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The Enduring, Evolving Style Legacy of The Beatles
Their mod suits and bowl cuts helped define the Fab Four and made them stars—but they almost didn’t happen. We explore how style shaped the most successful band of all time.
T here’s an early photograph of The Beatles you were never meant to see. Taken in April 1963, when the band was on the cusp of global stardom, and instead of their trademark matching suits, the boys are wearing jeans.
In terms of The Beatles’ chronology, the styling just doesn’t make sense. That year, new manager Brian Epstein was busy cultivating a clean-cut image for the soon-to-be Fab Four. Jeans, still a symbol of youthful rebellion in the early 1960s, were never going to be part of the formula that saw From Me To You, She Loves You, and I Want To Hold Your Hand top the charts.
The image belongs to a cache of pictures taken for Lybro Jeans, a small denim brand from the band’s hometown and speaks to a curious moment in time when The Beatles were both somebodies and nobodies; just famous enough to star in local Liverpool advertisements, but not enough to do it on their own—or Epstein’s—terms.
By 1963, Epstein had already spent a considerable amount of time convincing the group to abandon the rough-and-ready Gene Vincent-inspired look they’d adopted while coming up on the Hamburg musical hall circuit. It was there in Germany, practically still teenagers (and still performing with original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and drummer Pete Best), that the group were flung into the European beatnik scene, having befriended some existential art students. Among them was Astrid Kirchherr, the band’s early photographer, who is credited with cutting their signature matching mop tops.
The haircuts, with their whiff of European intellectualism, could stay, Epstein compromised. The leather jackets, pants, and cowboy boots needed to go. “People thought we looked undesirable, I suppose… With black T-shirts, black leather gear and sweaty, we did look like hooligans” George said later. “Brian Epstein was from an upper middle-class background and he wanted us to appeal to the producers of radio, television and record companies.”
"The suits made them more palatable to their fans and their fans' parents"
Craig Inciardi, founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Sotheby's Specialist in Popular Culture.
To impress the c-suite, he settled on the matching tailoring that now defines the peak of Beatlemania. As far as sartorial schemes went, it was hardly groundbreaking—plenty of bands before (and after) them wore matching suits or outfits “to make them more palatable to their fans and their fans' parents,” explains Craig Inciardi, founding curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Sotheby’s Specialist in Popular Culture.
Even John Lennon capitulated to Epstein’s wishes. He told the New Musical Express in 1975, “Yeah man, all right I’ll wear a suit – I’ll wear a bloody balloon if somebody’s going to pay me; I’m not in love with leather that much!” Though he would also take a revisionist approach, claiming it marked the moment the band “started to sell out”. “Brian put us in neat suits and shirts and Paul was right behind him,” he said. “I used to try and get George to rebel with me. I’d say to him: ‘Look, we don’t need these fucking little suits. Let’s chuck them out of the window.’”
As you’d expect, Paul tells it differently. “It was later put around that I had betrayed our leather image but, as I recall, I didn’t actually have to drag anyone to the tailors,” he said. “We all changed to the straight image… Check the pictures—John’s not scowling in all of them!”
Dezo Hoffmann, Distributed by Capitol Records, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dragged or otherwise, off they went to the tailor. Savile Row’s Arnold ‘Dougie’ Millings was the man chosen for the job, given his reputation for dressing the likes of Cliff Richard, Buddy Holly, and Adam Faith. One of his most iconic designs for the band was a set of Pierre Cardin-inspired jackets—a snappy collarless style that apparently forewent pockets because Epstein, ever cracking the sartorial whip, didn’t want the band to be able to put their hands in their pockets and disrupt the suit’s clean lines.
In the early 1960s, Epstein knew you couldn’t take a greasy, leather-clad boy back to your mother, but dressed up in his Sunday best? He’d be welcomed in for supper—even if his hair was a bit of a mess. As historian and podcaster, Tom Holland puts it: “They were just edgy enough.” Enough to get them invited to perform at the The Royal Variety show in 1963. Enough to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in early 1964. Enough to fill Shea Stadium with 55,000 screaming teenagers in 1965.
Copycats spawned. The American four-boy band The Monkees appeared on the scene, with a similar image to The Beatles. Maybe it was simple trendsetting. But maybe the simple arithmetic of the style—clean suit + Cuban-heeled boots + mop—allowed the musicians to focus on what really mattered, the music.
The Beatles’ relentless work ethic in those early years is now the stuff of legend, but it’s hard to overstate the sheer pace of their productivity at this time. “A six month period with The Beatles is such a long period of time,” explains Inciardi. “So much music is made and their influence… is huge.” But their clean-cut style remained largely intact. The hair might have been growing out, but the suits, staunchly, stayed on.
After an endless torrent of world tours, back-to-back album recordings and releases, and two feature-length films, the band took their first break in 1965 and were granted a whole month off. Or in Beatles’ terms, practically a lifetime. It was the reset they needed before returning to the studio in October 1965 to record their sixth album, Rubber Soul, widely considered a break with their pop sound and the first step on their way to a bona fide progressive rock band. It was the first time in their careers they could take their time—and that meant time to experiment and reinvent.
Inspired by Bob Dylan and the Byrds, their new music incorporated the eclectic folk and soul influences they’d encountered on the road. Their wardrobes got the same treatment. Taking control of the album’s cover art (another first) the foursome finally ditched Epstein’s suits in favor of rugged suede trucker jackets and grew their hair even longer.
Revolver, released a year later in 1966, continued the theme. By this point, London was well and truly swinging. The band said goodbye to Savile Row, and hello to Carnaby Street, now the sartorial center of the world. They started to make more daring, expressive fashion choices, ones that positioned them as individuals instead of a monolithic unit. “It’s most certainly intentional,” Inciardi adds. “I think once they didn't have to wear the matching outfits, they were free. And that's when they started shopping for their own clothes individually.”
Lennon used his newfound freedom to start wearing his signature round sunglasses; George, meanwhile, amassed an impressive collection of ruffled shirts. They all started growing facial hair. The band became frequent visitors to Granny Takes A Trip, a cornucopia in Chelsea considered the first psychedelic store in London. “It was a lot of velvet clothing… very colorful,” Inciardi explains. “The clothing that was available… was not really available in the States… it was more elaborate.” They even opened their own shop, the Apple Boutique, which Paul called “a beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things.”
By 1967, the Summer of Love, The Beatles had fully embraced counterculture and psychedelia and were beginning to tread even fresher musical ground, with the release of what would become the world’s first ‘concept’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club and the surrealist Magical Mystery Tour film. Nowhere is this more apparent than the press launch for the former. Paul is wearing a pinstripe suit and purple T-shirt; Ringo has on his most flamboyant tie, George has paired his ruffled shirt with a striped maroon blazer and John has donned an elaborately-embroidered shearling jacket accessorized with a sporran—the Gaelic pouch traditionally worn in Scotland with kilts. Clearly outfit coordination wasn’t discussed.
After one trip too many, the band travelled to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh in 1968 for a brief dalliance with Indian spirituality and Transcendental Meditation. It was the most creatively fruitful period of their careers. So naturally, they got the digs to match. But when the time came to take the cover shots for their last album Abbey Road a year later, gone were the traditional white tunics and flower garlands.
They replaced them with four suits – if George’s Canadian tuxedo counts. But in these suits, they are anything but coordinated. In their final act as a foursome, the band walks away from the studio, all out of step, having swapped their costumes for a confident casualness that speaks to the dawn of the new decade. Paul is even barefoot.
If The Beatles’ early years had been characterized by carefully-curated conformity, they were rewarded in the late 1960s with a blank creative check. It was a currency that afforded them a unique sort of style freedom that would ultimately cement their status as the greatest band of all time—and one of the most stylish. And all it cost them was a few years in matching suits. Good thing John didn’t throw them out the window.
