THE TOPLESS DRESS – AND THE SLEAZY 60S

Growing Up: Sex In The Sixties Peter Doggett Bodley Head £25

Araunchy documentary, London In The Raw, was premiered in Piccadilly on July 9, 1964. The film’s producer hired two sisters, Marion and Valerie Mitchell, to attend wearing a fashion item that was all the rage: a dress that exposed the wearer’s breasts.

The paparazzi had their fill. But the photographs could not be printed, and the sisters were arrested and charged with indecency. ‘It’s all a storm in a B-cup!’ quipped one of them.

They were let off with a conditional discharge.

Marion went on to operate under the name Janie Jones as a pop singer, TV star and – in the end – brothel-keeper. She was jailed in 1974 for procuring prostitutes for BBC executives.

The Affair Of The Topless Dress is one of many stories recounted in a book that doesn’t quite know whether to condemn the 1960s or drool over its most salacious episodes, and so instead does both, and rather successfully, too.

Peter Doggett uncovers some of the tales that lie outside of the era’s ‘well-trodden ground’. Nevertheless we encounter familiar names, from Nabokov’s Lolita to The Beatles and Germaine Greer.

We meet serial killers, sexologists, pornographers and – of course – Mary Whitehouse.

We also meet an awful lot of exploited young women, some of them very young indeed.

After all, those topless dresses were not intended for a matronly bust. Their designer, Rudolf ‘Rudi’ Gernreich, described the perfect breasts for the occasion as ‘young, firm, small’ and (of course) ‘adolescent’.

Adolescent breasts regularly took centre stage in a popular culture newly enthused about sexual freedom – for men, that is.

Doggett is attentive throughout to the costs to women of the promise of sexual liberation.

In rich and playful prose, Growing Up knits together material from newspapers, women’s magazines, films, television and pop music to create an account of the 1960s that, unlike most popular histories, does not edit out the grim bits.