1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
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4 Fashion and the Counter-Culture
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Counter-culture of opposition spread like wild fire with alternate lifestyles blossoming, people coming together and reviving their communal efforts, demonstrated in the Woodstock Art and Music Festival. Various specific fashion styles developed within counter-cultural groups, often organized around pop-music styles and bands, and these became a growing influence on houte couture. The hippy look of flowing scarves, loose, flowery robes and flowing sleeves and trousers was widely copied. But “hippy” dressing was a critique of the very fashion system it both plundered and influenced.
The counter-culture of the late sixties also loved second-hand clothes. Quite apart from cheapness, recycling clothes was part of a tactic of bricolage and of self-sufficient living on the margins of capitalism, which demonstrated their opposition to the wastefulness of the consumer society. They snapped up old “frocks” from the thirties and forties, tailored men's and women's jackets and suits, and antique hats and shoes. Counterculture groups rose to every debatable occasion. Groups such as the Chicago Seven , Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a on a whole, the term, New Left, was given to the generation of the sixties that was radicalized by social injustices , the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam. One specific incident would be when Richard Nixon appeared on national television to announce the invasion of Cambodia by the United States, and the need to draft 150,000 more soldiers. At Kent State University in Ohio, protesters launched a riot, which included fires, injuries and even death.
A Chelsea dress shop called “Granny Takes a Trip” epitomized the late sixties esthetic, with punning reference to hallucinogenic drugs as well as to the rifling of the past for “old-fashioned”styles. In addition, the political concerns of the student movement of the period brought various forms of dress from exotic cultures into Western fashion, in an attempt - perhaps contradictory - to celebrate rather than exploit the Third World.
Instead of a Paris-dictated line of artistic evolution imitating the manner in which other art forms developed, fashion became knowingly self-conscious. Designers seemed to acknowledge more openly that fashion is all about novelty and change for the sake of change. Although pastiche and the rifling of history for decorative and fashion motifs has been part of fashion at least since the early 19th century, the scale of the borrowing was intensified in the esthetics of “retro-chic”.
One of its early innovators was Biba of London. Biba's creator, Barbara Hulanicki, started in 1964 with a mail-order service selling dolly dresses at rock-bottom prices to the newly fashionable teenagers of the period. By the late sixties she had branched out into art nouveau/art deco fantasy shops where you could buy feather boas, sleazy thirties pyjama suits in cream or flesh-colored satin, wide-shouldered, dumpy forties dresses, and endless period accessories, all available in a range of “dirty” shades from old rose to chocolate. Her final gamble was to fill the whole of an old department store - which retained its original art deco carpets and fittings - with clothes, accessories, furniture an deven food in the Biba style. She over-reached herself, and hed magic emporium was gutted, to be replaced by chain-store predictability.
All this was part of a wish to replace the products of the consumer society with objects and artefacts that had a craft rather than a commodity relationship with the owner. Although, for example, the fashion for crocheted garments was initiated by the fashion industry in Britain in 1963, this was often introduced in popular women's magazines as an opportunity to make your own. Waistcoats and shawls made from crocheted multi-colored squares, fairisle and other patterned sweaters hats macrame belts and other do-it-yourself alternatives to consumerism were featured in new magazines such as Honey, aimed at the young, trendy mass market of relatively affluent women in their early twenties.
Dubbed "The Face of 1966" Twiggy dominated fashion photography. She was on the cover of every major fashion and teen magazine. Her boyish look was the one to emulate.
The use of exotic motifs in alternative fashion was highly eclectic. One such fashion was a band tied round the head in the manner of American Indians - much later to become a fashion for gay men in San Francisco. Another was the kaftan, which matched a fashion for long skirts on women. Despite the hippy trail to the Indian subcontinent, Indian fashions never really caught on; men would wear African-style and students the PLO-type Arab head scarf, but the adoption of Third World styles was gestural rather than serious.
For some young women the early 1970s was a period of fashion refusal, in an attempt to find an alternative mode of dress that moved away from obvious self-objectification as much as from hautere-couture discomfort. In the United States this was more likely to be achieved by styles based on sportswear; in Britain a kind of dusty picturesqueness was achieved with the combination of home-knits with jeans, dungarees and long skirts in Laura Ashley old-fashioned prints.
Soon hauture couture was introducing ethnic borrowings into its twice-yearly shows. The appetite of the mass clothing market for new styles was so intense that rebel fashions were quickly taken up, but without their political content. Perhaps it was inevitable that the adoption of clothing from cultures in which garments were relatively unchanging was superficial, since after all, these alternatives were all about style. The styles themselves signaled rebellion or disaffection from the dominant culture; since, however, that culture was highly organized around styles and their changes, to adopt a stylistic alternative was still to remain part of the culture which expressed change, dissidence and difference in these symbolic terms.
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