<P> For young mods, Italian scooters were the "embodiment of continental style and a way to escape the working - class row houses of their upbringing". Mods customised their scooters by painting them in "two - tone and candyflake and overaccessorized (them) with luggage racks, crash bars, and scores of mirrors and fog lights". Some mods added four, ten, or as many as 30 mirrors to their scooters . They often put their names on the small windscreen . They sometimes took their engine side panels and front bumpers to electroplating shops to get them covered in highly reflective chrome . </P> <P> Hard mods (who later evolved into the skinheads) began riding scooters more for practical reasons . Their scooters were either unmodified or cutdown, which was nicknamed a "skelly". Lambrettas were cutdown to the bare frame, and the unibody (monocoque) - design Vespas had their body panels slimmed down or reshaped . </P> <P> After the seaside resort brawls, the media began to associate Italian scooters with violent mods . The media described groups of mods riding scooters together as a "menacing symbol of group solidarity" that was "converted into a weapon". With events like the 6 November 1966, "scooter charge" on Buckingham Palace, the scooter, along with the mods' short hair and suits, began to be seen as a symbol of subversion . </P> <P> Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson argue that compared to other youth subcultures, the mod scene gave young women high visibility and relative autonomy . They write that this status may have been related both to the attitudes of the mod young men, who accepted the idea that a young woman did not have to be attached to a man, and to the development of new occupations for young women, which gave them an income and made them more independent . Hall and Jefferson note the increasing number of jobs in boutiques and women's clothing stores, which, while poorly paid and lacking opportunities for advancement, gave young women disposable income, status and a glamorous sense of dressing up and going into town to work . </P>

The who were not a part of the mod movement