… and why 1970s fashion was better Nicola Shulman
The British love to play with clothes, and this decade was the ultimate fancy dress parade of outrageous fashions, argues Nicola Shulman
The Seventies: notoriously ‘The Decade that Taste Forgot’. Or is it the decade that taste remembered? The most desirable vintage clothes today were made in the Seventies: ‘Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci…’ as Sister Sledge sang in He’s the Greatest Dancer. The best were the offerings of the British designers of the time: Thea Porter, Jean Muir, Barbara Hulanicki (Biba), Antony Price and Ossie Clark. Today, their dresses sell for between £800 and £8,000. They are bought to be worn.
Young women in the streets now stomp by in modern copies of Seventies hits: Afghan coats, platform shoes, long dresses with plackets and print panels, blouses with lapels like the tongues of thirsting basset hounds. This makes me very happy, because for the first time since then, Seventies clothes seem to others as they’ve always seemed to me: the most bewitching garments ever.
My mother and I have chosen decades when we were teenagers, and the world of adult things was shimmering out of reach. Can a woman look lovelier than she does to a schoolgirl in possession of a dreadful haircut and a polyester kilt that her sister has made her buy?
In Seventies west London, there was a café with wooden ceiling fans and Indonesian lattices, where you could get an endless pot of coffee for 35p. There I watched an apparition of sulky beauty
descend from the restaurant above in jeans and emerald satin. She wore a floor-length, white-fox coat which she’d shrugged off her shoulders, while the rest of it slithered down the stairs behind her. Nothing has matched up since.
Adolescent longings apart, what was so great about the Seventies? Fashion was restless; so there was something for everyone. Between the floppy hats and shaggy coats of 1970 and the pie-crust blouse of 1979 – admittedly a low point – grew a decade of innovation.
The demotic monoculture that had developed in the Sixties seeded in all directions. In came cheesecloth smocks and long muslin dresses; in came highwaisted checked baggies, tight satin, glamrock jackets, stripy dungarees, Peruvian jumpers, trousers as silver as wet trout, and groin-crushing American denims that took three people to haul up the zip. In came disco; in came Annie Hall’s kooky, linen three-piece; in came punk.
These were proper ‘looks’, both prescriptive and discrete. Pockets of devotees would wear them for years as a badge of identity, or just because it worked for them. The fashion tribalism that had always attached to musical cliques – mod, rocker, hippy – became just a matter of taste. Those with no tribal drum to bang could pick and choose. The British have always adored dressing up, and it suited them that most good Seventies clothes amounted to fancy dress. Toddler? Vamp? Flapper? Pierrette? Groupie? Flower fairy, in a dress made entirely from floating scraps of chiffon scarf? You could be one on Friday and the other on Saturday.
As for androgyny: everyone remembers how men dressed up as women, and women dressed up as men dressed up as women (fun!). But they forget the Ken Doll pageant of masculine get-ups that came available for both sexes, as American goods came in, surplus shops and secondhand stalls popped up and no one felt weird about dead people’s underwear.
Gigolo, baseball star, rust-belt farmhand, desert rat in camply belted army shorts, droog... The Seventies was one long costume parade.
Drusilla has also chosen (no conferring) a grim decade of bombs and blackouts and bad food, the tragedy to the farce of the 1970s. Women did look good, but principally because they had so few opportunities to exercise their taste. Leaving aside the question of whether Dru is cheating to choose a time when half the country was in uniform – so, of course, they looked foxy as hell – it’s not exactly a vote of confidence for British women’s dress sense.
The Forties weren’t a good time for the older woman. What with the bust-darts and stoutly unyielding serge on the one hand, and the skimping crêpe dresses on the other, the Forties gave no quarter to the middle-aged. In the Seventies, though, designers such as Jean Muir wrought miracles with rayon jersey – it flowed. Skirt suits, the choice of the serious, looked elegant and always fitted well because no one had yet thought of taking out the linings. That was for the next decade. Could anyone go for that?
Nicola Shulman is author of ‘Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt’ (Short Books)
Drusilla Beyfus and Nicola Shulman talk fashion on the Oldie App See page 6 for details