Peacock Revolution: Mainstreaming queer styles in post-war Britain, 1945-1967

In the late 1950s, Carnaby Street designer and retailer John Stephen began a systematic program to decouple himself, the products he sold, and the very notion of male fashionability from associations of effeminacy and homosexuality. Of course this project was never complete, but nor did it need to be. Carnaby Street shops, beginning with those of John Stephen, traded on a sense of playful camp that distinguished them from what were seen as old-fashioned or short-back-and-sides fashion establishments and worldviews. This article examines how producers and retailers of queer styles interacted with 1950s and 1960s consumers, and how these consumer interactions illuminate the changing relationship between homosexuality and hetero-normative constructions of masculinity in mid twentieth-century Britain