A New Photo Book Celebrates the Iconic Mod Style of Michael Caine

In the new book Michael Caine: Photographed by Terry O’Neill, editor James Clarke revisits some of the actor’s most storied and stylish roles.

“I think that at the heart of Caine’s sense of style are those earliest days that defined his life and movie career in the Swinging ’60s of London,” Clarke tells InsideHook. “He has spoken very eloquently, and I think quite movingly, actually, about his years as a child and a young man striving to find his place in the world and the ways in which actors and pop singers with working-class backgrounds really broke through in the early 1960s here in the U.K.”

Clarke also argues that Caine’s work in Get Carter represented a milestone for both his work and the way he dressed. “Within the setting of this hard-as-nails crime story, Caine’s suit is distinctively well cut and really does play on his well-established image by the early 1970s as a suavely-dressed Londoner,” Clarke says. “I think that this specificity of time and place really enriches his film star persona and is one of the aspects of his amazing career that audiences have taken to heart.”