Fashion: Yesterday, Today and TomorrowIt took a very long time before women designers began to approach gender
equality, and when they did it was the result both of social changes (such as
women’s liberation) and further structural changes in the fashion industry
(especially the growth of ready to wear). Although there are many gay fashion
designers, homosexuals continue to face widespread social prejudice, which
has been exacerbated in the age of AIDS.
If we look back at the post-war period, it is clear that, almost immediately
after World War II ended, the Cold War began, ushering in an atmosphere
of conformity and paranoia. As one American advertisement for men’s
clothing put it: “You’re being watched! Dress right – you can’t afford not
to!” If men were pushed towards stereotyped masculinity and sartorial
uniformity, women were pressured into the world of the Feminine Mystique.
Fashion writer Eve Merriam noted how the women’s fashion press
emphasized conformity: “The language is hortatory, a summons... You have
been Called. Would you keep the Lord waiting?... Therefore accept the dicta
from on high and do not question. Today, thick textures, nubby, palpable.
Tomorrow, diaphanous draperies, fluid, evanescent.... Mauve Is. Don it, or
go back to supermarket suburbia where perhaps you really belong.”
“Think pink!” ordered the fashion editor in the 1950s movie Funny Face,
and immediately women obeyed. (Only the fashion editor herself remained
above the diktat.) Today, of course, this type of direct order is no longer
seen in fashion magazines, because it would arouse anger and ridicule, rather
than obedience. To understand why this shift occurred, it is necessary to
examine the course of fashion in the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the rise
of Youthquake fashions and the spread of anti-fashion sentiment.
Self-trained British designer Mary Quant reacted against the conformity
of mainstream women’s fashions. As early as 1955, she opened her first
boutique on the King’s Road, a fashion promenade for London’s Mods and
Rockers, youth groups obsessed with music and style. In her autobiography,
she wrote: “I had always wanted young people to have a fashion of their
own. To me adult appearance was very unattractive, alarming and terrifying,
stilted, confined, and ugly. It was something I knew I didn’t want to grow
into.” The clothes she made were simple and inexpensive variations on the
Chelsea Girl or Art Student look, unmistakably young in feeling, and with
rising hemlines.
“People were very shocked by the clothes, which seem so demure and
simple now,” Quant’s husband and partner, Alexander Plunket Greene, told
Rolling Stone in 1987. “At the time they seemed outrageous. I think there
was a slightly sort of paedophile thing about it, wasn’t there?” The fashionable
woman of the Fifties, “all high heels and rock-hard tits”, was replaced in
London by a girl with a “childish... shape” and “a great deal of long leg”.