A Sixties Scrapbook, Volume 14 #1

Fit, Young and Casual Were the Trinity

Fashion is almost invariably kind to the powerful. For a start, the rich can afford better clothes. And clothing can be used for the benefit of the group in power to conceal physical faults and lapses--and, where appropriate, beauty.

For example, when everybody wore the white powdered wig, it meant that beautiful hair could simply not be seen: the wig was a triumph of money over bodily giftedness--and most especially over youth. In the nineteenth century, the modern dark tubular business suit was invented largely to disguise the poor physiques of the newly powerful, sedentary rich. The same garment made the muscular working classes look uncomfortable, even foolish, in "proper" dress, especially in cheap versions of it. Youth, with its recent access to money, became powerful in the 1960s, and its weapon at once was fashion. With a single blow, fashion made looking "proper" intolerably embarrassing. Clothing began to reveal rather than conceal, to the disadvantage of the no-longer-young.

Middle-aged women were forced to wear tight clothes and display their legs in shorter and shorter skirts. If they wore skirts below the knee, or otherwise unfashionable clothing, they risked "not counting" on the social and sexual scene. Men had to grow their hair out even if bald (men have often favoured short hair partly because it makes baldness less obvious). Hats died because, except insofar as they were merely utilitarian, they meant formality; they also hide hair.

There were two main codes of dress in the sixties. The simple, hard-edged, angular silhouette of up-to-the-minute clothing was often achieved with new artificial fabrics: dresses were made of plastic, elastic, even "paper" (actually cellulose and rayon). With the help of technology, designers made fortunes by marketing modernity, mass-producing nonconformity, and keeping the prices of individual garments low. For the decade's horror of the old to translate into an addiction to sporting every dernier cri, constant changes in fashion had to be affordable.

Alternatively, you wore rags: second-hand clothing, rumpled, ripped, transparent or flapping open to display your youthful body and proclaim your readiness for sex. Accessories included toe-freeing, long-lasting and therefore antimaterialistic sandals; beads; and headbands both to restrain and to draw attention to your long, abundant hair.

Most people, in most places and times, have worn traditional rather than fashionable clothing: each social group had its "costume," which it wore with a few personal twists and decorations added. In the sixties, a "people's uniform" returned, in the form of blue jeans. The middle classes began to wear cheap denim pants to project an informal image, and therefore one of self-confidence, physical and political activity, and youth.

Clothing for the demonstrably young and the fit has to allow for movement, to leave arms and legs free. Work clothes do this, as do clothes for sport and relaxation. Polite behaviour, on the other hand, expresses a willingness to restrain oneself: it requires limbs to be controlled and even hobbled, allowing only small, hesitant movements. People began to discard such rules and signs both in manner and in dress, even when not anticipating very much physical exertion. The effect of such dressing was usually more symbolic than practical: it meant one was standing free, rejecting social structures that might hamper movement, and maintaining a readiness to take the consequences. Fit, young and casual now became the trinity of laws.

Jeans enabled women to dress like men--even as they emphasized the difference between the sexes. Tight jeans flatter the young, exalt the skinny, disqualify the dumpy and the old. They are classically dyed blue, the modern West's favourite, most conservative colour. By wearing jeans, therefore, you could fervently conform on several different levels with society's demands, even as you dressed for the most desperately desired role of the decade, that of Dissident.

The ostensible "comfort" of blue jeans, meanwhile, was severely reduced as people used extreme techniques in the shrinking of their jeans to fit their forms ever more closely, then aged and bleached them to look as though they--and therefore their owners--had experienced life. In any case, denim's roughness and toughness itself underlined the body's softness, and so lent it more sexual allure.

The miniskirt exacted a heavy price for granting women the young, fit, casual, sexually liberated look. True, it left legs bare, with connotations of action; the miniskirt was unthinkable without the marketing of pantyhose, which had previously been designed for acrobats and children. But a grown woman had constantly to watch out. She could not afford to let the tiny tight tube ride up at the back; she sat with legs (often encased in high hot narrow boots) under tighter control than ever before; and she never ever bent over from a standing position. Courtly etiquette has rarely been more demanding.

Margaret Visser is a contributing editor of Compass and the author of The Way We Were, among other books.