At last a new series of Mad Men is on the way! So while we wait let's cast our minds back to the first series set in 1960. I know an awful lot of women who would risk all for just one night of passion with Don Draper (and will he even remember your name in the morning?) but where would Don be without those gorgeous suits?
In our present age of endemic casualness Mad Men reminds us of just how much we've lost in settling for wall to wall jeans, t-shirts and sneakers. I've just returned from a week of teaching at IED Design school in Rome where, yet again, I was the only guy wearing a suit and tie. This in Rome . . . where Marcello Mastroianni (also in 1960, in La Dolce Vita) knew a thing or two about how to wear a suit.
For me the real stars of Mad Men are its costume designer Janie Bryant and its set designer Amy Wells. My new book BOOM! - A Baby Boomer Memoir, 1947-2022 explores, amongst other things, the extraordinary extent to which the 60s were two decades for the price of one - the early and mid 60s of Don Draper, Playboy, slick skyscrapers, cool jazz and sharp suits being diametrically opposed to the let it all hang out, shaggy, flowers in your hair Hippy era which emerged from about 1966 onwards. (How, one wonders, will Don et al fit into/struggle against the coming of the Age of Aquarius?)
Here's two extracts from BOOM! - the first recounts my buying a less is more cool school suit in 1960 which, although no doubt a lot cheaper, could have passed for the one used in the opening credits of Mad Men. The second explores how spot on Amy Wells' set designs have been in contrasting the modernist aesthetic of Sterling Cooper with, on the other hand, the traditional styling of Don and Betty's 1960 suburban home. I also lived in a suburban home (in Neptune, New Jersey) in the 50s and 60s and I reject the implication given in so many books on design in the 60s which (wrongly) imagine that modernism pervaded the home as well as the office. No, Mad Men gets it right in insisting that the home (ditto Betty's feminine, flouncy dresses) remained a traditional preserve.
Hope you enjoy and feel free to leave your comments and, if a fellow Baby Boomer, your own memories of this amazing time.
BUYING A SUIT - 1960, NEPTUNE, NEW JERSEY
[an extract from BOOM! - A Baby Boomer Memoir, 1947-2022 - © Ted Polhemus]
It’s 1960 . . . Richard Nixon is battling John Kennedy for the White House – with help (not enough, as history will prove) from Don Draper and the other Mad Men at The Sterling Cooper Ad Agency. I’m in my first teenage year and in need of a new suit, so my father takes me to Fisher’s on Springwood Avenue.
For my father’s generation – after, as before World War II – a good, desirable suit used a surplus of fabric and lots of gratuitous buttons to signal luxury and success: extra wide lapels, big shoulders, baggy trousers, double-breasted. But in the ‘50s (influenced by ‘Cool Jazz’ and the new styles of Italian menswear) an opposite, ‘modern’ look began to emerge: trim, pared-down, minimal. By the early ‘60s, even in Neptune, it was impossible for a guy to look hip without a single-breasted suit with narrow lapels, tight trousers, an ‘Ivy League’ button-down collar shirt, a straight, pencil-thin tie (cut square at the bottom rather than, heaven forbid, pointed), a plain, silver tie pin (exactly the same width as the tie and worn no more than 3 inches up from the belt) and a pair of loafers (optionally ornamented with a shiny dime lodged in the strap over the arch).
Like so many things, this ‘modern’ (or ‘modernist’ or, in Britain, ‘Mod’) style was born in the ‘50s within the emerging world of ‘Cool’ Jazz. Its startling, double-take shock of the new is described perfectly by Joe Goldberg in Gene Sculatti's delightful book A Catalog of Cool:
There were several stores along Broadway displaying these wonders. The hippest of them all but, sadly, a world I never made was Phil Kronfeld. In the conformist Fifties, Phil Kronfeld used to show a suit in his window that looked like a Lenny Bruce parody of the regimental banker’s grey flannel. It was grey, all right, but not the dark grey, as light as your mother’s hair, and it was single-breasted, in a time when double-breasteds were still the thing. Most outrageous of all, it had one button. One button! Do you understand what that means? Can you visualize how deep the cleavage went, how much of your solid-knot tie it showed? [Sculatti (ed.), 1982, p. 4]
By 1960 this modern style of menswear had made its way from Broadway and the new Jazz clubs of Manhattan all the way to Neptune, New Jersey. But my father (whose own appreciation of Jazz reached nothing more contemporary than Louis Armstrong) didn’t know this. To his dying day my father was handsome, well-groomed and exceptionally ‘dapper’ (using a word to which he was partial) but the less-is-more ‘Mod’ thing never impacted on his sartorial consciousness. Accordingly, my younger brother Joe and I attended church, and any other rare occasion which called for ‘Sunday Best’, dressed in suits so voluminous that both of us could easily have fit into just one with room to spare.
Now, however, as the older sibling and a teenager, much influenced by Modern Jazz and the style of the hipper male teachers at school, I was determined to stand my ground. (Hip teachers like Mr. Foster Diebold: unquestionably the coolest person ever to teach English Lit - who, as well as wearing suits so sharp you could cut yourself on them, also drove a sports car. A sports car which, strangely, someone blew up with a bomb one evening - the mangled wreckage prominently exhibited in The Asbury Park Press the following day. Yet, as if this sort of thing happened all the time, even in Neptune, following only an absence of a day or two, Mr. Diebold returned to Neptune Junior High with an air of nonchalance worthy of James Bond or Don Draper at his best.) And all of us - Mr. Diebold, Don Draper and me - owed a huge sartorial debt to Rod Sterling, the creator and presenter of the greatest TV series ever, The Twilight Zone - a man who, if the truth be known, looked even better in a suit and smoked more cigs than Don Draper.
Back in the days before shopping malls transformed the American consumer experience, the usual place on the Jersey Shore to buy a suit would have been Steinbach, or one of the other large department stores in the center of Asbury Park where the goods on offer tended towards traditional, classic quality rather than avant-garde street cred. Had my father opted to take me to one of these stores I expect I would have emerged dressed like Bing Crosby rather than, as I hoped, a member of The Modern Jazz Quartet. But these stores were expensive and Fisher’s on Springwood Avenue was known for its bargains. My father liked a bargain. And, to be fair, it should also be said that, while dated, my father’s own sense of style had a flair and working class edge which he might have found lacking in the bigger, middle class department stores.
Like most of the Jersey Shore’s towns, Asbury Park is sliced in half by railroad tracks which run north and south, parallel with and about a mile back from the sea. The east half of Asbury is all neatly gridded streets down to ‘The Circuit’, which encircled the first and second blocks back from the boardwalk and where, a la American Graffiti, a lot of gas was used in the pursuit of love, sex and the flaunting of automotive design. In the early ‘60s, this eastern slice of the city (where the big department stores were) was grand, prosperous and exclusively white. West of the tracks however, streets get narrower and instead of being based on an urban, right-angled grid, all jumbled up.
More importantly, at least back in 1960, the tracks also marked a division of class and race. Blurring the boundary between Asbury and Neptune, this neighborhood west of the tracks was where the ‘colored folks’ lived - their community focused on Springwood Avenue, which had long since lost the rural and picturesque connotations of its name.
Although only a mile or two from my home, this was a neighborhood I saw only rarely and fleetingly. As a kid I’d collected old newspapers and magazines from our neighbors, and when these threatened to take over the garage my father would help me load them into the car and we’d go together to the ‘Scrap Yard’, which was located in the ‘colored’ neighborhood. First they would weigh the car loaded down with all the newspapers, then we would unload, then they would calculate the difference and I’d come away with a few dollars in my pocket.
More than this, however, I’d come away with my mind jostling with vivid images. Black dudes in sharp suits hanging around a street corner – their postures laid-back yet precise. A group of young, sexy women in tight-fitting dresses with gravity-defying bouffants and extraterrestrial make-up outside a bar. Dingy liquor stores and lovingly painted churches. A tired mother laden with grocery bags shepherding her children home – all in old but beautifully cared for, freshly cleaned and ironed clothes. An old, white-whiskered drunk propped against a wall. Poverty and Cadillacs. Sounds of shouting and mesmerizing music I didn’t recognize. Everything all mixing together, cheek and jowl - so different from my own neighborhood where little happened on the street and each family lived out their isolated lives within a fenced-off rectangle of land.
Fisher’s Department Store, situated at the heart of this black neighborhood, on Springwood Avenue itself, was a wonderfully ramshackle place with boxes and bags of stock crammed into every inch of available space. If there was carpet on the floor it was threadbare. If there was the occasional mannequin it had a broken nose or was missing an arm. Mostly there were just jumbled racks and towering piles of clothes or shoes, and it always amazed me that anyone knew where anything was, but they always did. Also, luckily for me, they knew exactly what was ‘in’ and what was ‘out’ – no doubt resulting from taking scrupulous note of their black customers’ shifting trends.
Nevertheless, the salesman who came up to serve us – white, Jewish, old enough to be my grandfather, dressed in a style which was far from cool – didn’t inspire my confidence.
‘We’re looking for a suit for my son here', explained my father.
‘No problem', replied the salesman, ‘I’ve got just the thing'.
Sizing me up with his eye, rummaging around amongst the store’s seeming anarchy, he returned in a remarkably short time with exactly the suit I was looking for – one remarkably like that described so enthusiastically in A Catalog of Cool. My eyes lit up. My father, however, was clearly not impressed.
‘You and I sir', the salesman said turning to address my father, ‘we like a fuller cut. But this will be right for your son'.
Not waiting for my father’s reply, I went to try it on. It fit like a glove. A tight glove. It was cool. I had to have it. But my resolve would be tested to the limit. It was bad enough modeling, turning this way and that, fully aware of my father’s penetrating gaze tracking over every inch of me. But then, his coup de grace: focusing on the tight cut of the trousers at the crotch he loudly commented, ‘Everyone can see everything you’ve got'.
Nothing could have mortified me more. I didn’t want my father to know I had a cock, let alone allude to its existence in public. A couple of years before, when the physical education teacher had instructed us boys to buy an athletic support, instead of conferring with my ‘old man’ about this the way I expect other boys instinctively did, I’d chosen to walk miles to a drug store unfrequented by my family in order to make the purchase clandestinely. Now, despite all this effort, my sexual being – that common denominator of masculinity which I shared with my father but so desperately wanted to avoid acknowledging – had ceased to be a secret.
I wanted to shrivel up and disappear, but I also wanted that suit. I REALLY WANTED THE SUIT. And I said so. Smiling, a glint of respect in his eye at my perseverance, my father gave up the fight and I entered The Modern World in a suit which, while no doubt a whole lot cheaper and less well made, was pretty much the same style as that worn in the opening credits of Mad Men which, in its graphic reduction of jet black and pure brilliant white – cuffs, tie, lapels all as bare to the bone minimal as a Mondrian – so perfectly captures the insistent modernity of the year I entered the world of cool school style and the year the original series of Mad Men is set: 1960.
Suburban Life - Why Don and Betti Draper's 1960 home is traditional rather then modern
[extract from BOOM! - A Baby Boomer Memoir, 1947-2022 - © Ted Polhemus]
An interesting irony: we rightly see the 50s and the early 60s as the era of ultimate conformity – with even the exceptions to this rule (the Beats, the Bikers, the Hipsters) demonstrating just how overwhelming must have been the stifling weight of the conformity which prompted their extreme rebellion. And surely this is true. But at the same time one must also acknowledge the fact that the 50s and early 60s saw the birth of unprecedented consumer choice, diversity and heterogeneity within the mainstream as well as within the eccentric, rebellious fringes.
Such individual choice was obviously the driving force behind the supermarket: a nearly infinite constellation of types of cereal from which to choose rather than, as previously in the corner shop, just a handful. And in Channel Lumber (one of those new steel and glass boxes which suddenly sprang up like mushrooms all along Highway 35) it wasn’t only the Formica for your kitchen countertop which offered a seemingly unlimited range of choice for your home.
How I used to marvel at the stylistic range of the little screw-on plates which covered the electrical switch and socket boxes in suburban American homes. There were the standard off-white ‘cream’ plastic plates, with which our own home at Tilton Place (Neptune, New Jersey) had originally been equipped, but there was also the (to me) excitingly futuristic (think diner decor) option of dazzlingly undecorated, gleaming stainless steel. This, however, was only the beginning: ‘wood effect’ (or even, possibly, real wood itself), sculpted into all manner of unlikely shapes offered Old World Louis XIV gilded possibilities on the one hand and, on the other, New World ‘Colonial’, which one felt would have been George Washington’s choice had he lived in 20th century suburban America. But it didn’t even stop there: ‘Ranch’ style electric switch plates could symbolically transport your New Jersey (or wherever) suburban box into the Wild West. Or, something vaguely rustic and Mexican, could position it south of the border. Electrical plates shaped like pink flamingos or Elvis were also available (and how one kicks oneself now, for not having bought and preserved them for posterity).
That personal freedom first outlined theoretically in The Constitution was now available in practice at your local supermarket, at DIY emporiums like Channel Lumber and at Howard Johnson’s with its 28 flavors of ice cream. The big department stores like Steinbach in Asbury Park had offered some choice, but such stores always limited the possibilities according to their own definition of ‘good taste’ – such ‘direction’ being expected of them. That would have been the job of my great aunt Charlotte in the women’s fashion department there – sorting the wheat from the chaff.
But now shops like Channel Lumber abdicated from this responsibility to guide the consumer to the ‘right’ choice. Now, so long as it didn’t catch fire and burn your house down or give you an electric shock, the consumer could have any imaginable style of plate to cover his or her electrical boxes. Achieving a real democratization of style, Channel Lumber said ‘If you want it you can have it, and far be it from us to tell you what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste. Here you the customer really are always right.’ (So it will be the Elvis electrical plates then).
This freedom of choice was inherently modern, but frequently (and more often than not when it came to the appearance of the suburban American home) the style option chosen was one which harked back to a reassuring past rather than boldly looking forward into an ever more futuristic future. For the really interesting thing about design in America in the 50s and early 60s was the extent to which ‘real people’ almost never opted for ‘modern’ design in their own homes. I can’t remember a single house on my block where the new completely or even predominately triumphed over the old. A ‘modern’ style sofa (as eventually appeared in my family living room) often reflected not taste so much as the fact that it was a great deal cheaper than traditional styles and, in our case, acquired for a mere carload of Green Shield Stamps. Modernity was fine for public buildings, but when you went home at night you wanted the old world, the tried and tested, the cozy, comforting and safe.
We see this dichotomy, this schizophrenic split, in Don Draper’s 1960 life in Mad Men. Don’s sharper than sharp, supremely minimal suits – with that razor-edge slash of white cuffs and collar – we’ve already mentioned. There’s also Don’s extremely less-is-more office and, of course, the squeaky clean glass and steel skyscraper in which he works. And let’s not forget his Modern Jazz loving, determinedly bohemian, in the groove, conspicuously copacetic mistress. But back in Don’s suburban home it’s a very different story: old style, naturalist wood cladding, soft drapes in traditional windows, frilly lampshades, patterned wallpaper, cream not white trim. And within it all, also perfectly retro-styled, Don’s wife Betty who, a Grace Kelly clone, wears flowing, flowery dresses, not too much make-up and her hair so natural-looking that only her hairdresser knows for sure.
In Don Draper’s 1960 suburban home all is tasteful, feminine, reassuringly classic and traditional – but for the electric lights and the TV set (which, when not in use, as was the case with almost all TV sets at this time, is discreetly hidden away in a mahogany cabinet which resembles an old-fashioned sideboard) it could be 1860 in this reassuringly timeless home. And this is of course exactly how Don wants it: his entire life is a balancing act between the future and the past – a balancing act which he hopes will bring a steady-state sustained stability and easy equilibrium but which, unfortunately, is in reality the precarious, death-defying balancing act of the circus acrobat performed day after day after day. And, as we know from the opening credits, a fall from the dizzy heights is always on the cards.
In Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8½ it is interesting to note that, at least as far as the women are concerned, the polarities of Don Draper are reversed. Of course, Marcello Mastroianni’s central character Guido is, true to the Italian style, at least as modernist and minimal in his own appearance as Don Draper is in his. But, unlike Betty Draper, film director Guido’s wife (played by the breath-taking Anouk Aimée, who dangerously unhinged my seventeen-year-old self and troubles my sleep to this day) is also a miracle of modernism: trim, stark, white linen trouser-suited, tightly cropped hair and a pair of jet black, chunky, almost square, cubist, plastic glasses. Instead, it is Guido’s mistress – froufrou, frilly, frivolous, curvaceous, Old World feminine – who seems to have stepped out of a previous century, and who supplies a reassuring yet enticing retro fix for our anti-hero hero.
The need for just such reassurance was also to be found in the homes of millions of early 60s American families – homes, like the one I grew up in at 423 Tilton Place, which stylistically demonstrated a hesitation, a dis-ease about completely, unreservedly, leaping headfirst boldly into the Brave New World which beckoned and bewitched as never before at the start of the 1960s. Yes . . . but. Best to embrace the new but to preserve some section of your life (your home, your wife, your mistress) within the timeframe of a reassuring (imagined) past. And so it came to pass that Chanel Lumber sold an awful lot of ‘ye olde world’ mahogany veneers, ‘Colonial’ light switch covers and wallpapers worthy of long dead European monarchs.
This stylistic inclination back towards the past shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. As Gutman and Kaufman tell us in their delicious book American Diner, precisely the same thing happened during the first flowering of modernism in America back in the 1920s:
But though a few fashionable and fashion-setting clients bought the new modern furniture, the majority of Americans were still fearful about experimenting with the sacred domain of their own homes. For quite a few years, most people continued to fill their houses with the same old mohair-covered, over-stuffed suites of furniture and the same fussy decoration. Modernism’s most important early appearances, therefore, were in public spaces – hotel lobbies, railroad stations, offices and commercial buildings.’ [Gutman and Kaufman, 1979, p. 36]
And this duality – this schizophrenia – carried on even throughout what one would have thought was the ultimate flowering of the modernist spirit in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Not that you would know it from flicking through any book on the design of that period: for the curators of design collections and custodians of good taste, have thought it best to remove my family home (and those of pretty much everyone else who shopped at Channel Lumber) from history. But while these reassuring pockets of tradition lingered on (and on and on), one beacon of modernity penetrated even the most traditionally draped of windows to dazzle with its brilliant sparkle: the futuristic sci-fi vision of guilt-free, casual, thoroughly modern sex.
Here's the table of contents for BOOM!
CONTENTS
1) 1947
2) Coming Home
3) Suburban Life
4) Modern Times
5) Sex
6) Drugs
7) Rock 'n' Roll
8) Protest
9) Swinging London
10) No Future
11) 2022
Sources and Inspirations
- Music
- Film
- TV
- Fiction
- Non-fiction
Timeline
Good news . . .BOOM! is now available on Amazon Kindle with 125+ links to the best film, TV and music of each decade
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