Be My Baby: Sensory Difference and Youth Identity in British Fashion Retail, 1945–1970

British fashion retailers emerged from the Second World War with severe stock shortages and shabby, damaged and hopelessly out-of-date infrastructure. Yet, for all the challenges of the immediate postwar era, there was also a development that offered exciting opportunities for selling new types of fashion goods in enormous numbers: the growth of the teenage consumer. But what did teenagers really want from a fashion store?

It soon became clear that this new demographic wanted more than just the inexpensive ready-to-wear clothing that had become available in ever-greater quantities as a result of wartime manufacturing trends. They wanted retail spaces that were unlike those in which their parents shopped, ones that felt like entirely different environments that belonged solely to them. This chapter traces how this was achieved through the experimental use of lighting and music to create sensory experiences in teenage fashion departments and boutiques from 1945 to 1970. Using department store archives, fashion magazines and the retail trade journal Display, it explores the successes and failures of British retailers in their attempts to follow the latest social science research into the effects of sound and light on consumer behaviour. The chapter traces how these ideas changed over time, from the use of live jazz music to create a “club” atmosphere at Liberty & Co. in 1947 to the close relationship between London’s pop stars and its fashion boutiques in the 1960s, and from the instillation of coloured fluorescent lighting in Bentall’s teenage department in the late 1940s to the sensory confusion of the darkness and mirrors in 1960s boutiques. In doing so, it explores the role of sound and lighting in shaping the experience of fashion consumption in the second half of the twentieth century and asks how this impacted ideas about the sensory nature of modernity, gender, youth and pleasurable consumption in postwar British society.