The fashion heyday for cool young chaps was London, 1965

The response to my last post about 1970s male fashions (here) set me thinking: when were young men's clothes really cool? If I were 18 again, three stone lighter and less dorky-looking than I was back then, how would I want to dress? The answer is, I'd want to dress like the members of South-West London R&B groups c.1965:

Obviously, there are some problems here - mainly the Brian Jones-style blond hair-helmet sported by Keith Relf and the fact that Jimmy Page evidently hadn't received the memo about never wearing a parting with hair that length or a military-style top with too many buttons - but, as a tubby 13-year old, I'd have killed to look like any of these blokes. The style worked in black and white, too. which was important back then:

I presume that The Yardbirds had been studying another London-based band of that era:

Obviously, Bill Wyman never quite made the sartorial grade, but the other four look okay to me. The odd thing is that bands from the provinces never quite got it:

And Americans bands didn't quite manage to get the look either:

Of course, by the time I was old enough to afford cool clothes, it was the hippie era and men's fashions had all gone severely Pete Tong!

Oh dear! As for commenter Riley's worries about he and Martin D sporting cravats as they rode around Wimbledon, they'll be relieved to hear that they were stylistic trail-blazers - an Australian Masterchef judge, the generously-proportioned food critic Matt Preston, has made them all the rage again: