John Bates

John Bates designed under the label Jean Varon rather than his own name for most of this decade, a genuinely unusual choice that kept his profile lower than his actual influence - he's most widely remembered now for costuming Diana Rigg as Emma Peel on the British television series The Avengers starting around 1965-66, dressing a character built specifically to read as capable and modern rather than merely decorative. That brief mattered: Bates was designing for a woman who needed to look convincing doing physical, active things on screen, not simply posing in a studio.

His signature techniques - strategic cut-outs at the midriff or shoulder, PVC and vinyl trim applied to otherwise conventional daywear fabric, bold graphic paneling - fit squarely within the mod silhouette's geometric, youth-driven vocabulary, but his clothes stayed considerably more wearable and mass-producible than some of his more avant-garde contemporaries' work. That's part of why The Avengers was such an effective showcase for him specifically - television demanded clothes that read clearly on screen and held up under repeated filming, not one-off runway showpieces.

I think Bates is worth including as a reminder of how much this decade's fashion story runs through television and film costuming rather than couture runways alone - his reach through a hit television character likely put his silhouette in front of more ordinary British households on a weekly basis than any single runway show could have managed, which is a genuinely different, and in some ways more powerful, distribution channel than the ones most designer entries in this project rely on.