DLers of the 80s, please explain "Mod" style?

Cure kids where I grew up were goths. I never heard them referred to as “mods”.

The Cure weren’t mods. Google The Jam.

Until the late 90s there wasn't a name for goths in wide use. Cure kids, punks, weirdos, etc. I moved around a lot in the late 80s and 90s and was one of them. Mods is probably what your friend's aunt called it in her part of the country. It was only later that they were called goths. In the 80s and 90s I always associated goths with music like Bauhaus and The Damned, rather than music like Depeche Mode and The Cure.

This is just a data point.

I loved this look, it was closer to a beatnik look vs the goth-y Cure Siouxsie Sioux thing.

I agree with r2 and r4. The Jam would be mod. I think it was a little earlier than The Cure/Depeche Mode.

[quote] Mods is probably what your friend's aunt called it in her part of the country.

Possibly, R3. I'm in Chicago but friend's aunt is from Southern California, so this would have been Southern California in the 80s.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the '80s, and Mod fashion at my school was a melding of New Wave and Ska / 2 Tone styles. The guys emulated the looks of The Untouchables and The Specials with their checkerboard patterns, black trenchcoats, and trilby hats, while the girls, I remember wore two-tones wedge cuts and fashions like early Bananarama.

Sting as a Mod

Deee-Lite?

I associate "mod" with things like Oingo Boingo, Julie Brown, the films "Forbidden Zone", "Meet the Hollowheads" and "Liquid Sky" and comics like "Love & Rockets". Things like Pee-Wee Herman's original stage act sort of creep in there too. I guess I'd call it glossier than punk and more retro than goth - a kind of jokey take on '50s aesthetics.

OP, I vaguely remember one of my older siblings talking about this when they were in high school in the '80s. I'll ask them next time I see them.

I was a teenager in the 80s. We always used goth. Lower middle class kids in black.

Mod was never pretty.

Mod was in the 60s, not the 80s and they were not alike.

[quote] A friend's aunt described it as a style from the 80s and people who listened to things like Depeche Mode and the Cure?

She doesn't know shit.

So much misinformation being shared here. It was actually a Revival of the original English mod movement of the 1960s. The poster who appointed you to the band The Jam was on the right track .

R7 is right on.

[quote]So much misinformation being shared here. It was actually a Revival of the original English mod movement of the 1960s

You think that's what OP's friend's aunt was talking about?

[quote]who listened to things like Depeche Mode and the Cure?

Gurl, NO!

I was a mod revivalist and it lasted about a year circa '79.

There was a 'mod' look in SoCal in the 80's. Look up pics of The Specials - it was more of a mix of ska and 2-tone band looks.

I don't really associate it with girls that much - more guys had the look. And you didn't have to listen to a specific band or type of music.

Back then, there was a lot of music bunched under new-wave or progressive category. The kids who listened to that music had all types of looks.

But yes, mod was a thing - for lack of a better term. Not traditional 60's mod either.

yes i remember it well, i was a cure kid and we called it mod before goth.

I don't think we used the term 'goth' much in the 80's as a look. There was goth music - Bauhaus for example. But I think goth got turned into something more specific later.

There was always the white pancake makeup, black eyeliner, black trenchcoats with band buttons and then colored hair that defied gravity. But we wouldn't have called it goth.

Goth is all about the vampire thing, though, no?

Mod was more architectural. It's basically mall-rat postmodernism yoked to New Wave backdrops.

LA mod scene.

I thought the 80s mod was more of a revival of 60s mod, and then there was the broader 80s New Wave. I was there but mostly drunk.

Watch this movie.

Mods were NOT Goths.

And ska-influenced rock of the early '80s NEVER sounded like post punk/ goth/ The Cure/ Morrissey / Bauhaus or later Industrial music.

Your friend’s aunt hasn’t a clue what she is talking about. Mod was a 60s movement that had a small resurgence in the 80s but has never entirely gone away because of people like Paul Welles, Bradley Wiggins, Martin Freeman, Liam Gallagher and others. It was a very British thing and remains so really.

In the 60s it was derived from the term ‘modernist‘ and was about sharp Italianate dressing and soul music. Latterly it’s a way of dressing smartly and sharply, particularly for men who don’t want to go down the dad jeans/shorts slob look.

Weller not Welles.

I think mod meant totally different scenes in different areas of the country.

Yes, R29.

In the 60s, Americans used the word "mod" to cover anything modern and colorful and fashionable that came from London. Mod in London meant something totally different.

America played a huge part in the Swinging London "movement". It was an American journalist in London. who coined the phrase "Swinging London" in 1964 and Time Magazine that ran with it in 1966 (see pic) and that's when things really took off.

Many of the Swinging London movies were American financed, starting with Hard Days Night, which was also directed by an American.

When the Americans abandoned ship in circa 1970 (you know what those gurls is like, they move on, FAST) - the Swinging London scene died.

The 60s were such a turbulent time in the USA - focusing on England was a light-hearted distraction.

Remember Kennedy was assassinated just months before The Beatles arrived.

I remember all the Americans in London in the 60s as a kiddie....especially the film people.

There was a very good documentary about this called Hollywood UK. WHOA! it's online >

As you can see it's says at the start - 90% of funding for British movies in the 60s came from America.

[quote]I don't think we used the term 'goth' much in the 80's as a look.

We called them the People in Black in the mid-80s.

Have a photo of the lovely Paul Weller, “modfather” of the 80s.

I never heard goth used for kids in black unless it was specific to the band Bauhaus or Sisters of Mercy.

New waver Punk Rude boy Skin head

Were terms i heard in my area ( CT )in the 80s

In the '80s, to be Mod was more or less to be Goth but without the back hair and heavy black makeup.

Think Alison Moyet vs. The Cure

Okay, I'm confused. Was Sally Cruikshank Mod? Was Linnea Quigley? Yes, I am aware there was a UK movement from the '60s that was called Mod, but this was not that, rather obviously.

To me Mod in the '80s in the US meant a severe, glossy, obviously ironic take on what we would now call Post-Modernism. Pastels and angles and wink-wink gender-bending and straight camp. Too silly for New Wave, Too cheeky for New Romantic.

Ibid to those who sent you in the direction of my dream man my senior year, Paul Weller, then not only Mod God from The Jam but by that time even more Soul Croonerier in Style Council). Whatever he was at that point was pretty much the high-water mark of the Mod revival.

As for Goth, growing up in Chicago I kind of came up through both Medusa's and Berlin both kind of Goth Centrals in their own way. We didn't really have a name we labeled ourselves with outside of Alternative or Cool People. The Batcave club in London, and it's house band, Specimen, are your next stop for finding out everything you want to know about Goth but were afraid to ask.

I’ve always been a bit stick on the dividing line between Mod Revival & New Romantic. I think of the Romantics as the middle of a Venn diagram between New Mod & Goth, but this thread doesn’t support that idea.

The cleaner, more stylised New Romantics like Spandau Ballet & The Human League incorporated Mod into their look, or so it seems to me. Beyond the Kabuki makeup & dour posturing of the Romantics, are there many other major differences?

Go to this website, it'll explain most things.

ooops. here.

Are you sure she wasn't talking about Maude fashion?

Maude style would be pretty amazing R39.