The King's Road in Chelsea, west London, has twice changed how young people wore their hair. In 1955 Mary Quant opened her shop Bazaar there, and her short, sharp bob, cut by Vidal Sassoon, matched her miniskirts. In the mid-1970s the shop SEX, run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at number 430, made the street the centre of London punk, with spiked and dyed hair and the mohican.

Mod and Quant

Mary Quant's Bazaar at 138a King's Road was one of the first boutiques for young women, and Quant herself wore a short geometric bob by Sassoon, which helped spread the style. On Saturdays in the 1960s the street was a parade of mods with neat short cuts and of young women with bobs, fringes and backcombed volume. Later in the decade longer, looser hair came in with the hippies.

Punk

From 1974 to 1976 SEX, later renamed Seditionaries, sold the clothes of punk and was a meeting place for the musicians who formed the Sex Pistols. Punks cut their hair short and ragged, dyed it bright colours and stiffened it into spikes with soap, sugar water or glue. The mohican, a strip of hair down the centre of a shaved head, and liberty spikes, long separate points, followed. By the 1980s punks posing for tourists on the King's Road had become a London sight.