America may have invented rock ’n’ roll, but within months of the first British screening of Rock Around The Clock, Britain’s Teddy Boys had refined a rock-inspired sartorial style that not only shamed anything we Americans had, but has survived intact into the ’80s. Even in the dark days between Elvis’s conscription and the emergence of the Beatles, Britain’s manufactured prettyboy pop stars were much prettier than America’s.

With just a few exceptions—Britain invented both long hair and the New Romance (both the 1967 and 1981 varieties), for instance—the same pattern has continued ever since. Americans dream up some exciting new style, and then the British refine it and wear it with so much greater pizazz that they seem to have invented it in the first place.