 Paris and London Effects
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Turtlenecks
Daily News Record magazine proclaimed 1967 the year of the turtle, as in turtleneck sweater. Favored by beatniks and flower children.
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Although in politics and economics the 1920's were predominantly years of conservatism and caution, in cultural life, these years were marked by bold innovation. Paris still eclipsed Berlin in range of cultural activity. The city on the Seine remained what it had been for centuries--the literary and artistic capital of Europe. Indeed, in certain respects Paris increased its earlier lead. In different ways, then, Berlin and Paris both profited because other centers had apparently become less hospitable to talent.
After World War II Chanel had been in eclipse, (owing in part to her wartime association with a Nazi officer), but in 1953 she decided to re-open the doors of her salon. Her first collection seemed to be a disaster - the simple little dresses and suits were quite out of tune with the carapace -like creations of Dior, Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain, and the show was panned. Theoretically the cultural wants are of secondary importance; but, in reality, they have primary significance for most people.
Yet within a year the American ready-to-wear manufacturers had seen the potential of the Chanel suit, and the design went into mass production. Chanel claimed she was no longer interested in designing for the few, but for the woman in the street. With its simple jacket and skirt and its signature of braid trim and gold chain necklaces, an off-the-face hat and bag with a chain handle, the Chanel suit became the uniform of the smart American business or career woman. Jackie Kennedy was wearing such a suit when her husband was assassinated, and the Chanel mode of simplicity was the inspiration for the mainstream fashions of the early sixties.
Another Parisian, Andre Courreges, introduced the two most revolutionary fashions of the 1960s: the miniskirt and the trouser suit. His futuristic designs expressed the optimism of the space age. But it was Mary Quant who did more than anyone else to bring this youthful style of fashion to the mass market. Her designs displayed an amalgam of influences: the Mods, the London art-school scene of the fifties - already bohemian and avant-garde - and French houte couture. She described her fashions as “mod” and classless, “pop” fashions in a time of pop songs and pop art.
But although she herself was an original artist, with her husband she married her talent for design to an awareness of the latest American mass-production and merchandising techniques. Improved sizing was one innovation; another was her original presentation, first in her own shop Bazaar, in the King's Road, Chelsea, where the displays were young and zany instead of still and lifeless, and in her use of pop music during the showings of her collections; another was in her use of original materials.
In the space age sixties, synhtetic materials could be translated into high fashion. The use of shiny PVC for raincoats and hats was her most successful experiment, but she later used “old-fashioned” synthetic crepes and satins in the “off” colors of the 1930s and 1940s - maroon, burnt orange, eau de nil and salmon pink - for droopy blouses and minidresses that began to have a “retro” feel about them, rather than invoke pure modernism.
As she successfully launched into cosmetics in the second half of the sixties - and as she and her models wore the geometric hairstyles created by Vidal Sassoon - she, like Chanel before her, initiated a total look. Significantly, one of her most successful products, a foundation cream called “Starkers”, was advertised as looking so “natural” that it was as if you were wearing nothing (ie your face was stark naked), but by this time the cult of the natural - in reality, no more natural than any other fashion - was in full swing.
The name “Starkers” was a typical use of the upperclass slang of an earlier period. This language - “super”, “smashing” - united with the language of the criminal fringe - “dolly-bird”, “my old man” - is revealing not so much of any classlessness of the period as of a knowingness about class and a new kind of snobbery, “trendiness”, which rejected the middle-class and “square” in favor of the glamor of both the upper and the lower classes. It was also a childish language, of the school playground and the 1930s schoolgirl story.
By the mid-1960s the British designers had snatched the fashion initiative from Paris, but it was not immediately clear that this was the beginning of a waning in the dominance of the Paris “system”. That system had presupposed that women formed one homogeneous group, all equally receptive to the same fashion styles, and divided only by whether they purchased original models, expensive copies or cheap adaptations. The advent of youth fashions, which had begun, tentatively at first, in the 1950s but escalated in the 1960s, indicated that there was instead a variety of consumer groups, each aspiring to something different and distinctive.
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1960 - 1973
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