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Printing the Counterculture: From Pop Art to Psychedelia in Magazines, 1966-1973

AUB Library's Special Collections contain some rare countercultural and underground publications, from the UK and the USA. We've gathered them together for this mini exhibition, charting how magazines were a tool for artists, designers and poets in the 1960s and 70s. 

The term ‘underground press’ refers to magazines and newspapers which came out of the youth-led counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. The underground press mirrored the changing way of life in the UK and USA, publishing on topics such as rock music, occultism and mysticism, drug use, pornography, sexuality, alternative lifestyles and anti-establishment thought. Often controversial, artists and poets found that these magazines gave them an uncensored voice. These publications became platforms for Avant Garde artists, offering a space for experimentation with graphic design, cartoons and the emerging art movements of the 60s and 70s.

International Times (1966-1973)

International Times was Britain’s first underground newspaper, a radical weekly publication which covered art, literature, politics and news of alternative lifestyles. It was launched on 15 October 1966 at The Roundhouse at an 'All Night Rave' featuring Soft Machine and Pink Floyd. The event promised a 'Pop/Op/Costume/Masque/Fantasy-Loon/Blowout/Drag Ball' featuring 'steel bands, strips, trips, happenings, movies'. Following legal threats from The Times newspaper, it was was renamed IT.

As the British counterculture grew in prominence, IT covered many alternative topics including articles on Eastern mysticism, flying saucers, vegetarianism, communal living and, of course, drugs; the paper provoked controversy by including the street prices of LSD and marijuana. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were early contributors. Members of The Beatles helped to keep it financially afloat. Unsurprisingly, IT often fell foul of the establishment and was subject to a number of police raids.

According to Barry Miles, who founded the magazine with John Hopkins, “It’s very, very difficult now to imagine how straight England was, even in the mid 60s. It was a very black and white world then… The idea of anyone from our community writing for the Guardian or the Times was inconceivable. None of the papers had any popular music coverage in those days. Our group of people needed somewhere to express themselves, so in early 1966, Hoppy (John Hopkins) and I started to put it together.”

Oz (1967-1973)

Oz magazine is one of the most important magazines of 20th century counterculture, publishing on subjects ranging from gay rights to racism, the environment, feminism, sex, the pill, acid, rock music and the Vietnam War. Produced in a basement flat in London's Notting Hill Gate by three editors, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, the magazine was renowned for its psychedelic covers by pop artist Martin Sharp, cartoons by Robert Crumb, and provocative articles that called into question established norms of the period.

In the early 1970s, Oz became the subject of the longest obscenity trial in British history after it was raided by the obscene publications division of the Metropolitan Police. The best known images of the trial come from the committal hearing, at which Neville, Dennis and Anderson all appeared, wearing rented schoolgirl costumes. The editors were convicted of two lesser offences and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, but these convictions were later overturned.

Aspen (1965-1971)

Aspen was conceived by Phyllis Johnson, a former editor for Women's Wear Daily, who wanted to break away from the magazine format. Known as the ‘Magazine in a Box’, each issue came in a customized box filled with things like booklets, flip-books, posters, records, super-8 recordings, musical scores, cardboard cut-outs and postcards.

Issues #1 and #2 of Aspen centred on the town in Colorado it was named after. Issue three, however, marked an editorial shift. Moving from place to time, issues #3-#10 demonstrated fully the concept of the magazine as artwork, capturing a specific movement or way of thinking in the late 1960s conceptual Avant Garde, with contributors including the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Yoko Ono. Although the magazine was supposed to come out regularly, working with artists proved difficult. “All the artists are such shadowy characters,” publisher Johnson said, “that it takes months to track them down.”

Read on to find out about the creation of the two issues from which this exhibition takes its name:

• Aspen: Pop Art Issue (1966)

Issue #3 of Aspen was the first ‘themed’ issue, dedicated to Pop Art. The issue was designed by the artist Andy Warhol and David Dalton, a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine.

Published in 1966, it was housed in a box with graphics based on the packaging of "Fab" laundry detergent. Among its contents were a flip-book based on Warhol's film Kiss, and Jack Smith's film Buzzards Over Bagdad, a flexidisc by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, a "trip ticket book" with excerpts of papers delivered at the Berkeley conference on LSD by renowned psychedelics guru Timothy Leary, and a one-off copy of the Warhol Factory's one-shot underground paper The Plastic Exploding Inevitable.

• Aspen: Psychedelic Issue (1970)

Inspired by the acid trip tickets presented by Warhol in issue #3, issue #9 was devoted to the art and literature during the psychedelic drug movement. Published in 1970, it was edited by Angus MacLise and his wife Hetty MacLise, legends of the early psychedelic/avant-garde movement. Angus was known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground who abruptly quit due to disagreements with the band playing their first paid show. Hetty was an artist, poet and musician. The two were married by Timothy Leary in Golden Gate Park. Fascinated by the occult and Eastern mysticism, the MacLises relocated to Kathmandu in 1971, when their four-year old son, Ossian, became a Buddhist monk.

Subtitled ‘Dreamweapon’, the psychedelic issue contains poetry, calligraphic design, stamps, a phonograph recording and musical scores drawn in different styles. From the words “Lucifer, Lucifer, Bringer of Light” printed on the back of the cover to Neal Cassady’s quote “You gotta zig when they zag” written on the inside of the box, the Psychedelic issue is possibly the most fascinating of all of Aspen's issues.

Further Reading:

Allen, G. (2011). Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Birch, J. and Miles, B. (2017). The British underground press of the sixties: a catalogue. London: Rocket 88.

Brennan, A. (2017). An Architecture for the Mind: OZ Magazine and the Technologies of the Counterculture. Design and Culture. Vol. 9 No. 3. pp. 317–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2017.1368828.

Dopp, B.J. (2007). Review of Aspen: The Multimedia Magazine in a Box. American Music. Vol. 25 No. 1. pp. 125–130. https://doi.org/10.2307/40071648.

Gil-Glazer, Y. (2024). Birds, bees and hippies: sex education on TV and in Oz magazine in Britain of the 1960s-70s. Sex Education. Vol. 24 No. 2. pp. 172–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2023.2167071.

Stansill, P. (2006). Life and death of International Times. British Journalism Review. Vol. 17 No. 4. pp. 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956474806074955.

Fashion & Satire in Punch Magazine

One of the older collections in the Library is a back run of Punch magazine, some of which are more than 180 years old. This a a great resource to study the history of Victorian print culture - but it's surprisingly useful for learning more about the history of fashion!

From the time of its publication in 1841, Punch was one of the most popular weekly magazines in Victorian Britain. Offering a mixture of jokes, cartoons, and social and political commentary, Punch was aimed at a conservative middle-class male audience, though was considered suitable to be read by the whole family. It therefore becomes a guide to the manners and morals of Victorian society, and its cartoons are a straightforward reflection of mainstream attitudes.

Today we may consider some Victorian fashions strange or oppressive – but if Punch shows us anything is that the men who created these cartoons thought the same thing! Satirical cartons are one of the few places you can see historical fashion at its worst, and fashion provided frequent fodder for Punch’s humorous drawings, ridiculing vanity, excess and eccentricity. While Victorian men’s dress codes were seen to be relatively static and uniform, women’s clothes were constantly changing, in line with technological developments and advances in rights for women. As a visual record of the period, Punch provides a window into Victorian social mores, tastes and opinions on fashionable dress, as well as revealing male anxieties over gender roles, class, morality, etiquette, and the rapidly changing world.

Read on for a few examples of how fashion and dress were represented and ridiculed by Victorian satirists!

Bloomerism (1851)

Attention to female clothing in Punch initially appeared in the context of the bloomer costume. The bloomer, an alternative trouser-dress for women, emerged in 1851 and received much press attention after Amelia Bloomer, a young American woman, introduced it to the public. Unlike the heavy and long skirts of the time, that rendered the wearer almost immobile, the trouser-skirt was lighter and easier to wear. The British press manufactured controversy over this new modes of dress – a perceived transgression of gender norms – and the fashion was short-lived, all but finished by 1852.

Punch’s cartoons continued to ridicule the costume long after the original furore died down. These illustrations were suggestive of the many objections that bourgeois society had to the idea of women wanting to wear trousers in public. Initial illustrations featured women in male dress and imitating male poses and behaviour. Men, when they appear, are forced into the background or into more passive roles. The cartoons suggest that, permitted to dress in this way, women would take on a more active, masculine role in society, and are variously depicted smoking pipes, asking men to dance, protecting them on the street and proposing marriage.

Crinolinomania (1850s)

Over the course of the 1850s, dresses grew bigger and wider, requiring increasing numbers of petticoats to support them. These layers of undergarments were made of horsehair, stuffed pads and stiffened fabric and were hot, heavy and unhygienic. In 1856 a patent was taken out for a ‘cage’ petticoat, made of graduated spring steel hoops, suspended on cotton tapes. The new cage crinoline did away with the layers of heavy petticoats, allowing skirts to become both lighter and larger, and became an overnight fashion sensation.

The new fashionable silhouette was quickly satirised in the pages of Punch, with the men who wrote and illustrated the magazine ridiculing its size, its inconvenience and the women who wore it. Punch termed the fad ‘crinolinomania’, a mass hysteria that had taken over women of all social classes. It blamed the crinoline for all manner of ills, including corrupting the morals of young women, and causing death by drownings, crushings and burnings. Cartoons variously depicted fire accidents, women stuck in doorways, concealing gentlemen behind the giant expanse of their skirts or blown into the air like balloons.

The likely reason behind the constant attacks on the crinoline seen in the pages of Punch may have been down to how they increased the presence of women in the public arena. Women in crinolines took up too much room, they invaded men’s space and they swept them off the pavement with their enormous girth. Men felt crowded out of galleries and ballrooms, and unable to approach ladies whose expansive crinoline made them physically inaccessible. The irony of the crinoline is that, despite its impracticalities and associated dangers, it created, literally and metaphorically, public space for women.

As Nature Intended (1860s-90s)

Edward Linley Sambourne’s extensive cartoon series, “Designs After Nature” comprises over 20 images published between 1867 and 1876, all depicting in elaborate dress taking the form of animals, including birds, lobsters and snails. These cartoons parody and ridicule some of the most extreme forms of fashionable dress of the period, such as tight-laced corsets and bustle skirts, whilst also implying that such fashions were outlandish and unnatural.

Sambourne’s later cartoons from the 1890s would become more critical of the use of animals in the creation of fashion accessories. These particularly targeted the trend for feathers that saw many birds hunted to near-extinction so their plumage might be used to create stylish millinery, parasols, muffs, boas and fans. At one point egret feathers were worth more than gold. By the end of the nineteenth century there was significant backlash against this fashion, and animal protection societies, such as the Fur, Fin, and Feather Club and the Society for the Protection of Birds, campaigned against the use of animals in women’s clothing.

The Aesthetes (1880s)

The Aesthetic Movement of the 1880s represented a startling departure from conventional patterns of Victorian life. The followers of aestheticism stood out in a crowd: their dress, their speech, and their ideals all marked them as sensitive, creative, intense, and dedicated to the ideals of beauty. Aesthetic women favoured looser, simpler forms of dress worn without heavy petticoats and bustles. For men, the velvet, furs, purple satin and knee breeches worn by Oscar Wilde would become the template.

In Punch, George du Maurier ridiculed the aesthetes in Punch in a series of cartoons published from 1873 to 1882. He created several recurrent characters to parody the Aesthetic style, including the poet Jellaby Postlethwaite, the artist Maudle and their foolish admirer, Mrs. Cimabue Brown. In the pages of Punch, Aesthetes were depicted as grotesque slouching figures, dressed in droopy, wrinkled Liberty fabrics, with untidy hair and downturned mouths. They fawned over each other in drawing rooms, unaware of their own ridiculousness. Adherents to the movement were usually seen wearing sunflowers, lilies and peacock feathers, but illustrators would also rely on posture, expression and general demeanour to juxtapose men and women in Aesthetic dress with the fashionable ideal. For du Maurier, Aesthetic men looked like women, and Aesthetic women looked like old women; this depiction was a reflection of du Maurier’s conservative sensibilities, his dislike of affectation and his distrust of change.

Most of the surviving illustrations of the Aesthetic look are ­Punch caricatures. This has given rise to the persistent rumour that Aesthetic fashion was an invention of the magazine, fuelled by du Maurier’s claim that Aesthetes "only exist in MR. PUNCH'S vivid imagination" (1891). However, the Aesthetic style was very real, and in terms of dress, the Punch cartoons were only a slight exaggeration.

The New Woman (1890s)

The pages of Punch also poked fun at changing social trends, especially the shifting roles and behaviours of women. From the 1890s, cartoons featured women wearing pants, bathing at the beach, and engaging in physical activities like riding bicycles. They often juxtaposed a sporty young woman with a man or a woman from an older generation, who were alternately surprised or made uncomfortable by these new behaviours.

Dress reform was far less controversial by the end of the century, and bloomer-like rational dress was popularised by bicycling culture of the 1890s. In the pages of Punch, women became more active and athletic, and shown engaged in various outdoor pursuits including swimming, cycling, hunting and mountaineering. This image was frequently labelled ‘The New Woman’. Nevertheless, this didn’t prevent Punch from suggesting that rational dress, sensible for athletic pursuits, made it impossible to distinguish the gender of ladies who wore it. Throughout the cartoons of this era, female bicyclists are mistaken for men or accused of wearing their husband’s clothing. 

In the final decades of the century, more middle-class women began to attend college, went out to work and became economically independent. Over these years, we see Punch’s shifting attitudes to women’s attire and thereby women’s changing role in society. Because of Punch’s popularity and cultural prominence, this suggests a general public growing steadily more accepting of women’s growing independence at the start of the new century.

Further Reading

Collins, T.J.R. (2010). Athletic Fashion, ‘Punch’, and the Creation of the New Woman. Victorian Periodicals Review. Vol. 43 No. 3. pp. 309–335. [online]. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41038818

Nead, L. (2013). The Layering of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Vol. 35 No. 5. pp. 489–509 [online]. https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2013.854978.

Petrov, J. (2016). “A Strong-Minded American Lady”: Bloomerism in Texts and Images, 1851. Fashion Theory. Vol. 20 No. 4. pp. 381–413 [online]. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2015.1082296.

Schaffer, T. (2000). Fashioning Aestheticism by Aestheticizing Fashion: Wilde, Beerbohm, and the Male Aesthetes’ Sartorial Codes. Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol. 28 No. 1. pp. 39–54. [online]. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150300281035

Walkley, C. (1985). The way to wear ’em: 150 years of Punch on fashion. London: Peter Owen.

Yan, S.-C. (2014). (Ad)dressing Women: Fashion and Body Image in Punch, 1850s–1860s. Women’s Studies. Vol. 43 No. 6. pp. 750–773 [online]. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2014.921510.