Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a member of a teenage cult orig. c.1961, who wore smart clothes, rode motor scooters and fought their main rivals, the motorcycle-riding, leather-clad ‘rockers’.

1960		New Left Rev. Sept./Oct. 4/2: Teds and Mods, Beatniks and Ravers.
1966		T. Keyes All Night Stand 22: Gin and orange is out this year [...] It’s port and lemon for fashionable little mods.
1979		Sun. Times Mag. ‘The Pictures You Missed’ Nov. 43: Latest youth cult: the New Mods. Kids have resuscitated the pimpled peaock vanities of the ‘old’ mods of the mid-Sixties.
1981		J. Sullivan ‘Big Brother’ Only Fools and Horses [TV script] So while all the other Mods were having punch-ups down at Southend and going to the Who concerts, I was at home baby-sitting!
1988		R. Doyle Commitments 100: The audience was dancing, a lot of them, little mods and modettes, shaking, turning in time together.
1999		Guardian Guide 14–20 Aug. 15: Give him some amphetamines and a scooter and he’s a mod.
2000		Z. Smith White Teeth 23: Ryan fancied himself as a bit of a Mod.
2010		K. Richards Life 74: Brian, who was the archetypical mod [...] may have single-handedly started the mod movement [...] He was one of the first to go to the lyceum and get the mod gear.

2. attrib. use of sense 1.

1967		Oz 3 5/2: Paisley shirts and pre mod western levi jackets.
1989		T. Blacker Fixx 109: Jostling idiots in mod regalia.
2000		Guardian G2 18 Feb. 11: Of course, ‘mod’ always did mean modern, but who’d have thought a movement that started in the 60s could look so right for now.

3. (Aus.) one who discards the conventional past and looks to the future.

1968

R.D. Magoffin We Bushies 23: Most publications, what sad change, / Also no longer care [...] They’re more impressed by purple gods / And hefted dinosaurs / Composed by scruffy, bearded mods / With new poetic laws!

4. (US campus) a well-dressed, fashionable person.

1967–8

Baker et al. CUSS.