Sixties Counterculture Generation Now Changing the Way We Age?

Revising Language to Change Attitudes

Images on this collage from Canva.om.

London in the Sixties

In 1965, I moved to London intending to go to the Lucy Clayton School of Modelling. I was eighteen. Fashion was in the process of change from the sophisticated, mid-calf-length creations of the fifties to something completely new. Mary Quant, the British designer, had emerged on the scene in the UK with her geometric designs which were worn just above the knee. This was considered very daring. For me, fresh from a small country town in the Midlands, it was mind-blowing. I had always loved clothes, designing and drawing them, browsing through fashion magazines and saving up to buy them.

While attending the Lucy Clayton School in the evenings, I worked as a secretary in a dress manufacturing company in Beak Street in Soho. When I graduated from the modelling school, I worked for another dress manufacturing company in Clerkenwell. This time I modelled the latest designs for buyers of fashion chain shops.

I’d been told by Lesley Kark, CEO of Lucy Clayton’s, that though I had the face and the figure, I didn’t have the height for the catwalk. I was so excited to be in London I didn’t mind where I worked. I was just happy to be in this exhilarating new life. London seemed to be at the epicentre of everything of importance that was happening in the world.

The dresses I had to model were mid-calf length and very boring in their design. One buyer asked me if I liked the dress I was modelling. Not sure what to say, I opted for the truth. “No”, I said. Sydney, the Managing Director, overseeing this potential sale, spluttered that I was young, and the dress wasn’t really for my age group. The buyer asked me another question. If I were older, do I think I would wear this dress? Again, I answered in the negative.

This exchange led to the sacking of the designer employed by the company. Sydney and his cohorts had realised they had to move with the times if they wanted to continue to sell dresses on the new fashion scene that was now aimed at the young. Rather than employing a new designer, several strategies were used to create designs to be made up at the factory and shown to prospective buyers.

One method was Sydney and I would go window shopping in the West End. He would point out dresses in high street shop windows that he’d like to get a closer look at. We would go in and I would try on the dress. He would quickly and surreptitiously make sketches of the structure of the design. It probably looked a little odd. I would have been eighteen or nineteen and Sydney would have been in his forties. We’d sometimes get sent packing when it was realised what we were doing.

Another way was for me to look through piles of current fashion magazines and pick out dresses that appealed to me. I liked this method. I got to keep some samples of the designs that were made up in the factory that I then wore for buyers. The company became a huge success and moved to the West End. I was offered the job of buyer in the new set-up.

However, my request for a pay rise to cover the extra travelling costs was turned down. So I didn’t go with them to the West End, but I wasn’t particularly ambitious. I enjoyed a year working as a temp in various offices, including Shell in Waterloo and the British Standards Institute where I was offered a permanent secretarial job, which I turned down.

The sixties was a time when youth dominated in almost every popular cultural field, a trend that had begun in the fifties. Fashion was all about the young. Music became more accessible in the UK as radio stations were set up to play only pop music, the music of youth. There was a move away from being like the previous generation. It was a time of questioning tradition and authority. The youth of the sixties was a counterculture generation and the divide between old and young became known as “the generation gap”.

Ageism had existed long before the nineteen sixties, but the term was coined in 1968 by Robert Butler, an American Pulitzer prize-winning gerontologist, to describe the systematic discrimination against older people. It’s still relevant today as the social narrative around ageing continues to be negative. In 1995, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of Older Persons rejected the term elderly in preference of ‘older persons’, as noted by the UK charity dedicated to helping those in later life, Age UK. They questioned whether the rest of us should follow suit.

Guidelines have been recommended by press bodies to change the language used about older people. Examples of biased language to be avoided are ‘elder’ ‘elderly’ ‘senior’ and ‘the aged.’ These are considered othering. I’ve only recently read an article in a newspaper where the person being written about was referred to as elderly. It turned out that she was in her sixties. So journalists are not all taking note of these new guidelines.

Phrases like ‘older person’, ‘older adult’, and ‘older individual’ are preferred in the guidelines, as ageing should be conveyed by authors as a normal human experience, they insist. A person’s age could be mentioned rather than lumping them into a homogenous group, as in Mary Smith, aged 84. Changing the language used to describe older people will help to reduce the negativity, which can affect them in various ways. It may influence employers who might see them as frail and incapable, so they are overlooked when looking for work or volunteering.

Older people themselves can internalise the negativity around ageing and those who do are more likely to neglect looking after their health by eating unhealthily, smoking, drinking alcohol, and not keeping up with their health check-ups. Studies have shown that those who are positive about their ageing can live over seven years longer than those with negative perceptions.

In my forties, I gave up eating meat and took up yoga, both of which I continue with today. In my late sixties, I determined I would maintain a positive mindset and refuse to talk about myself as being old. It’s not about being in denial, because I accept how old I am, it’s about not giving age a negative angle. So, for instance, if I can’t do something that I used to be able to, I don’t say, “I can’t do ….. now, because I’m old”, I look at the reason I can’t do that something and try to change it. I see this positive way of thinking being promoted by many third-age influencers on social media. It’s a growing phenomenon.

Perhaps it’s being part of the counterculture revolution in the sixties, wanting to move away from tradition. Now we are the older generation and we don’t want to age the way previous generations did. There is a definite move afoot to change the language and perceptions of growing older and it seems to be the youth of the sixties now promoting this new attitude to ageing.

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Have you read a newspaper or magazine article and been surprised by its choice of words to describe an older person? Let me know in the Comments.

Next time I’ll be writing about how I traced my family tree, mostly online, how engrossing it was, and how the people I discovered in the records became real to me.