is a British theatre and opera director, author, physician, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the 1960s with his role in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and...

's dreamy, rather Gothic

Gothic fiction

Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...

 production of Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

's mid-Victorian children's fantasy Alice in Wonderland (1865). (Confirming the aspiration, Sydney Newman

Sydney Newman

Sydney Cecil Newman, OC was a Canadian film and television producer, who played a pioneering role in British television drama from the late 1950s to the late 1960s...

, the BBC's Head of Television Drama in the 1960s, reflected of Adam Adamant that "[they] could never quite get [the] Victorian mentality to contrast with the '60s".)

On the face of it, Carroll (a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) had been a rather conventional and repressed Oxford University don

University don

A don is a fellow or tutor of a college or university, especially traditional collegiate universities such as Oxford and Cambridge in England.The term — similar to the title still used for Catholic priests — is a historical remnant of Oxford and Cambridge having started as ecclesiastical...

, but he was a keen and artistic photographer in the early days of that medium and he developed an empathy and friendship with several of the Pre-Raphaelites; the sculptor Thomas Woolner

Thomas Woolner

Thomas Woolner RA was an English sculptor and poet who was one of the founder-members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was the only sculptor among the original members....

 and possibly even Rossetti dissuaded him from illustrating Alice himself, a task that was undertaken instead by John Tenniel

John Tenniel

Sir John Tenniel was a British illustrator, graphic humorist and political cartoonist whose work was prominent during the second half of England’s 19th century. Tenniel is considered important to the study of that period’s social, literary, and art histories...

. The imagery of Alice, both textually and graphically, lent itself well to the psychedelia of the late 1960s. In America, this was apparent in, among other ways, the "Alice happening" in Central Park

Central Park

Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...

, New York (1968) when naked participants covered themselves in polka dots and the lyrics to Grace Slick

Grace Slick

Grace Slick is an American singer and songwriter, who was one of the lead singers of the rock groups The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, and was a solo artist, for nearly three decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s...

's song "White Rabbit

White Rabbit (song)

"White Rabbit" is a song from Jefferson Airplane's 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. It was released as a single and became the band's second top ten success, peaking at #8 on the Billboard Hot 100...

" (1966) - "One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small" - that she performed with both the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane.

Since the 1960s: hippie/boho-chic

Journalist Bob Stanley remarked that "the late 1960s are never entirely out of fashion, they just need a fresh angle to make them de jour". Thus, the features of hippie fashion re-emerged at various stages during the ensuing forty years.

In the mid to late 1980s variants of the short and fundamentally un-Bohemian rah-rah skirt

Rah-rah skirt

The rah-rah skirt is a short flounced skirt that originated in cheerleading and became popular among teenage girls in the early 1980s. As such it marked, as the Oxford Dictionary noted, the first successful attempt to revive the miniskirt that had been introduced in the mid 1960s...

 (which originated with cheerleaders

Cheerleading

Cheerleading is a physical activity, sometimes a competitive sport, based on organized routines, usually ranging from one to three minutes, which contain the components of tumbling, dance, jumps, cheers, and stunting to direct spectators of events to cheer on sports teams at games or to participate...

) were combined with leather or demin to create a look with some Bohemian or even gothic

Gothic fashion

Gothic fashion is a clothing style worn by members of the Goth subculture; a dark, sometimes morbid, eroticized fashion and style of dress. Typical Gothic fashion includes dyed black hair, black lips and black clothes. Both male and female goths wear dark eyeliner and dark fingernails. Styles are...

 features (for example, by the singing duo Strawberry Switchblade

Strawberry Switchblade

Strawberry Switchblade was a female pop rock band formed in Scotland in 1981 by Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall, best known for their song "Since Yesterday" in 1985.-Before being signed:...

 who took inspiration from 1970s punk fashion

Punk fashion

Punk fashion is the clothing, hairstyles, cosmetics, jewelry, and body modifications of the punk subculture. Punk fashion varies widely, ranging from Vivienne Westwood designs to styles modeled on bands like The Exploited. The distinct social dress of other subcultures and art movements, including...

). In the 1990s the term, "hippie chic

Chic (style)

Chic , meaning 'stylish' or 'smart', is an element of fashion.-Etymology:Chic is a French word, established in English since at least the 1870s...

", was applied to Tom Ford

Tom Ford

Thomas Carlyle "Tom" Ford is an American fashion designer and film director. He gained international fame for his turnaround of the Gucci fashion house and the creation of the Tom Ford label before directing the Oscar-nominated film A Single Man.-Early life :Tom Ford was born August 27, 1961 in...

’s collections for the Italian house of Gucci

Gucci

The House of Gucci, better known simply as Gucci , is an Italian fashion and leather goods label, part of the Gucci Group, which is owned by French company PPR...

. These drew on, among other influences, the style, popular in retrospect, of Talitha Getty

Talitha Getty

Talitha Getty was an actress of Dutch extraction, born in the former Dutch East Indies, who was regarded as a style icon of the late 1960s. She lived much of her adult life in Britain and, in her final years, was closely associated with the Moroccan city of Marrakesh...

 (d.1971), actress wife of John Paul Getty and step-granddaughter of Dorelia McNeil, who was represented most famously in a photograph of her and her husband taken by Patrick Lichfield in Marrakesh, Morocco in 1969. Recalling the influx of hippies into Marrakesh in 1968, Richard Neville

Richard Neville (writer)

Richard Neville is an Australian author and self-described "futurist", who came to fame as a co-editor of the counterculture magazine Oz in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s...

, then editor of Oz

Oz (magazine)

Oz was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963 and 1969 in Sydney, Australia and, in its second and better known incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London...

, wrote that "the dapper drifters in embroidered skirts and cowboy boots were so delighted by the bright satin '50s underwear favoured by the matrons of Marrakesh that they wore them outside their denims à la Madonna

Madonna (entertainer)

Madonna is an American singer-songwriter, actress and entrepreneur. Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance. After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983...

 [the singer] twenty-five years later".

In the early 21st century "boho-chic" was associated initially with supermodel

Supermodel

The term supermodel refers to a highly-paid fashion model who usually has a worldwide reputation and often a background in haute couture and commercial modeling. The term became prominent in the popular culture of the 1980s. Supermodels usually work for top fashion designers and labels...

 Kate Moss

Kate Moss

Kate Moss is an English model. Moss is known for her waifish figure and popularising the heroin chic look in the 1990s. She is also known for her controversial private life, high profile relationships, party lifestyle, and drug use. Moss changed the look of modelling and started a global debate on...

 and then, as a highly popular style in 2004-5, with actress Sienna Miller

Sienna Miller

Sienna Rose Diana Miller is a British-American actress, model, and fashion designer, best known for her roles in Layer Cake, Alfie, Factory Girl, The Edge of Love and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. In 2007, the London Film Criticsnamed her British Actress of the Year for Interview...

. In America similar styles were sometimes referred to as "bobo-" or "ashcan chic", or "luxe grunge

Luxe Grunge

Luxe Grunge is a chicer updated grunge-boho collection; an unkempt approach to wardrobe, popularized by celebrities such as the Olsen twins....

", their leading proponents including actresses Mary-Kate Olsen

Mary-Kate Olsen

Mary-Kate Olsen is an American actress, producer, author and fashion designer. She made her career debut in 1987 alongside her twin sister Ashley Olsen in the television series Full House...

 and Zooey Deschanel

Zooey Deschanel

Zooey Claire Deschanel is an American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter. In 1999, Deschanel made her film debut in Mumford, followed by her breakout role as young protagonist William Miller's troubled older sister Anita in Cameron Crowe's 2000 semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous...

. As if to illustrate the cyclical nature of fashion, by the end of the noughties strong pre-Raphaelite traits were notable in, among others, singer Florence Welch

Florence Welch

Florence Leontine Mary Welch is an English singer-songwriter, best known worldwide as the lead singer of Florence and the Machine...

 and model Karen Elson

Karen Elson

Karen Elson is a British model, singer-songwriter and guitarist.As a child, Elson attended North Chadderton School in Chadderton with her twin sister, filmmaker Kate Elson. She began working as a model as a teenager....

.