A young woman with a long ponytail and very long shapely legs is looking in a mirror: She is wearing an extremely short mini-skirt in an abstract print; against her body she holds another skirt, this one caramel-colored, midcalf length and still attached to both a hanger and a dangling price tag.
It is the young woman`s face that is compelling. But she is not looking at herself. She is looking at that l-o-n-g skirt, and the look on her face is totally inscrutable. Perhaps as inscrutable as the look that flickered across Eve`s face when she looked down at that apple and thought, ”Should I or shouldn`t I?”
The young woman shopper appeared on the cover of Life magazine on Aug. 21, 1970, symbolizing the millions of women who at that moment were trying to decide if they should give up their `60s minis and plunge ahead with the new longer skirts known as ”midis.”
Despite pronouncements by big retailers that ”the micro-mini is dead as a dodo,” some women–and almost all girls–resisted the midis and continued to wear their minis. Fashion followers and those with thicker thighs gratefully latched on to the midis. By far the majority of women said, ”Oh, heavens,” and jumped into an alternative that became the basis of many a woman`s wardrobe: pants.
It was the turning point in modern fashion history, the moment that the word ”options” was conceived, when millions of women said, ”Thank you very much, but I`ll wear whatever I please.”
Today variety is a fact of life, as these photographs of Chicagoans attest. In this fall of 1985, there is more diversity in fashion than has ever existed, not only in lengths and silhouettes but in moods. There is the lively, youthful, daring, sometimes oversized and sometimes skin-tight look-at-me fashion that is indeed hot stuff. And there is the spare and lean, uncluttered, sometimes dramatic and sometimes laid-back fashion that is very cool.
There is a peaceful coexistence, one might say, between the two fashions because no one, anywhere, is saying, ”This is the look, the one and only look that is fashionable this season.” No one would dare. Z
This fashion freedom ”started with Michael Butler`s musical, `Hair,”`
says Joan Weinstein, owner and president of Ultimo, the fashion-forward shop on Oak Street that she and her late husband founded 16 years ago.
”We opened at a time when fashion was changing, and I remember wearing a maxi one day and my husband saying to me, `How do you hope to sell all those minis you have in your store when you`re walking around in that?` I told him that I looked better in a maxi skirt and that I liked the changes that were taking place. And I thought that maybe the following year more women would wear longer skirts because by then they wouldn`t look so weird, and women would also see that the longer skirts could look better on them.”
But the changes that came out of the `60s went far deeper than hem lengths. ”Things had been so uptight,” Weinstein says. ”I just recently came across a picture of myself in a gray flannel suit. Tight, double-breasted, with opossum trim and an opossum hat and even gloves. I was so ladylike and uptight, I swear I looked older then than I do now. We wore slips, girdles, gloves–even when we didn`t need them.
”After we saw `Hair` we realized that we didn`t ever have to wear garter belts again–unless we wanted to. It was all part of a much bigger freedom. Freedom of conversation and freedom of relationships.”
While Weinstein remembers the impact of the `60s as a retailer, Elizabeth Jachimowicz views clothing then and now from the perspective of a historian. Curator of costumes at the Chicago Historial Society, she calls the `60s the
”foundation of our freedom from dictates.”
That rejection of the midi in the early `70s would not have happened, she maintains, ”if it were not for the `60s when young people revolted against the establishment–and the establishment took it seriously.
”Young people have revolted from time immemorial; and adults had always viewed their revolt as temporary. But in the `60s the youth revolution was very real, and adults did take it very seriously. They even began to dress like young people–tie-dyed blue jeans, mini dresses, all the rest of it. And all of that turmoil is what broke real fashion–that is, fashion as it had existed with its rules, with its pressures, such as in 1947 when everybody simply had to wear Christian Dior`s `New Look.”`
”Today you can go to any chic gathering and you will find a far great variety of clothes than you would have found 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago,” says Jachimowicz.
The variety does not stop with clothing. Louis Oliver Gropp, a former Chicagoan who revitalized and modernized the monthly House and Garden magazine as its editor-in-chief, uses the word ”pluralism” to describe the coexistence of many trends in interior design.
”In part, it`s a reflection of the diversity of the world today and the fact that the world has shrunk so suddenly. One day you are looking at a show from India and you want part of that in your own environment. Or you go to California, or maybe to Mexico, and you take a little of that into your life. I think we`ve all traveled a little more, studies a little more. We are exposed to a far broader spectrum–and from all this, we have gained assurance.”
Opinions vary, however, on just how men and women are coping with the vast options in dress.
New Yorker Marjorie Dean, who has been covering fashion worldwide for some 20 years and who publishes a weekly trend roundup for retailers and manufacturers called the Tobe Report, says, ”American women do not know how to handle these choices that offer them individuality. They don`t have enough conviction about their own style or their own taste. They don`t want to look like a mirror image of someone else and they`re trying to establish their own identity. For many, it is a time of searching.”
Fashion designer Marc Jacobs, 22, who was just a tyke when all that mini- midi business was taking place, says:
”What is considered acceptable now is much looser than it was, say, in the `50s and `60s. Women are buying clothes and mixing different kinds of things together. I love it when people take something and make it individual. ”But I have to admit,” he adds, ”that I have sort of a cockeyed optimism. I would like to believe that lots and lots of people out there are dressing in a very individual way. But you really do have to look for them.” Leah Bowman, who has been with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for the past 18 years as both a professor and as chairman of the Fashion Design Department, says, ”Before, women wanted to be told how they should look. Now they dress for themselves, not for other people.”
Says designer Sharon Harris Hart, who also has taught at the Art Institute: ”We`ve certainly had options before, but we still asked, `What are you going to wear tonight?` Now we just let our moods tell us what to wear.”
