In the early 1950s, working-class teenagers in London started showing up to dance halls in long drape jackets with velvet collars, drainpipe trousers, and pompadour hairdos. Their look approximated the aristocratic Edwardian styles then in fashion on the expensive Savile Row, but slightly askew, knocked together by backstreet tailors on the cheap. These kids were called Teddy Boys, Ted being short for Edward, and they scandalized postwar Britain. The press painted them as violent thugs, and politicians fretted over their malign social influence.

Max Décharné’s Teddy Boys: Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution (Profile Books, 2025) is the first book to give the Teds the full treatment. Décharné presents the Teddy Boys less as a criminal menace than a class provocation. World War II had so significantly reduced the population of working-age men, Décharné explains, that Britain in the early 1950s was approaching full employment. Teenagers could leave school and expect to get a well-paying job straightaway — and if they didn’t like it, they could quit and find another. The result was a cohort of working-class youths with unprecedented spending money and self-respect.

As Décharné explains in the following interview with Jacobin’s Meagan Day, British class society had always been marked by a rigid dress code. Eccentricity was for the aristocracy; workers were meant to dress in a drab, mud-colored uniform and blend into the background. In medieval times, wearing clothes above one’s station was an actual crime. The Teddy Boys’ and Girls’ real offense, then, was breaking class decorum by dressing in luxe, attention-grabbing clothing, a privilege of self-expression long reserved for British elites.