Did beatniks beget hippies

Answer 1

You could say that beatniks were parent to hippies. Both groups were certainly alike in that both were determinedly non-conformist, or even anti-conformist, so while they all dressed alike, they all dressed differently from the people they weren't conforming with, which was anybody identified as part of the established culture, which they called the Establishment, man.

Both groups liked beards and long hair and any kind of music which appeared non-conformist. Horrified conformists suspected both beatniks and hippies didn't wash themselves.

Flowers were popular with both groups, and hippies were especially known for giving them away to Establishment people as a token of peace. This practice became upopular with the Establishment people, who mostly grew the flowers.

Both groups did grow some plants, but not the kind you see in Establishment gardens and parks.

San Francisco was hugely identified with hippies in the 1960s, while England was rather proud of its beatniks and, later, extremely proud of its mods, who were almost frighteningly Establishment and became a Tourist Attraction, especially in London.

Yves Saint Laurent featured beatnik clothing in at least one of his collections, but nobody liked it. The Establishment wouldn't buy it, and the non-conformists thought it was conformist and capitalist, and they couldn't afford it anyway. Paris, which pretty well invented non-conformists, the Establishment, and Style, and is still in charge of the last two, absolutely hated the stuff and Saint Laurent nearly died of shame, and had to join the army for three weeks with a view to fighting in Algeria. He didn't learn from this, and went on to invent the safari suit.

Australians invented their own non-conformists in the late nineteen fifties; they called the male ones bodgies and the female ones widgies.

Like beatniks, bodgies and widgies were held to be vaguely threatening, and they hung around outside milk bars looking frighteningly tough. I believe they all died out through sheer embarrassment; certainly, I've never met an elderly Australian who'll admit to having been either a bodgie or a widgie.

Surfies came later in Australia, as elsewhere, and you do sometimes meet old folk with long hair in ponytails below their bald patches who proudly admit to having been a top surfie. Unfortunately, many of the old surfing records have been lost, but we believe them anyway.

Surfies were neither tough nor threatening, but some had flowers painted on their surfboards and on their motor vehicles, especially Volkswagens. Surfies were sort of transitional hippies and nearly harmless but, sadly, many died out from fibreglass before they discovered that while fibreglass looked like plastic it was really tiny little bits of glass which weren't good to breathe in.