60's Fashion

1960s fashion was bi-polar in just about every way. The early sixties were more reminiscent of the 1950s — conservative and restrained; certainly more classic in style and design.

The late 1960s were the exact opposite. Bright, swirling colors. Psychedelic, tie-dye shirts and long hair and beards were commonplace. Woman wore unbelievably short skirts and men wore tunics and capes. The foray into fantasy would not have been believed by people just a decade earlier.

It’s almost like the 1950s bottled everyone up so much that the late 1960s exploded like an old pressure cooker. Women were showing more skin than ever before.

For the first time in the 19th Century, London, not Paris, was the center of the fashion world. The British Invasion didn’t stop with The Beatles. It swept into all parts of life, especially clothing.

http://www.retrowaste.com/1960s/fashion-in-the-1960s/

The 1960s was a decade of sweeping change throughout the fashion world generating ideas and images which still appear modern today. Whereas fashion had previously been aimed at a wealthy, mature elite, the tastes and preferences of young people now became important. At the beginning of the decade, the market was dominated by Parisian designers of expensive haute couture garments. Formal suits for women underwent a structural change resulting in looser lines and shorter skirts.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
/b/b2/Londons_Carnaby_Street,_1969.jpg
Carnaby Street, London, 1969.

Men's suits became sleeker and were often accessorised with bright, bold shirts and high-heeled boots. The flamboyant look was in, signalled by wider trousers and lapels, like those belonging to the blue checked Tommy Nutter suit seen below. Designers experimented with shiny new waterproof materials with a modern look like PVC and perspex. Paco Rabanne pioneered dresses made from plastic discs and metal links which looked more like sculpture than clothing.

Later in the decade the hippy look, which originated on the West Coast of America, crossed the Atlantic.

Yet the shape of clothes was soon transformed by new ideas emerging from the London pop scene. In Britain, musical taste and styles of dress were closely linked and it was the mod look which first popularised the simple geometric shapes typical of the 1960s. By the mid-sixties, the flared A-line was in style for dresses, skirts and coats. Slim fitting, brightly coloured garments were sold cheaply in boutiques all over 'Swinging London' and had tremendous influence throughout  Europe and the US.

This was a time when designers of dress and textiles experimented with colours, patterns and textures borrowed from non-Western cultures. As ethnic influences took over, the most fashionable people wore long layers of loose clothing in vivid, clashing colours, typified by Thea Porter's kaftans and Pucci's dazzling prints.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/history-of-1960s-fashion-and-textiles/

http://vintagedancer.com/1960s/

1960s Dresses  – The first half of the Sixties resembled the Fifties. Conservative, ladylike, proper. No short skirts. Gloves for evening and social occasions. Petticoats and girdles.
The dresses at left and below with their swing, pleated or pencil skirts could easily have been worn in the 1950s. Women wore dresses or skirts for all but the most casual activity. Pants were for sport or play and never worn to school.

_{Montgomery Ward’s 1961
Sleeveless scoop neck dress has either straight or unpressed pleat skirt. Matching solid cummberbund buckles in back. Jacket has dolman sleeves.}

_{Ward’s 1960
Dainty lace accents softly shirred sleeves and tucked bodice.}

1960s dresses, the shirtwaist dress will survive the entire decade. The skirt will get a little shorter and the collar a bit wider, but the dress will remain a staple of the average American woman.

_{Montgomery Ward’s 1961
Shirtwaist of tropical colors printed on all cotton. Kerchief included.}

There was evidence of changes to come. The dresses below have 1950s styling, but hint at 1960s color and pattern. The flowers at left are not yet those we associate with “flower power” but they are bigger and bolder than we would have ssen a decade before. The dress at right sports colors far more vibrant than seen earlier.

_{Montgomery Ward’s 1961
Bouffant silk dress with deeply rounded neckline. Fitted bodice and full shirred skirt. Attached nylon petticoat.}

_{Sears 1963
Cotton Dress. Print scalloped neckline}

No suit of the early 60s is more famous or better remembered than that worn by Jacqueline Kennedy on November 22, 1963. She had been given bad weather reports. The Chanel pink suit was wool and thus uncomfortably warm on a hot Dallas day. She wore her signature pillbox hat which had become all the rage. By the way, it was Mrs. Kennedy’s hats which gave Halston his first serious public exposure as back then, he was a milliner.

Jackie was only 33 years old when she became First Lady, the youngest ever. During her brief tenure in the White House, she brought an elegance to dressing, a style to American life. Unlike her predecessors, she wore European couture dresses, but this presented political problems. She needed to dress in American designs more often. Eventually she found her way to Oleg Cassini, a French-born Russian turned naturalized American. Cassini gave her Americanized versions of French designs, clean lined, in the bright, solid colors she preferred, but with oversize buttons and coat pockets that his Hollywood experience told him would stand out in photographs.
Jackie’s trademarks were the boxy jackets and pillbox hats, the three-quarter-length sleeves, the lace mantillas, the overblouse dresses and the sleeveless A-lines.

President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. November 22, 1963. Dallas, Texas.

The second half of the Sixties begins quietly. But the dynamic social changes sweeping the world would soon manifest themselves in fashion. A new freedom in hemlines, a bolder approach to color would parallel the youth movement yearning for choices which did not mimic their predecessors.
The dress at left from 1965 still screamed ladylike femininity. Throughout the decade certain basics remained and real women didn’t go around dressed like hippies. The polo style dress below from 1969 remains a classic and you could easily wear it today.

_{Montgomery Ward’s 1969
Wards ’69 Seahorse sun-sation The super shirt dress with easy travel-tuned lines, is the look.}

_{McCall’s Magazine 1968
An artless little black and white plaid with a Kitty Foyle bow at the neckline, and long sleeves ending in white cuffs}

Venerable clothier Ship’n Shore responded to the 1960s by shortening the hemlines on this classic shirtshift. The tent dress at right reflects late Sixties bold colors.

_{McCall’s 1967 Life Stride Shoe ad
Spectacular in a tent dress that’s tantamount to spring. A free fall of ’67 color boldness let loose from a curved yoke neck. All splashed with a surprise of geometric stripes. Shoe: Life Stride}