1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
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4 Fashion for the Youth
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In the eighties the new ideas and values spread to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and even China. The deeper meanings of Peace, Love and Community spread through the universality of the music, and the ideas of the pilgrims that had experienced or been influenced by the cauldron of the Sixties. In Prague, Czechoslovakia during the peaceful revolution there John Lennon's "Imagine" was sung by 200,000 people as they sung the Communist dictatorship down. Esalen Institute had been doing exchanges and training in the former Soviet Union for over ten years. To express their protests, and to "turn on" others, the hippies used art, street theater and particularly music. In Tienanmen Square the Chinese students played Beatles' and Rolling Stones' music over loud speakers.
The music and youth subcultures of the 1950s and early 1960s generated a number of dress styles, especially in Britain. That of the teddy boys never lost its outlaw status, but the mod fashions of a slightly later period, which originated among art students, fertilized mainstream fashion and created a new cheap instant high fashion. It was designed from the beginning to be massproduced and to be worn by the young, yet still the product of individual artists: inspired by the teenager, it was not yet “street fashion” as such.
This style was popularized, first in Britain, later in the United States, by television pop-music shows, later still by new women's magazines catering to specific sections of the market, and especially to the under-25s. In catering for this new clientele, younger than the previous fashion market, manufacturers were almost bound to produce youthful styles; but the new youth styles were taken up everywhere, by fashion writers in Vogue and in the more staid newspapers as well as in the trendier magazines.
At the beginning of the 1960s the youthful - and soon the positively infantile - styles seemed to express the optimism of the “affluent society”, the joy of consumerism, and even a kind of innocence, as the old, rigid hierarchies of deference and the stifling sexual puritanism of Western culture after World War II began to dissolve. Simple shift dresses, sometimes with childish raised waitslines, flat shoes with cream or black stockings, tight ribbed sweaters, pinafore dresses and long or short straight hair and “ Christopher Robin” fringes replaced the over-sculptured cuts of the fifties.
All these expressed not just a rebellion of youth, but a general reaction to the hierarchic modes of the previous decades. Subsequently associated with the “permissive society” or the breakdown of sexual restraint and family values, short skirts initially seemed to express the innocence of a new generation growing up with the hope of a thaw in the Cold War.
The new fashions testified that the New Look and its aftermath had never been adequate for the lives that women - and not just young women - were leading in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the new youth fashions are often said to have been the brainchild of British designer Mary Quant, there is a sense in which they originated from within Paris, the heartland of French haute couture itself.
By the mid-1970s, the hippie movement was on the wane, though many aspects of its culture-particularly music and fashion-had worked their way into mainstream society. The fraught atmosphere of the 1960s that had created the hippie counterculture no longer existed, particularly after the Vietnam War ended, and with the advent of punk and disco music the earnest hippies were often seen as ridiculous.
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