It's a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod world — the '60s are hip again

LOS ANGELES — A banner reading "1966" hangs above DJ Rena Durrant and her turntables at Club Satisfaction in Hollywood. On the dance floor, doe-eyed girls in polyester A-line dresses and bobbed hair shimmy and shake alongside boys in three-button suits and Beatle boots. A '60s R&B tune fills the room.

A film shoot for an "Austin Powers" prequel? Is "American Dreams" returning to prime-time?

Not on your nelly, mate. This is reality for Durrant and a growing international community of party-going hipsters who are grooving to the Mod scene some 40 years after it zoomed out of London's postwar streets with Italian scooters, colorful styles, soulful music and its own lingo.

Actually, the Mod scene is in its fourth or fifth wave — historians of pop culture disagree on which — and now encompasses subgroups and Internet cliques from Tokyo to Paris.

Like many of today's Mods, Durrant, 23, wasn't even born during the '60s. But her interpretation of the movement reflects back to that time.

"There's the age-old definition of Mod as 'clean living under difficult circumstances,' which was what the original Mod movement in the '60s was all about," she says.

Like before, Mods love minimalist design, sharply tailored clothes, and living and partying well as they maintain a smartly fashionable image in a world of upheaval.

An ambitious law student by day and a club DJ by night, Durrant wears dresses with Peter Pan collars and coordinates her purses perfectly with her go-go boots or flats. Her long, black hair bouffants in the back. When she goes out, fake eyelashes rim her eyes.

"The attention to detail is the biggest thing for me," Durrant says.

Though she normally downplays her Modness at school or on the job with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, it still peeks out. Last summer, "when I was working in the sex crimes unit, I could wear a pink plaid suit if I wanted to and my boss one day commented, 'Rena, you look so Mod.' "

Even the home Durrant shares with her British-born husband and fellow scenester, Glenn Durrant, 34, is a tribute to retro design — from the blue sectional living-room couch to an OpArt lamp hanging over the kitchen table.

The two met in England at a Mod event when Rena was 19.