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The Cultural Movement of the Skinheads

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One of the biggest cultural movements to arise from Reggae was the Skinheads. Skinhead culture grew from the fusion between the modernists or ‘Mods’ and Jamaican rude boys. Mod culture was a youth movement in British cities that originated in the late 1950s, that represented a certain fashion, music tastes and scooter riding. The peak of the Mod culture matched up with the time when the majority of Caribbean immigrants arrived in the UK, in the mid 60’s. Due to a large amount of Mods being of working-class backgrounds, they were one of the few groups to mix with the Caribbean immigrants. Once Mod culture declined, due to commercialisation of the style and their demonisation due to the violence between them and rival ‘Rockers’, some Mods began the Skinhead movement by integrating Jamacian style and music into Mod fashion. Many young mods of the mid/late 1960s lived in the same working class and economically challenging areas as Jamaican immigrants in areas such as parts of South London. Those ‘hard’ mods eventually created the Skinhead movement. Those Mods began integrating the ‘rude boy’ fashion of short trousers, braces and Trilbys into their fashion of Fred Perry shirts, skinnier jeans and Dr. Martens boots. The actual ‘skinhead’ aspect of very short hair originates with working class Mods and very early Skinheads who choose to cut their hair this short for the practical reasons of it not impeding them in either street fights and football brawls, that some Mods

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