Find your new sixties-style bestie in these 7 cool places
If you’re looking for sixties fans or your local vintage community, keep reading to find out where they’re hiding.
When I started listening to Nancy Sinatra and binging on Brigitte Bardot movies, my school friends were super rude to me.
They said things like…
“Why are you listening to your mum’s music?”
Har. Har.
“Urgh, why can’t you play something cool?”
Jimi Hendrix is cool?
And I’ll never forget when one (ex)friend said…
“you only watch old movies to seem interesting.”
How. Dare. She.
But I didn’t care. I knew I wasn’t the only teenager that loved old things.
I used to have an online diary (on a site called Xanga). On there, I documented my vintage discoveries and people my age would comment, and tell me they loved it too.
Over time, I started to bump into Sixties girls who weren’t on their pension yet.
But, it took me a while to work out where they were hiding.
So I’ve jotted down the places where I found Nancy Sinatra fans and Pattie Boyd lookalikes hanging out so you can find them too and create your groovy girl gang.
Find your vintage community in these 7 places
1. Your Local '60s Night
Many “Sixties nights” are full of tacky cocktails and cackles but, there are club nights out there that make you feel like you’ve time travelled back to 1968. It’s hard to tell what kind of night you’re going to attend from just a flyer, so do some research to avoid ending up at the wrong one. See who is going, look at the photos of previous events and check whether it’s in a cool bar. In the UK, there is great Mod/Sixties events company called The New Untouchables which I highly recommend looking up.
2. Vintage Fairs
Vintage fairs are where I collected most of my advice on collecting vintage clothing. If you’re really into your vintage fashion, get off of eBay and go to a fair. I’ve met a girl who makes beautiful A-line skirts, a girl who specialises in gorgeous beehives and a band-tee crazy girl all from fairs.
An extremely popular fair is Judy’s Vintage Fair which tours around the UK but there are many, many out there. Just find your nearest vintage community on facebook groups and they’ll let you know when the next fair is.
3. Sixties Exhibitions
If you find the right exhibition, chances are you’ll find your new BFF standing right next to you, swooning over a recreation of The Rolling Stones’ bedroom. And last year, we had SO much choice. There was an exhibition on Mary Quant, one on Stanley Kubrick and so many more.
Just look up your local gallery/museum and see what sixties-based exhibitions are coming up. The Tate has announced all their exhibitions for 2020 in this handy list including one on Andy Warhol.
4. Vintage Collection Launches
These are more difficult to attend because you usually need to be invited. But a vintage fashion launch is one of my favourite ways to find a new bestie. It’s more intimate, there are gorgeous clothes plus there’s a bar!
To get invited to one of these, I’d suggest getting buddy-buddy with your local vintage shop and that way, they’ll keep you in mind for their next fashion launch.
5. Concerts & Festivals
When I went to watch The Monkees, I was half expecting to be surrounded by baby boomers but no. There were a lot of young Monkees fans. The good thing about concerts and festivals is that everyone is in a great mood and are itching to talk to you about their favourite bands.
If you’re into sixties music, this is essential. Although sixties bands are more likely to have heartburn than burn their guitars, it’s an experience you will not regret.
Just find either a tribute band or your favourite 60s bands and see if they’ve got any tours lined up. You can also check out this Sixties Gold Tour that does a bunch of UK shows every year.
6. Iconic Locations
Here are some 60s locations which I’ve loved in London:
- Abbey Road
- The Phoenix In Cavendish Square
- Portobello road
- The Troubadour
And although London is a huge city, you can usually find at least one 60s location that’s loved by the vintage community in most places. Like the Cavern club in Liverpool or The Beatles Cafe in Bournemouth. But don’t go crazy on the research.
I’d recommend looking for places in the closest city because I doubt you’ll find an Edie Sedgwick fan in a village with a population of 12 and a half. You can check out my free ebook on iconic locations to get some more ideas of where to visit.
7. Old Movie & Theatre Screenings
Cinemas and theatres are always throwing anniversary screenings of old classics which is great if you’re a classic movie fan like me. But don’t talk to people during. People don’t want to hear about your obsession with Brigitte Bardot’s hair during a one-off screening of La Verité. Head to the theatre’s cafe or bar after the movie.
These are a few places that I’ve met fellow sixties lovers and I hope this will open up your world to more women who share the same taste in music, fashion and film as you.
Do you have an event in mind that you want to attend this year? Is it a festival, vintage fair or other? Tell me in the comments below.
P.S. Do you know a sixties fan who needs to get out of the house? Send this to her and make her year!
2 Comments
I’d love to go to more sixties exhibitions this year! I wonder if there’s a list of that somewhere…
Love the Abril Fatface font in your headings, Mandy, just like I use thanks to the ‘Lyretail’ theme at WordPress for my music blogs, ‘Girls Of The Golden East’ and ‘Bananas For Breakfast’, which I chose because of the Bratislavská Lýra (Bratislava Lyre) music festival and then subsequently discovered that one of the font’s co-designers was born in Prague! ‘Czech’ out my ‘Abril Display’ font use at the brilliant and informative ‘Fonts In Use’ site. It’s still on the front page as I write on 6th April.
Although – being probably a ‘little’ older than you! – I was in at the core of the Mod Revival and other similar revivals going on at the same time in the year I turned eighteen at the end of the Seventies all these discoveries mostly in the former Czechoslovakia over Cyberspace in this last half-decade or so have made me a bit more Seventies than Sixties, which might seem like bad faith with the Sixties revivalist crowd in which I have spent much of my adult life, but if you ‘Czech’ out both ‘Girls Of The Golden East’ and ‘Bananas For Breakfast’ I think you’ll soon see that the Pop scene there and in other parts of the former Soviet Bloc was still stacked with some very ‘Sixties-ish’ girls, which was a bit different from the way the Pop scene had gone here.
Unless I am missing something here, I think that should be ‘The Monkees’, not ‘The Monkeys’, which is very apposite to the Blog ‘Bananas For Breakfast’, dedicated to my No. 1 ‘Sixties-ish’ girl in Seventies Czechoslovakia, Valérie Čižmárová, who covered that bit of Late-Sixties/Early-Seventies Bubblegum by the group of ‘chimpanzees’, Lancelot Link and The Evolution Revolution’s ‘Sha-La Love You’ as ‘Dávno nejsem hloupá’ (‘I’ve Not Been Crazy For A Long Time’)….and thinking of The Monkees and 1968, that was the year in which Valérie Čižmárová launched herself into the public eye as a sixteen-year-old hopeful around the time ‘Valleri’ was in the charts.
One, two, three…”I love her, Va-a-a-a-alerie etc.” (that misspelling being intentional!)
She apparently was also a Jimi Hendrix fan, as she said in an interview for a 1973 edition of the magazine aimed at the Communist Young Pioneers, ‘Sedmička Pionýrů’.
…and no, I ‘don’t care’ about all those who think, “you think Communist Central/Eastern Europe could be ‘cool’???”