A culture as kinetic and innovative as Modernism, with an aesthetic constantly transformed by a vanguard of Faces, was always going to break its self-imposed borders. Over the course of the early 1960s, Mods would see the dark Soho corners where the culture had gestated flooded with light.

Once known to a national and ultimately global audience, Mod would convulse and, in many ways, create from scratch popular and youth culture. In turn, what Stanley Cohen described as the ‘agents of social control’ would impose their own definitions and meanings on the original vision. Though Modernism was already fully formed by the time the straight world was alerted, contact would leave its mark.

For a few short years from 1958/9, Modernism quietly evolved in the coffee houses of Soho. Here, the originals plotted the coordinates of a youth culture that would establish the template for every subculture to come. But Mod didn’t emerge in a vacuum. The wider social drivers are by now well known: the post-war invention of the teenager, an unshackling from austerity’s moral and material grip, the erosion of class-based deference, glimpses of social mobility and of globalized horizons previously unknown, or dismissed, by a national imagination locked into colonial myopia.

Modernism announced so much more than the birth of cool. The archetypal Mod was a composite of historical trends, tastes and opportunity. An intoxicating brew of influences revealed to teenagers during the 1960s alchemized an ever-evolving blueprint. Like all subcultures, Modernism contains a flurry of contradictions. But its key components – the music, the clothes, the attitude and commitment to the shock of the new – remain constant.

Ask any two Mods what the culture means to them and you are likely to hear a mix of the subjective (‘I’m a Mod because…’) and the objective (‘Mod is…’). We self-mythologise, namecheck the originators, condemn the villains (or ‘tickets’) and valorize our heroes. But the unmediated Mod is itself a myth. From the moment the tabloid lens constructed the meaning of Mod for a mass British audience, a culture previously free to develop within its own climate-controlled bars and clubs began to change.

Modernism had to account for itself. A moral panic framed the culture in fevered terms. That quality most central to Mod’s DNA – detail – was challenged by a pearl-clutching focus on its most lumpen exponents. As Cohen observes in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, the post-1964 Mods received news of the movement via a prism far removed from an underground whose signifiers had been codified and jealously guarded by a select few. Amplified by a media scandalized by this uprising of working-class autonomy and creativity, a version of the ‘Sawdust Caesar’ Mod took root.

What mainstream culture did not bargain for was how resilient Modernism’s carbon elements would be. In the time it took ‘parental culture’ to notice the Mod on its peripheral vision, a formulation had been established. Its verities would stand firm against the tides of fashion, technology, shifts in class composition and musical trends. It would evolve on its own terms.

In ‘We are the Mods,’ Christine Feldman takes us on a cross-culture journey through Mod’s global iterations. From Germany to Japan, national contexts have filtered Mod through a gauze of localised sensibilities. Like a global cultural exchange, British working-class youth imported their tastes from France, Italy and the US, before exporting their synthesis to the rest of the world.

Mod would make cameo contributions to everything from skinhead, suedehead, punk, soulboy, casual, Madchester and Britpop cultures. Like lettering through a stick of Brighton rock, Mod is the constant refrain over decades of British youth culture. In 1979, when the full glare of the music press was directed at a nascent revival scene, the attentions of a media more invested in passing fads served only to confuse and disorient a burgeoning culture. Today, any new scene still unsure of its essential character can expect to be dissected and shared to a hundred different media platforms before it has drawn its first independent breath.

Since those heady, outward facing days, a large section of Britain appears to have retreated behind a Brexit curtain of shuttered, curtain-twitching exceptionalism. Reform UK’s barbarians are at the gates. Would Modernism’s cosmopolitan reference points be so readily embraced were a young Mod’s forgotten story to be told for the first time in 2025?

In Rituals of Resistance, subcultural theorists like Stuart Hall locate Mod squarely in the context of a working-class desire for autonomy and meaning. Denied access to a mainstream culture detached from their everyday lives and with the resources available to them in the post-war period, the Mods forged an agency and identity beyon d the mainstream – ‘clean living in difficult circumstances.’

As post-2008 austerity consolidated under consecutive Tory governments, young people continue to explore self-expression at the fringes of consumer culture. Mod will always find a way. Its foundations are too distinct and too well established to dissolve now. Despite, or perhaps because of a more atomized society, Modernism continues to retain a profound allure and mystery.

DJ, producer and all-round counter-cultural hero Don Letts has described the evolution of two distinct identities – ‘Black’ and ‘British’ – towards a new and hard-won hybrid. In Coventry, public schoolboy Jerry Dammers imagined a forging of Mod, punk and skinhead cultures in debt to the Windrush generation and its influence on white working-class youth. To this day, the creative collision between black and white teenagers remains a lodestone of British culture.

Modernism remains a redoubt of individualism lovingly curated as an affirmation of collective class identity. Flicking two fingers at the squares and ‘numbers’ of conventional culture, Mods first walked the streets as high-end consumers, peacocks amongst the pedestrians.

Today, while it would undoubtedly benefit from an injection of youth into its still healthy ranks, Modernism’s verities remain a permafrost of British youth art, style, music, and literature.