‘Fashion’: How David Bowie was inspired by a classic song by The Kinks
Fashion was no laughing matter in the 1960s; it was an indicator of who you were and what you believed in. Sure, the only real differences between the mods and the rockers were their clothes and the way they styled their hair, but that was enough to turn London into a battleground. As the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the use of fashion as a means of individual expression was noticed by fashion retailers catering to a newly affluent youth market, giving birth to a new generation of fashion aficionados obsessed with the latest trends. It is this kind of individual that The Kinks mocked so readily in their 1966 single, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion.’
As John Davis notes in his book Waterloo Sunrise. “The sixties fashion revolution in London was initially driven not by department stores but by boutiques,” small, informal shops sprang up like mushrooms along Carnaby Street in the 1960s, providing competition to the French-style stores that had flourished in the years immediately after the Second World War. Offering cheap clothes to hungry customers keen to stay ahead of the curve, these financially vulnerable boutique stores survived by catering to a “young straight market responsive to adventurous design”. In other words, if it wasn’t bright, figure-hugging or made or corduroy, it wasn’t worth the effort.
In ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, The Kinks focus on the frivolity of the fashion world, mocking the young metropolitan professional who spends most of his money on dressing himself: “And when he does his little rounds
’round the boutiques of London town,” Davies sings. “Eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends / ‘Cause he’s a dedicated follower of fashion.”
David Bowie was very much part of this world, having come to regard fashion as a way of asserting his individuality. Costume, after all, was an essential part of his act. By 1980, however, he was growing disillusioned with the whole scene. In ‘Fashion’, which he considered a sequel to ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, he emphasises the shallow nature of the fashion industry while confessing his own participation in it.
“When I first started going to discos in New York in the early ’70s, there was a very high-powered enthusiasm and the scene had a natural course about it,” he recalled. “It seems now to be replaced by an insidious grim determination to be fashionable, as though it’s actually a vocation. There’s some kind of strange aura about it.” Where The Kinks saw fashion as a symptom of their generation’s narcissism, Bowie seems to have regarded it as a form of fascism. “Turn to the left, turn to the right,” he sings, conjuring up images of skinny runway models and military parades in the same breath.
You can revisit the single below.
